Part of the rescue team that, for four weeks, searched for the lifeless body of Virgilio, one of the two operators of the milling machine who swallowed the snow on January 1.
The first day of 2021 was the last for snowplows César Fernández and Virgilio García.
Virgilio, 62, had been clearing roads for two decades at the wheel of a milling machine tasked with knocking down the white walls.
At his right hand was César, 52, with whom he had been teaming up for just a few days.
He was going to relieve him when he retired.
The heavy snowfalls in the port of San Isidro (Asturias) led them to an area of frequent avalanches, severe storms and pronounced gorges.
Nothing new.
The first call was received around one thirty in the afternoon because a van, a passenger car and an SUV needed to go down from the top of Riofrío towards Cuevas and Felechosa.
There they went.
Two hours later, the snowplow lay, broken into three pieces, on a cliff 200 meters from the road, with its drivers dead;
the driver of the van was trapped in his vehicle and was at risk of frostbite;
and the other two cars were isolated between a white hell caused by an avalanche.
The truce that the storm has given has allowed Virgilio to be located after four weeks in the snow.
A geradar and aerial cameras scanned the vicinity of the accident while emergency services hovered around the critical point without forgetting the persistent risk of avalanches.
The body appeared 100 meters from the cabin of the machine between a white blanket 10 meters thick and with deep channels of water and ice where the operators had to move with ropes between waterfalls.
The memory of the disaster remains vivid in Aitor Rodríguez, 28, present in that small convoy.
He and his girlfriend continued with their jeep to the milling machine and took last place on the road.
Before long, they overtook the tourism that preceded them, with a couple and a girl inside.
The wheels of the 4x4 would open a more accessible path for the utility vehicle, explains Rodríguez, who knows the complexity of this port, especially in winter.
Suddenly, a landslide came between the snowplow and them.
Virgilio and César backed up and opened the left lane for the young couples to continue.
Then the nightmare began in a merciless storm.
Both cars took refuge under an anti-flood ledge and waited for Virgilio and César to return to make way for the van that was following them.
They did not arrive.
The group became restless.
Suddenly, the great dust, a blizzard with a huge shock wave signal of a “fat” avalanche, remembers Rodríguez.
When calling 112 they were scared: another call had warned that the detachment could have reached the milling machine.
The telephone operators asked him not to risk it.
But he did.
Rodríguez approached the fallen mass and scrambled to try to get a response from the driver of the van on the other side.
Any.
Only cold, snow and the worst omen.
Fernando Cordero's hands turn a cup of coffee as if he continues to wonder why the avalanche descended just when both workers were in this critical area, without protective visors.
Cordero, a hotelier at the nearby ski resort, spoke with Virgilio and César at noon without imagining the fatal outcome of the day.
A carousel of calls with Rodríguez and with 112 confirmed, hours later, that something terrible had happened.
Quickly, he and his brother started their own SUVs and set off for the avalanche.
A few meters before that huge white mass they saw the van lying down.
Under it, semi-crushed and hypothermic, was its driver, who was slow to warm up and tell them what had happened.
He was circulating behind the milling machine, at a safe margin, when it stopped, just below a channel through which avalanches usually fall.
The driver, named David, interpreted that the operators were signaling for his help and got out of the vehicle.
The hotelier Cordero suspects that he misinterpreted the gestures, which actually alerted him to stay away, since "snowplows are forbidden to ask for help."
Then the icy tsunami hit him from his van.
Aitor Rodríguez, meanwhile, reassured the other couple while waiting for help.
Other landslides had cut the road and the rescuers had to access their location on foot after two kilometers of torture, cold and the throb of urgency in the temple.
Every minute counted in trying to save the workers.
A team of firefighters, mountain civil guards and canine units began tracking in extreme night conditions.
Anyone could have the same fate as Virgil and Caesar.
One of them reports that they acted in "precarious conditions" and in anguish.
An arm appeared.
Time froze like the atmosphere and, with great delicacy, they removed Caesar's inert body, on the road, but under the snow.
His heart and his faith in finding his companion, much loved by the brigades, defeated the head and his prudence until, at dawn, they interrupted their efforts.
It was impossible, as Francisco Barreñada, head of the Asturias fire department chief, insists, to do it between storms: "We already had two victims, we didn't want more."
The family assumed the necessary caution.
Sadness rules the clear eyes of Avelino Alonso, with countless expeditions with Virgilio, that "brave and exceptionally good person" friend.
Misfortune has exposed him, at 54, the danger of this crude job.
Nature has dwarfed any human effort: rescuers have needed four eternal weeks to heal a wound on the mountain. Left Felechosa behind, from the rear view mirror you can see the peaks and a majestic white stamp, of absolute freezing. As if nothing had happened. As if nothing was going to happen. The snow is still there.