When nature is unleashed, life hangs by a thread, but, against all odds, some people escape miraculously.
This is the case of these survivors, who demonstrated extraordinary resilience: a skier trapped in a mountain hut buried under snow, a group of children lost in a violent storm, a 64-year-old man saved during the “blizzard of the century” and a rugby team in the Andes mountain range.
Here's what they experienced.
A hiker stuck in the snow
Aurélie Dutertre is a 46-year-old skier used to raids.
In April 2023, she is embarking on a new independent ski touring expedition in the Belledonne massif in Isère.
Having not returned as planned to his starting point, a team from the CRS des Alpes de Grenoble went looking for him.
She remained stranded for 3 days and 4 nights in a mountain cabin completely buried in snow at an altitude of 2,000 m.
Stuck in four square meters due to this never-ending snowstorm, she thought it was indeed the end.
“In the night, it starts to snow, it’s windy.
Impossible to get out.
The wind had put a large mass of snow in front of the door,” says the survivor a few days after her evacuation.
The skier was forced to wait for help and survive in precarious conditions: “The humidity, the cold, all my clothes were soaked.
I was frozen,” she explains.
She tries to conserve her oxygen and makes do with “a few cereal bars, almonds, apricots and almond paste” and “a liter of water”.
She will resist by thinking of her children and reading The Life Before You by Romain Gary using her battery-powered head light.
The drama of the Super-Besse snowstorm
Super-Besse, March 1967. In this family resort located in the Sancy massif, at an altitude of 1,400 m, two instructors from the VVF holiday village set off for a tobogganing trip with twelve children aged 5 to 13.
It's late afternoon, around 5 p.m.
“We were off to stretch our legs.
The weather had been bad all day.
A ray of sunshine appeared, the opportunity was perfect,” recalls with emotion, Marc David, one of the children of the group, interviewed by the newspaper La Montagne in 2019.
The instructors are confident because the walk is familiar.
By bad luck, along the way, a snowstorm surprises them, forcing them to take shelter in the shepherds' refuge called the "old buron", on the Plaine-des-Moutons plateau.
But the break does not last and the oldest instructor decides to return to the center of the village which is 2 km away.
The snowstorm is getting worse.
The snowfall becomes more and more abundant, the wind rises and swirls the snow, the group gets lost in the fog and takes refuge under a rock.
At the same time, emergency services are working to find the children.
In vain.
They were not found until 7 a.m. the next morning, frozen and unconscious.
This tragedy left three people dead.
One of the instructors, Jean-Jacques Soulier, aged twenty-four and a science student in Clermont-Ferrand.
Two children, Bruno Jolivet, twelve years old, originally from Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine), and Isabelle David, eight years old, originally from Lilas (Seine-Saint-Denis).
The “Blizzard of the Century” and the magic of social networks
It's Buffalo, 2022, on Christmas Eve.
The city is hit hard by the “blizzard of the century”.
Joe White, a 64-year-old man with autistic disorder, comes screaming to Sha'kyra Aughtry's door.
Obviously, the man fell and remained in the cold for a long time.
He is literally frozen, his hands are frozen, his shoes stuck to his feet.
The woman calls for help, to no avail.
She then launched an appeal on social networks;
“Right now, I have a 64-year-old man at my house.
He needs help, his hands are gangrenous.
He's going to lose his fingers.
I do not know what to do "
.
Sha'kyra tries to help Joe as best she can: with a hairdryer, she warms him up and removes the ice from his hands, coats them with vaseline and covers them with plastic wrap.
Together, they spend several hours waiting for a response from the overwhelmed emergency services.
Finally, says the American site People, it was a stranger who had spotted Sha'kyra's call on social networks who came to take care of the old man and drop him off at the hospital so that he be cared for.
During this terrible storm, several outbursts of solidarity took place in Buffalo.
A hairdresser, Craig Elston, sheltered around twenty completely frozen people in his salon.
“Come if you need heat or electricity,” he posted on social media.
“There was one that I brought in.
He was so grateful that he reached into his pocket and pulled out $1,000 and said 'take it.'
I said I wasn’t doing it for that,” he says.
The plane crash of a rugby team
On October 13, 1972, a small plane traveled between
Montevideo in Uruguay and Santiago in Chile.
On board, 45 people including an amateur Uruguayan rugby team, called the Old Christians, their friends and members of their family.
Unfortunately, the plane will never arrive at its planned point of arrival.
The weather conditions are bad, the machine hits a mountain and crashes at an altitude of 3,600 m in the middle of the Andes mountain range.
He lands on a plateau covered in snow, with no flora or fauna.
Seventeen passengers died following the impact.
Twelve other people died in the following days, eight of them due to an avalanche.
In the end, sixteen people will survive on the mountain for 72 days, in terrible conditions, resisting freezing temperatures and snowstorms and feeding on the bodies of the deceased.
“All together, we made a huge cross in the snow with the empty suitcases and we drew the SOS sign with our feet so that it was visible from the air,”
said Roberto Canessa, in a text published by The Daily Mail on the occasion of the 40th anniversary of the disaster.
The group also attempts several dangerous expeditions into the snowy mountains.
One of them bore fruit in December 1972.
As the France 24 website tells it, two of the survivors finally arrive in Chile and see a farmer on the other side of a river.
The distance between them is too great for them to communicate.
Fernando Parrado then writes a message on a piece of paper, which he hangs on a stone: “I come from a plane that crashed in the mountain.
I am Uruguayan.
I've been walking for ten days.
Near the plane, there are fourteen injured.
» Help will take a few days to reach the survivors.
One of them, a strong rugby player weighing 85 kg, weighed only 38 on December 22, 1972. The Chilean and Argentine authorities then spoke of a “miracle”.
The story has been adapted into a film several times.
The latest adaptation, called
The Circle of Snow
is available on Netflix.