So for those not familiar, in 1972 a plane crashed carrying a Uruguyan rugby team and their friends and families. The survivors were exposed to altitude sickness, hypothermia, starvation, and an avalanche. Unable to work the plane’s radio, and search aircraft unable to see white plane against the white snow, the survivors toughed it out two months before two of them walked for ten days and finally found a ranch encampment.
Imagine that this had happened in 1972 but in the US. Where would be the most-inhospitable location in the US as regards being able to survive a plane crash there, being able to make it out alive, distance from help, distance from food, etc.? And no, I mean in the mountains, so don’t say Death Valley or whatever. Bonus points if you can pick a place between two major cities roughly 4k kilometers apart. And of course, switch the dates as necessary (the Uruguayan crash happened in the early spring, so do the same to ours).
My guess is that even if the plane crashed in the highest peaks of the Cascades, they’d have been near enough to populated settlements that someone would have seen them go down and a search would have found them within days.
Even in 1972 I doubt there was any place in the lower 48 that was a 10 day walk from anywhere, much less a 5 day walk. Alaska, however, would still be extremely remote, even today. Perhaps if the plane went down in Gates of the Arctic National Park, or nearby between the Brooks Range and the Arctic Ocean, would compare to the Alive story.
We had many more planes to search at the time, much better for finding a plane crashed at an unknown location than helicopters. Even for rescue that altitude is tough for a helicopter. The available helicopters had a tough time reaching the crash site after it was known. I assume we had some that could be used in a rescue in that case, but we could certainly land a rescue team at a reasonable location near the crash site. We probably had a much better idea of where the a plane would go down in the continental US, but as mentioned if a plane went down in the vastness of Alaska the situation could have been much worse.
It’s a ten day walk/climb (mainly) through mountains, and IIRC they chose a longer route as they had the wrong idea about where they actually were.
Wikipedia says they only walked 33.5 miles before they found help. That seems possible in the more remote bits of the Rockies or other ranges there about, in 1972.
How about you the great basin Nevada? It’s not Andes elevation but plenty mountainous. Quick messing around on my Google maps app found this patch south of Elko:
Pick any large Wilderness area and it would definitely be possible. 2 I’m familiar with are the Beartooths in MT/WY and the Weminuche in CO–absolutely massive with crazy weather. Although in 1972 the Huey was in it’s prime and they probably would have been found inside of a week.
There was a crash of an American military Douglas C-54 in the Yukon Territory in 1950 with the loss of 44 lives. The wreckage has never been discovered, despite extensive searches. If there were any survivors, their presumed flight path from Snag to Aishinik would have put them probably about 30 miles (as the crow flies) from the nearest road. Although this was not in the US, it was less than 100 miles from the border with Alaska, which has similarly rugged and remote terrain. See Wikipedia on 1950 Douglas C-54D disappearance
Depending on how willing you are to stretch your definition of “in the mountains,” there are a number of uninhabited American-administered islands in the Pacific that are volcanic in origin.
Yeah, it seemed like it took forever for them to locate actor Julian Sands’s body after he disappeared while hiking on Mt. Baldy. But a young woman who recently didn’t return from a hike on the same mountain was found relatively quickly.
Julian Sands - five months.
Lifai Huang - two weeks.
Even in a storm? The circumstances in the Andes were due to the fact that not only did prospective rescuers have no idea where the plane crashed, but neither did the survivors. There are snow covered places all over North America where you could hide a white plane and no one would find it unless they knew it crashed near that location. Survivors would have no idea there was a ski resort or fire road just over a peak five miles away. And if the crash happened during a snowstorm, anybody on the other side of the peak would be unlikely to see or hear the plane go down.
I think we have to get it out of our head on just straight line distance isn’t the only factor.
If caught at high elevation and lots of snow, there is no effective travel without snowshoes or skis. If you’ve “postholed” through deep snow you understand the problem. If there’s no communication like cell phones or radio, nobody sees you augur in, you are &@ed and getting &ckder. It would take a few things piling up, but completely conceivable.
A guy on the long distance thru hiker circuit named Otter got caught in an early snowstorm, or late snowstorm or whatever. He stumbled into a forest service campground and holed up in one of the foresr Service latrines. There was a somewhat chance of a possibility that someone might be on a snow machine and rescue but nobody went up that far in the season. He slowly starved to death over a couple months.
With a large party maybe they could have signaled aircraft using pieces of mirror or something. But if the weather is cold exposure makes everything a pain, which is exactly what the Uraguayan folks ran into.
I think it was in that book I read that, when trying to signal someone in an aircraft jumping up and down and waving arms isn’t the best method. I don’t know if it’s true, but laying down and act like making snow angels is a larger image and maybe easier seen. It is very difficult to spot people on the ground, unless somebody has an idea where to look.
