FROM MY VERY FIRST HOURS in the mountains, I felt, deep in my bones, the immediacy of the danger that surrounded us. Nothing in the late-winter Andes welcomed human life. The cold tormented us. The thin air starved our lungs. The unfiltered sun blinded us and blistered our lips and skin, and the snow was so deep that we could not venture far without sinking to our hips.

The initial impact had sheared the wings and tail from the Fairchild, leaving its battered fuselage to plow into a snow-packed glacier flowing down the eastern slope of a massive, ice-encrusted peak. Miraculously, the plane did not cartwheel or spiral; instead its angle of descent matched almost exactly the slope onto which we were falling, and it came to rest with its crumpled nose pointing slightly down the slope. East was the only direction in which we could see for any distance; to the north, south, and west, the view was blocked by towering summits ringing the crash site like the walls of a monstrous amphitheater. We knew we were high in the Andes—later we'd learn that the crash site was at roughly 12,000 feet—and the slopes above us rose so steeply that I had to tilt my head back to see their tops.

Still, we hoped we had an inkling of where we were in that vast range: We all knew the words our copilot had moaned as he lay dying: "We passed Curicó, we passed Curicó." Curicó was a small city 100 miles south of Santiago—that meant we must be somewhere in the western foothills of the Andes. Surely, we reasoned, the tall ridges to our west were the last high peaks before the mountains dwindled down to the green pastures of Chile. This became my mantra: To the west is Chile.

But first we had to stay alive. If not for our team captain, Marcelo Pérez, we wouldn't have lasted a night. Marcelo was a wing forward—very fast, very brave, and a leader we would trust with our lives. After the crash, as the stupefied survivors staggered about in disbelief, Marcelo had organized the uninjured into a search party to free the dozens of passengers still trapped in the heaps of tangled seats in the plane. Roberto Canessa and Gustavo Zerbino, two players who were also in medical school, had done their best to tend to the injuries, some of which were grisly. A six-inch steel tube had impaled the stomach of a quiet, stoic player named Enrique Platero. When Gustavo yanked the tube from his friend's gut, several inches of intestine came out, but Enrique immediately got to work helping to free others.

As darkness fell, Marcelo turned the Fairchild into a makeshift shelter, stacking loose seats and luggage in the gaping hole left by the tail, then packing the gaps with snow. The living were jammed into a cramped space on the litter-strewn floor measuring no more than eight by ten feet.

Marcelo's wall kept us from freezing, but in the coming nights we suffered terribly from the cold. We had cigarette lighters and could easily have lit a fire, but there was little combustible material. We burned all our paper money—almost $7,500 went up in smoke—and found enough scrap wood to fuel two or three small fires, but the brief luxury of warmth only made the cold seem worse. Nighttime temperatures plunged to minus 30 Fahrenheit, and we huddled together, the injured crying out when the jostling of bodies caused them pain. Often, I would lie with my head close to the face of whoever slept next to me to steal a little breath, a little warmth, from him.

But, for the most part, we remained a team. We clung to the hope that rescuers would find us and that all we had to do was hang on. "Breathe once more," we would tell the younger ones and the ones who were losing heart. "Live for one more breath. As long as you are breathing, you are fighting to survive."