Survival
Fifteen days later, they went down to recover his body
A fisherman went into an unmapped flooded cave in Oaxaca with a spear and no guideline. Fifteen days later the search had become a search for a body.
🧗 Survival
Real people, real accidents: cave diving, mountaineering, rescues that worked and rescues that came too late. Every fact traced to a primary source.
Survival
The day they held his memorial service
In May 1982 a family in Japan buried a twenty-six-year-old climber lost on a Sichuan ice peak. Thirty-two people have reached that summit. Thirty-seven have died on it.
Survival
A white hand came out of the rock after seventy-two hours
Two rescue divers had been trained for exactly this moment: after three days underwater, you find a body. Their lamps swept across a bloodless human hand.
Survival
Three men talked by a pool, above what waited below
Four students walked into Clarksville Cave with one cylinder, one regulator and one torch. The pool they meant to dive was only three metres deep.
Survival
His tenth day of technical diving, and 150 metres
Two men walked into the water at Dahab's Blue Hole with five cylinders and nothing else. No support diver, no surface marshal, no oxygen, no doctor.
Survival
They searched twenty-six days, two metres too far
A spearfisher went under a Guizhou lake at night with no buddy and no line. The search that followed lasted twenty-six days and looked in the wrong place.
Survival
They found an air pocket, and photographed it
Three men over fifty went into a Catalan sea cave with one cylinder each and no guideline. Two of them found a dome of air, and thought they were saved.
Survival
He threw the food away, then climbed back up for it
Two broken hands, one bare foot, and the hardest ridge walk in China above him. He turned around and climbed back toward the food he had thrown away.
Survival
Four hundred metres below the summit, he turned around
Three years of preparation, and less than four hundred metres left to the top of the world. Then Fan Jiangtao saw someone lying in a hollow in the rock.
Survival
Two men roped together, and one working leg between them
At six thousand metres they had no anchor, so they tied themselves to each other and trusted that. Then they began to slide, and did not stop for 200 metres.