25 years since the Balandrau tragedy: "I thought my eyes would freeze"

Torelló"I remember entering the refuge and bursting into tears, thinking, 'Wow, we're saved. We won't die now,'" says Marta Valls (Barcelona, ​​1974). She is one of the survivors of the tragedy that, exactly 25 years ago, left nine dead in the eastern Pyrenees, in the Ripollès region, amidst the most extraordinary and fateful weather event ever recorded in the Catalan mountains. Barcelona.

The wind suddenly began to blow when Valls and Marc Pons had already finished climbing and were on the summit of Gran de Fajol Grande, around two in the afternoon. They met up with Enric Llàtser and two other climbers, "we'll be in the car before we even start climbing," Marta recalls. But suddenly the wind began to whip up the heavy snowfall that had fallen a few days earlier, painting everything white. The sky was indistinguishable from the ground: "Visibility was zero." When they reached the Coll de la Marrana pass, instead Instead of heading towards Vallter, they unknowingly and unintentionally went in the opposite direction.

Suddenly, they lost Enric. Lluís said he had to go back and look for him. They wouldn't let him: "It was impossible. It wasn't an option. It was death." The wind was blowing "very, very hard." So hard that it knocked them to the ground. They went down on all fours or crawling. "The snow had turned to ice and it pierced your face like knives." The wind was so loud they had to whisper to each other: "It felt like we were on Everest. It didn't feel like the Pyrenees. It was all surreal." "We were bundled up and it felt like we were naked," he explains. "I was wearing mountain sunglasses and I had to take them off because I couldn't see anything. They were full of ice." "When I took them off, it felt like my eyes were freezing." The three of them descended roped together, in a line: Marc, Marta, and Lluís.

They continued fleeing the blizzard, trying to lose altitude. The goal was to walk until daybreak, even if they were aimless. "So we wouldn't freeze to death." She had been baptized, had received her First Communion, but at that time she only went to Mass for funerals and weddings. "I prayed at least a thousand Our Fathers. My mother taught me that," she explains, smiling. She walked and prayed. "When night fell, I thought we wouldn't make it. I realized how much we had suffered. I completely lost hope. I thought a lot about my parents," she says. "It was awful for them." It was a pitch-black night. But suddenly they saw a light. "It was a miracle. Every time I think about that moment, I get goosebumps. It was a spark of light in the middle of the darkness. One, two seconds. It appeared and disappeared. We even looked the other way and couldn't see it," she sighs. They were saved by the sheer luck that the Vaca coma shelter had opened two years earlier, that there were four people in the emergency room because the shelter was closed that night, and above all, that someone went outside for a moment with a headlamp. "If we hadn't seen the light, we wouldn't be here now," says Marta.

Laughing after flirting with death two hours from home

Joan Marc Flores (Santa Perpetua de Mogoda, 1974), inside the refuge, grew tired of the "unbearable" noise of the door slamming shut, and went outside to secure it with wire. The light from his headlamp, as fleeting as a shooting star, saved three lives. He has kept it in a cardboard ice cream box ever since. He says that when he went outside, he was "blown away." "The sight was immense. There was no room for life. It was madness," he wrote in a letter he sent to Jordi Cuixart, a friend and fellow adventurer, in prison. Suddenly, they saw Marc come in. "He was a damn block of ice," he explains now. His beard was covered in icicles. They had to use an ice axe to remove their jackets because the zippers were frozen solid. They all laughed together, saying they could order some pizzas.

On December 31st, they awoke to the sound of the helicopter that rescued Marc, Marta, and Lluís. The firefighters also offered them a ride down, but they declined because it was a "splendid" day and they wanted to finish the route on foot. They passed through the Orri valley and saw an arm sticking out of the snow. It belonged to one of the first two victims of the tragedy. At that time, it was not yet known that eight people were lost on Balandrau, a 2,585-meter peak known as a "cow mountain." They were in two groups of three and five people. Only one person from the second group survived, after losing the couple and three friends and spending two nights in the open. The Country She confirmed that some bodies were found in a vertical position: "They were moving, as if swimming through the snow." The last body wasn't found until March 24th, still under a meter and a half of snow. Enric, Lluís's friend, was found alive the next day, half-buried in the snow. His body temperature was 27°C. Marta recalls that shortly after landing at Campdevànol Hospital in the helicopter, the first bodies began to arrive. Today marks 25 years since that second anniversary: "It was like being reborn."