Surviving after two days buried in the snow: "I wanted to die"

Torelló"Every year I feel a kind of sadness when these days approach," sighs hiker Biel Grau (Lliçà d'Amunt, 1948). Exactly 25 years ago, he lost two close friends buried by an avalanche while descending from the summit of Costabona, "a mountain of cows" at 2,465 meters in the Ripollès region. He survived for two days buried under the snow. It was the painful epilogue to the tragedy that had taken place three weeks earlier. Nine dead in the Balandrau area.

On Saturday, January 20, 2001, Grau met up with Jordi Artiaga, from Canovelles, and Joan Soley, a resident of Lliçà d'Amunt and his life partner and adventure companion: every Easter they would make a trek in the Alps. "He was the closest friend I had," Grau says nostalgically. They headed towards the eastern Pyrenees in Grau's Mitsubishi. They reached the summit of Costabona. The plan was to descend towards the French border and return, but the weather had turned bad, so they decided to turn back and head towards the cars. They were three renowned mountaineers. Biel and Juan had climbed in the Himalayas and had conquered a peak over 7,500 meters in China. They wanted to summit an 8,000-meter peak.

"There was a patch of ice that broke under our weight, triggering an avalanche. We started going down together with the avalanche. I felt like I was inside a washing machine. We were spinning around," he says. They were buried under the snow, trapped. They couldn't get out. "It seems Joan ended up horizontal. I was lucky to be lying down, but slightly tilted, with my head a little above the surface. There was about a foot of snow on top of me, but a little light and air filtered through, and I could breathe," he adds. He remembers above all "a very strong pressure from the snow."

"I felt a lot of pressure on my body. I felt like they were making a mold of me, all compressed. I couldn't move. I could barely breathe," he recalls. "I don't really believe in gods and all that, but I thought that if there was someone up there, I hoped they would take me." He was having a terrible time. A red stain of blood from a wound he'd gotten on his forehead while falling was staring at him. He and Juan had been buried quite close to each other and they were talking. Without seeing each other, without understanding each other, but they were talking. Shouting from their cells of snow and ice. "We could feel each other from a distance, but we could feel each other," he emphasizes. "This is where the hardest blow came. I cry, but the memories are so hard. Suddenly he stopped answering me and I knew he was dead," he admits in a whisper.

Wetting himself to gain warmth

He couldn't move his left hand because his ulna and radius were broken in several places. With his right hand, he made more space in the snow, took his car key from his pocket, and put it in his mouth to make a small hole so he could breathe "a little better." The night was "very hard." He imagined himself at home, in front of the fireplace with his wife and two children. To escape the pain and the reality, he was buried and lost under the snow. He had to urinate on himself more than once. It helped him stay warm. The second day, he continued making holes in the snow to get more space, but he was still buried. He kept shouting for help, but no one heard him. "I found a strength within myself that sometimes I think about and wonder how the hell I could have reacted that way. I guess it's the instinct to survive," he says.

Salvation arrived early Monday morning, almost two days after the avalanche. Suddenly, he heard a helicopter approaching. He recounts how they located him by tracking his mobile phone and thanks to the ARVA, an electronic device that emits and receives waves to locate people trapped under an avalanche. A group of firefighters dug him out with shovels. "I felt a great joy, though," he says. They found him suffering from hypothermia, took him to the hospital in Campdevànol, and then to the one in Granollers. He couldn't attend the funeral of his two friends: Joan, 44, with a partner and a seven-year-old son, a high school teacher and councilor in Lliçà d'Amunt; and Jordi, 40, with a partner and two children, ages nine and six. He owned a bathroom and kitchen furniture workshop. Grau says he was saved by "a stroke of luck." "It took me a year to recover physically and mentally. It was very hard. In the second year, I said I couldn't go on like that. I went to do the route we had done that day, on Costabona, right there at the avalanche, without telling anyone," he says at 77, overcome with emotion. "Every time I reached a summit, I thought of Joan. Of how much fun we would have had together," he admits. And he keeps walking.