Sixty-Nine Days Without the Sun

On August 5, 2010, seven hundred thousand tons of rock collapsed inside the San Jose copper mine in Chile's Atacama Desert, trapping thirty-three miners half a mile underground. For seventeen days, nobody on the surface knew if they were alive. The men rationed two spoonfuls of tuna every forty-eight hours. They wept in the dark. They prayed. They scratched messages on scraps of paper no one could read.

When a narrow drill bit finally broke through to their chamber, the miners attached a note: "Estamos bien en el refugio, los 33." We are well in the shelter, all thirty-three of us.

But "well" was generous. They were gaunt, sick, surviving in ninety-degree heat and total darkness. For sixty-nine days they waited, sustained only by the thin supply line connecting them to the surface and by the promise that someone was working to bring them home.

When the rescue capsule finally carried each man upward, the first thing he saw was light — blinding, glorious, unfiltered Chilean sunlight pouring across his face.