Mountain of the Dead

In 1959 a group of eight men and two women planned an expedition, funded by the Ural Polytechnical Institute.  Each member of the group was an experienced Grade II skier.  Completing the trip would earn them Grade III status, the highest certification there was at the time.

On January 27 they left Vizhai to begin their trek.  The following day Yuri Yudin, one of the members who had several pre-existing health issues, including rheumatism and a congenital heart defect, decided to turn back due to knee and joint pain.

He would be the only member of the group to survive the adventure.

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The remaining nine members of the expedition continued.  On January 31, they arrived at the edge of a highland area and started preparing to climb.  They cached some surplus food and equipment in a wooded valley, planning to use it on their way back.

The next day was February 1.  The group moved into the pass which has since been named Dyatlov Pass, after Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov, the leader of the group.  Evidently they planned to get through the pass that day and make camp the next night on the opposite side. 

Weather conditions worsened, bringing snowstorms and deteriorating visibility.  Still trying to advance, the expedition got confused about the direction and moved westward, towards the top of the mountain, Kholat Syakhl.  As soon as they realized their mistake, they decided to stop and set up camp right there, on the slope of the mountain.  For some reason, they chose not to move less than a mile downhill to a wooded area that would have offered a little shelter from the weather.

Kholat Syakhl means “Mountain of the Dead.”

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Dyatlov had agreed that he would send a telegram to their sports club as soon as they completed their trek and returned to Vizhai.  This was expected to happen no later than February 12, but Dyatlov had told Yuri Yudin, before he dropped out of the expedition, that he expected the trip to take longer than that.  Taking longer than expected was not uncommon for expeditions of that type.

Thus, when February 12 came and went, there was no immediate alarm.  However, by February 20, with no communication from the group, their relatives demanded that a rescue operation be undertaken.  On February 26, the searchers located the group’s tent.

What the rescue party discovered would haunt them for the rest of their lives.

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One of the searchers who found the shelter said, “The tent was half torn down and covered with snow.  It was empty, and all the group’s belongings and most of their shoes had been left behind.”  According to investigators, the tent had been cut open from the inside.  Eight or nine sets of footprints led down towards the edge of a nearby woods on the opposite side of the pass, about a mile to the north-east.  The tracks were left by people who were wearing only socks, or just one shoe, or were barefoot.

After about 500 meters the tracks disappeared, having been covered by snow.  Under a large Siberian pine, at the edge of the woods, they found the remains of a fire…and two members of the expedition.  The two had died there, naked except for their underwear.  As high as five feet up the tree above the bodies some of the branches were broken off.

Continuing their search the team found three additional bodies, including Dyatlov and one of the women members, spaced at 300, 400, and 630 meters from the pine in the direction of the camp.  Their death-poses seemed to indicate that they were trying to get back to the tent when they died.

The searchers failed to find the remaining four members of the expedition on that trip.

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Another search party two months later was finally able to locate the other four adventures…or what was left of them.  Their remains lay under 13 feet of snow in a creek at the bottom of a ravine, about 75 meters from the pine tree.  Most of them were better dressed than those who had already been found, leading investigators to believe that they may have taken the clothes off their dead friends.

But what happened to them, and what killed them?

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An inquest found that one of the five found under the tree had a small crack in his skull, but it was determined that the injury wouldn’t have been fatal.  It was concluded that those five had all died of hypothermia.

The other four bodies were a different, much more gruesome, story.  It made investigators wonder what had actually happened during the trek.

Three of the four had fatal injuries.  One had major skull damage.  Two others had major chest fractures.  According to one of the investigators, the force required to cause such damage would have been approximately that of a car crash.  Oddly, none of the bodies had external wounds associated with the fractures.  It seemed as if they had been crushed by some powerful force.

There was more. 

One of the bodies was missing its eyebrows, another, his eyes.  The third was most gruesome of all.  The only remaining female of the team was missing her eyes, tongue, part of her lips, and facial tissue as well as a piece of her skull.

What horrible thing could have possibly befallen these nine adventures?

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During the investigation, other interesting facts came out.  Supposedly, one of the bodies was found to have high amounts of radiation in his/her clothing.  A boy who had attended several of the skiers’ funerals, said their skin was a deep brown tan.  Another group of hikers who were about 31 miles south of the pass, reported seeing strange orange spheres in the sky north (toward the Dyatlov Pass) the night of the incident.  Several other witnesses verified that such spheres were common in the area during the months of February and March of 1959.

So what happened to the skiers?

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What could have caused nine experienced skiers and mountain trekkers to abandon their shelter in the middle of a frigid night and only partially clothed?

There are several different theories, including aliens, demons, and abominable snowman type creatures. 

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One of the more plausible ideas is that the group members, in their tent for the night, were caught in an avalanche, which covered the normal exits to the tent, and prevented them from leaving that way.  In their panic to avoid any subsequent avalanches, they slashed the side of the tent and ran off into the falling snow.  Once they were away from the tent they sought shelter under the big Siberian pine. 

This theory fits neatly with my own ideas, and facts I was able to glean from investigators.  What follows is mostly my own thoughts, tempered by my experience as a cold weather survival student and instructor in the Marines.

Temperatures that night got down to −40 °F with winds from 40-65 miles per hour.  The wind chill would have been equivalent to -84 °F to -93 °F.  These conditions would have caused hypothermia, with accompanying frostbite, to set-in mere minutes after exposure, especially with their bare or unshod feet.  Only partially clad as they were, the fire they had been able to build under the tree would not have been big enough to keep any of them warm enough to stay alive very long.

The experienced group members would have understood the seriousness of their plight.  They would have hurriedly weighed their options.  As the minutes passed and they got colder, the fact that they were quickly descending into unrecoverable hypothermia would have been undeniable.  

No one knows for certain when the group split up, but I believe four volunteered to go and promised to come back once they found the camp.  They mistakenly went the wrong direction and, in the low visibility, walked onto the weak snow at the edge of the ravine.  That snow crumbled beneath their feet, propelling them all the way down to the bottom, which contained a rocky creek.  Most of them sustained serious injuries and the other landed in the water with them.  In those temperatures and already hypothermic, being soaked in the water would have thrown them into deep hypothermia in mere seconds.  They died so quickly that they were unable to climb out of the creek, let alone out of the ravine.

Blowing and/or falling snow covered them over the next two months.

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The remaining five in the shelter of the tree were freezing more slowly due to the fire and the wind break of the tree, but they were still freezing.  They might have discussed whether any of their members was still able to climb the tree and attempt to see their camp.

I believe the broken limbs bear witness to the fact that the climber had lost his grip with numb and frozen hands and fallen, breaking the limbs in his descent, and hitting his head on the way down, cracking his skull.  It would have been a fairly minor injury under normal circumstances, but, already almost frozen, it could have made it harder for him to walk and, thus, more susceptible to hypothermia.

I think the two bodies found under the tree were the most poorly dressed of the five, and they succumbed to the cold.  Knowing they were dead, the other three made a last-ditch effort to get to the camp, which one of them had glimpsed from up in the tree before he fell.

In the effort to survive the last moments they had, and perhaps feeling that their dead comrades would have wanted them to, they stripped the clothing off the bodies and used them to add more layers of insulation to themselves.  Unfortunately, insulation only holds in the temperature of whatever it encloses.  So, despite the logical effort, they succumbed, one-by-one to the frigid temperatures 300, 400, and 630 meters from the Siberian pine.

But what about the injuries three of the four in the ravine sustained?  I think the broken skull and crushed chests were from falling onto the large rocks in the creek, at the bottom of the ravine. 

One alternative is that they were crushed by another avalanche, which would explain the lack of external wounds accompanying the crushed skulls.  The same avalanche may have swept them into the ravine.

What about the gruesome damage to those found in the creek?

I would wager good money that the missing eyes and flesh were taken by scavengers in the three months they lay there before they were found.  Small scavengers, like jays, always start with the softest tissue they can get at, which would have been probably the eyes, then the lips, and on from there.

 But what about the other strange facts brought out by witnesses of the funerals, etc.? 

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As for the tanned skin, while they were still alive, the trekkers would have tanned due to exposure to the glare of the sun and its reflection off the brilliant white snow…at least the skin which was exposed to them.  Of course, that same skin would have been exposed during the funeral, although I’m not sure why their ceremonies would have been open-casket.  Also, ice forming as they freeze causes a human’s cells to burst.  Remember, the first five had probably been dead for a month before they were found.  The other four were out there for three months.  They would have started to freeze-dry before they were found.  Then, when they were thawed prior to their funerals, the skin would have looked darker still.

The strange, orange spheres, if anything, may have added to the hikers’ fears.  I believe they were probably ball lightening, a normally pretty rare phenomenon.  Though usually innocuous, ball lightening has killed enough people that the hikers would have been justified in being concerned.

I honestly have no good evidence as to why one of the youths had an increased level of radiation in his clothing.  Perhaps he was careless when working with radioactive materials at the college.  Also, the Russians were experimenting with atomic weapons during this time.  Remember, this was during the Cold War.  Perhaps that is the source of radiation. 

I’d feel safe betting on those explanations too.

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In the late 1940s, Theodore Woodward, professor at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, instructed his medical interns to look for normal, rather than abnormal, reasons for sickness.  He said, “When you hear hoofbeats, think of horses, not zebras”

In other words, while I won’t tell you that there are no such things as aliens, demons, or abominable snowmen, I think we shouldn’t just automatically think the cause was supernatural, when we have plenty of natural things to consider.

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Of course, you could just say this is Scott, ruining another good scary story.

Yeah, there’s that.

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Addendum: I originally wrote this post several months ago.  Recently, a report came out from a group of Swiss engineers who study geotechnical, snow, and avalanche forces.  Head of the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne, Johan Gaume, spoke out about the group’s discoveries and logical explanations.

Rather than detail everything mentioned in the study, I’ll just say that the group basically came to the same conclusion that I did.  They also explained that the damage some of the hikers sustained was due to getting hit by an avalanche while sleeping and swept into the creek by the same avalanche.

Sounds pretty close to what I said, doesn’t it?

Yeah, I think I’m pretty smart.

Just saying.

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