The hikers were found dead outside their tent. Some barefoot. Some naked. Some radioactive. All outside in the darkness of remote Russia, then the USSR, in 1959.
Their leader, Igor Dyatlov, 23, an outdoorsman who often used equipment he cobbled himself as a wannabe inventor, was lying face up in the snow.
The radio engineering student’s head looked towards the tent, his fists clenched and his jacket unbuttoned.
Igor, just like the eight young winter campers and cross-country skiers he called his classmates and friends, was dead.
The group had ventured into the Urals, a mountain range that splits western Russia from Siberia, on a planned 16-day cross-country ski trip.
Where the bodies were found has many names. To Soviet officials, the skiers’ tent sat on the remote mountain Height 1079. The Mansi, an indigenous people in the area, knew it as Kholat Syakhl, or Dead Mountain in their language.
These days, the area is called the Dyatlov Pass, named after Igor.
What – or who – killed the nine hikers is a riddle that, for decades, no one has been able to answer.
‘The Dyatlov Pass incident is the ultimate cold case,’ Teodora Hadjiyska, who runs a website dedicated to the mystery, tells Metro.co.uk.
‘Sixty-five years since the tragedy, we are no closer to solving it. Evidence continues to be – literally – unearthed to this day.’
The question of what happened that cold winter’s night has confounded federal investigators and bemused scientists while energising conspiracies and tall tales about everything from UFOs and yetis to Soviet spies and teleportation devices.
As Hadjiyska puts it on her website: ‘Many are more bizarre, strange and quite frankly dumb ideas.’
Igor, Yuri Doroshenko, Georgiy Krivonishenko, Alexander Kolevatov, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Rustem Slobodin, Nikolai Thibeaux-Brignolles, Semyon Zolotaryov, Yuri Yudin and Lyudmila Dubinina, were in high spirits when they first set off on January 27.
Mostly students in their 20s from the Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI), the team of 10 hoped to ski 200 miles around the soft mountains that bulged out of the birch and fir forests below them and get to the tiny village of Vizhai by February 21.
They were pretty committed. They rode two trains, a bus, the back of a woodcutter truck and a sledge to get to what would be the start of their journey about 350 miles north of Sverdlovsk – now Yekaterinburg.
Yuri pulled out after suffering from joint pain, leaving the nine hikers to set off on January 28 towards the Gora Otorten mountain.
Instead of a finishing line, the team planned to send a telegram to the university sports club upon their arrival.
Yet the telegram would never arrive.
The terrain had never been a worry for the group. Rather, it was the temperatures sinking as low as -30°C and the blistering winds and deep snow that came with it.
By February 1, the party had veered off course and pitched their tent on Kholat Syakhl. Forty-eight hours later, all would be dead.
A search party found the group’s campsite in late February. Inside the tent, everything seemed normal – food was laid out as if ready to be eaten, and equipment was neatly lined up by the entrance.
But the tent, now half-collapsed and covered in snow, appeared to have been deliberately slashed open by a blade from the inside. Diary entries dated February 2 suggested a snowstorm had taken place that night.
Rescuers found tracks about 100 feet downhill that suggested up to nine people had walked at a ‘normal pace’ towards the trees, some only wearing stockings, one ski boot or nothing at all. The placement of their bodies, including Igor’s, suggested they tried to return to the tent and froze to death as they struggled uphill.
A small fire had seemingly been lit under a large cedar tree, by which two wearing just their underwear and pyjamas were in.
Krivonishchenko was found in his underwear, his fingers blackened and covered in third-degree burns, a chunk of flesh from his right hand inside his mouth.
Another had a missing tongue, two had no eyeballs. Fractured skulls, slabs of bone piercing the brain, broken ribs, bruises and even more burns were found on the rest. Most of their clothing was covered in radioactivity.
Four were found two months later buried under 13ft of snow in a ravine nearly 250 feet further away in the trees. The dead had seemingly donated their clothing to the living, with some having mismatched clothing, and wearing the burnt and torn trousers of others.
The death of Igor and five other hikers was ruled by coroners as hypothermia. The remaining three died of injuries.
After initially believing that the Mansi people were behind the deaths, the authorities eventually ruled out homicide.
‘It should be concluded that the cause of the hikers’ demise was an overwhelming force, which they were not able to overcome,’ prosecutor Lev Ivanov wrote at the time.
Ivanov’s rather, well, cryptic conclusion was followed by Soviet investigators classifying all the case files about the incident.
This didn’t exactly do much to put off frantic speculation – not even from the Soviet investigators themselves.
One suggested in 1990 that a ‘heat ray or strong but completely unknown energy’ may have blasted the hikers. A lead investigator said in 2013 that top Moscow officials had pressured his team to shrug off the incident as nothing more than an accident. Nothing to see here, in other words.
With no solid evidence supporting any one theory, the Russian federal government reopened the case in early 2019 to finally put the speculation to rest.
Their answer was simple. No, it’s not romantic rivalries or a military experiment gone wrong (or right, rather) but an avalanche.
Andrey Kuryakov, deputy head of the regional prosecutor’s office, said that the disaster forced them out of the tent to shelter under a nearby ridge. A lack of visibility prevented them from heading back.
‘It was a heroic struggle. There was no panic,’ Kuryakov said, according to the state-owned news agency RIA.
The Mansi people, who have long herded reindeer in the Sverdlovsk area, aren’t so sure about that.
‘As far as I know, no one has ever seen [an avalanche] on these mountains,’ Valery Anyamov, a member of the Mansi people, told The Dyatlov Mystery documentary.
Some researchers agree. The slope, they say, is too gentle and the conditions for an avalanche too far-reaching to have happened.
What actually happened at Dyatlov Pass?
That’s the question that has kept people like Teodora Hadjiyska up at night.
Since she first started investigating the case following a near-death accident in 2012, leaving her with injuries not too dissimilar from some of the hikers, Hadjiyska has translated almost every file, testimony and report around the case from Russian to English.
In her comprehensive list of explanations, they fall into other ‘natural’ or ‘criminal’. Some, she says, are more ‘fear-mongering’ and ‘exploitative’ than anything.
Here are a few:
KGB
Semyon Zolotaryov, Aleksander Kolevatov and Yuri Krivonischenko were Soviet agents on a mission to uncover a CIA hideaway, only to be killed by the Americans.
That’s the theory put out by Aleksey Rakitin, author of the book Dyatlov Pass, who says they worked for the domestic intelligence agency known as KGB.
Others have suggested that the Dyatlov group stumbled upon a military testing area and were slain by the Soviet soldiers protecting the area.
Time vortex
A historian on YouTube trawled through some of the photographs taken from the trek and had a pretty wild claim – the hikers were trapped in a time vortex.
In a theory straight out of an M Night Shyamalan movie, he says the hikers were in the area because they were carrying out a mystic mission only for them to age prematurely.
They say the photos are riddled with UFOs and capture some of the hikers levitating and using smartphones – yes, really.
UFOs
Speaking of UFOs, an unidentified flying object – though not alien – could have been what sent the hikers hurrying from their tent.
The Soviet military had a base in nearby Baikonur and was known to launch missiles, Hadjiyska says, while Ivanov, the prosecutor who carried out the initial investigation, spoke of ‘fireballs’ that had been spotted in the pass.
Gravity fluctuation
A Russian scientist has proposed that gravity around the Dyatlov Pass might have been, for a few minutes and a grab bag of reasons, weaker than normal.
This sent some of the hikers flying about 1km into the air before they fell to the ground, injuring them.
The whiplash of the air pressure being higher outside crumpled their bodies up, which explains the ‘unexplainable’ blunt-force trauma.
Even if an avalanche had occurred, the impact would unlikely have caused the blunt-force trauma seen.
Hadjiyska, who co-wrote the book 1079: The Overwhelming Force of Dyatlov Pass with her mentor Igor Pavlov, also remains unconvinced.
‘When the avalanche theory is discussed it is always about could an avalanche happen in the dead of the winter in the mountain,’ she says.
‘Of course, freak avalanches can happen. This doesn’t explain the myriad of strange things about this case, doesn’t explain what killed them, or how they died.’
Hadjiyska argues that a fallen tree was behind the ‘nightmare’. The injured leapt out of the crushed tent, narrowly avoiding being burnt by a cooking stove, before succumbing to their injuries.
Another argument suggests officials from a nearby mining expedition found the bodies and, worried that their blasting caused their deaths, attempted to cover it up. They didn’t do the best job at it, leading to some of the inconsistencies which have baffled people for years.
‘The entire mystery ensues from this desperate attempt to protect themselves from what could have been very severe consequences,’ Hadjiyska says.
Alexander Puzrin, a professor of geotechnical engineering at the Swiss research university ETH Zurich, feels the ordeal might not have started with a downed tree but an avalanche.
Just one far weirder, rarer and delayed than the Russian government suggested.
Puzrin, who grew up in Russia, worked with Johan Gaume of the Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, another Swiss federal technical institute, to figure out what happened.
The slope of Kholat Saykhl, the pair found, wasn’t as shallow as first thought – it’s about 30 degrees. Computer simulations suggest that a ‘slab avalanche’ could be behind it, where a chunk of snow no larger than an SUV crashed into the tent.
Bleary-eyed and fearing another avalanche, the campers may have fled in a hurry from the snow-smothered tent out into the harsh winter night.
Missing limbs can be chalked up to scavengers and decomposition, while radiation levels may be simply due to the sun and high altitude, they wrote in a peer-reviewed study in 2021.
‘Follow-up expeditions confirmed that slab avalanches are possible on the eastern slopes of Northern Urals,’ Puzin tells Metro.co.uk. ‘Something that our opponents always denied.’
Puzrin says that neither he, Gaume nor their crew have cracked the mystery. They’ve just handed the world one piece of the puzzle.
Not all the evidence is there to back up the slab avalanche idea – but there’s at least a tad bit more than gravity fluctuations or a time vortex.
‘Probably not,’ he says when asked whether the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass incident will ever be solved.
‘There are people who believe in science,’ he adds, ‘and others who prefer conspiracy theories.’
For Hadjiyska, the Dyalotv Pass incident is a bit like a Rorschach inkblot test – you get out of it what you put in.
‘Even the people that help me dig up or cut off the samples believe in other theories, aliens and reindeer if you can believe it, so they look for aliens and reindeer,’ she says.
‘And we keep arguing around the campfire at night and joining forces again in the morning to survive the snow.’
Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at webnews@metro.co.uk.
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