The Dylatov Pass Incident: Has One of the Biggest Soviet Mys…

Most of us would go out of our way not to set foot any­where near a place the local natives refer to as “Dead Moun­tain.” That did­n’t stop the Dyat­lov Hik­ing Group, who set out on a six­teen-day ski­ing expe­di­tion across the north­ern Urals in late Jan­u­ary of 1959. Expe­ri­enced and intre­pid, those ten young Sovi­et ski hik­ers had what it took to make the jour­ney, at least if noth­ing went ter­ri­bly wrong. A bout of sci­at­i­ca forced one mem­ber of the group to turn back ear­ly, which turned out to be lucky for him. About a month lat­er, the irra­di­at­ed bod­ies of his nine com­rades were dis­cov­ered scat­tered in dif­fer­ent areas of Dead Moun­tain some dis­tance from their camp­site, with var­i­ous trau­mat­ic injuries and in var­i­ous states of undress.

Some­thing had indeed gone ter­ri­bly wrong, but nobody could fig­ure out what. For decades, the fate of the Dyat­lov Hik­ing Group inspired count­less expla­na­tions rang­ing wide­ly in plau­si­bil­i­ty. Some the­o­rized a freak weath­er phe­nom­e­non; oth­ers some kind of tox­ic air­borne event; oth­ers still, the actions of Amer­i­can spies or even a yeti.

“In a place where infor­ma­tion has been as tight­ly con­trolled as in the for­mer Sovi­et Union, mis­trust of offi­cial nar­ra­tives is nat­ur­al, and noth­ing in the record can explain why peo­ple would leave a tent undressed, in near-sui­ci­dal fash­ion,” writes the New York­er’s Dou­glas Pre­ston. Only in the late twen­ty-tens, when the Dyat­lov Group Memo­r­i­al Foun­da­tion got the case reopened, did inves­ti­ga­tors assess the con­tra­dic­to­ry evi­dence while mak­ing new mea­sure­ments and con­duct­ing new exper­i­ments.

The prob­a­ble caus­es were nar­rowed down to those explained by experts in the Vox video above: a severe bliz­zard and a slab of ice that must have shift­ed and crushed the tent. Dense­ly packed by the wind, that mas­sive, heavy slab would have “pre­vent­ed them from retriev­ing their boots or warm cloth­ing and forced them to cut their way out of the downs­lope side of the tent,” pro­ceed­ing to the clos­est nat­ur­al shel­ter from the avalanche they believed was com­ing. But no avalanche came, and they could­n’t find their way back to their camp in the dark­ness. “Had they been less expe­ri­enced, they might have remained near the tent, dug it out, and sur­vived,” writes Pre­ston. “The skiers’ exper­tise doomed them.” Not every­one accepts this the­o­ry, but then, the idea that knowl­edge can kill might be more fright­en­ing than even the most abom­inable snow­man.

Relat­ed con­tent:

What Caused the Mys­te­ri­ous Death of Edgar Allan Poe?: A Brief Inves­ti­ga­tion into the Poet’s Demise 171 Years Ago Today

The Denali Exper­i­ment: A Test of Human Lim­its

The Curi­ous Death of Vin­cent van Gogh

The Grue­some Doll­house Death Scenes That Rein­vent­ed Mur­der Inves­ti­ga­tions

Archae­ol­o­gists Dis­cov­er 1300-Year-Old Pair of Skis, the Best-Pre­served Ancient Skis in Exis­tence

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on the social net­work for­mer­ly known as Twit­ter at @colinmarshall.