Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

by Eichar, Donnie

  It was on this second-to-last day of their trip that the nine hikers began to deviate from the river and make their way up the slope in the direction of Otorten Mountain. The group had been lucky in rediscovering the Mansi tracks—ski tracks this time—but the uphill path was still slow going and the hikers needed a more efficient method of cutting through the snow. They invented one on the spot, one that Igor called “path-treading,” in which the lead hiker takes off his backpack and beats a path for five minutes before returning to his pack to rest. When he has retrieved his pack, he catches up with the others who have since flattened the path. At the end of the path, they repeat the process with a new leader. Still, even with this method, Igor noted that it was difficult to advance.

  The track is hardly visible, we lose it often or walk blindly, so we cover only 1.5 to 2 km in an hour.

  Of the wind blowing in their faces, he wrote:

  The wind is warm and piercing, blows fast like air when a plane takes off.

  The hikers were understandably exhausted, and at 4:00 PM they began to look for a place to set up camp. They went south to the Auspiya valley where the wind was weak and the snow less deep. The downside to the valley was that firewood was scarce, with mostly damp firs at hand. With what firewood they could gather, they chose not to dig a fire pit and simply laid the fire on top of some logs. They ate dinner inside the tent, inspiring Igor to write, in what would be the group’s final diary entry:

  It’s hard to imagine such a cozy place anywhere at the ridge, under the piercing howls of the wind, and hundreds of km from any settlements.

  FEBRUARY 1

  THE FRIENDS TOOK APPROXIMATELY TEN PHOTOGRAPHS on their final day of life, and judging from the first few snapshots taken at the campsite that morning, spirits were high. A casual shot of Kolya and Doroshenko reveals them laughing in front of the tent, surrounded by piles of backpacks. Then there are two images of Rustik, wearing a jacket that looks to have been shredded violently. Upon closer inspection, however, it appears that the material was burned, perhaps when left too close to the stove. If Rustik was worried about losing a much-needed layer of warmth, he doesn’t show it in these photographs, and instead adopts a pose of inflated pride. After all, of the nine hikers, Rustik would have been most able to afford a replacement jacket when he got home.

  The morning’s mood was evidently contagious, and one member of the group drafted the front page of a mock newspaper called The Evening Otorten, dated February 1, Issue 1. Among its contents was an editorial posing the question, “Is it possible to keep nine hikers warm with one stove and one blanket?” plus an announcement for a daily seminar titled “Love and Hiking” to be held in the tent by lecturers “Dr.” Kolya and “Candidate of Science” Lyuda. The sports page announced that “Comrades Doroshenko and Zina Kolmogorova set a new world record in competition for stove assembly,” while the science pages claimed that the “snow man,” or yeti, dwelled in the northern Urals around Otorten Mountain.

  With the morning’s entertainment out of the way, a serious task lay ahead: constructing a labaz, or temporary storage shelter. The hikers’ packs needed to be as light as possible for their journey up the mountain, and items that weren’t crucial for the next two days had to be stowed for their return trip. After the shelter’s construction, the hikers stocked it with food reserves, extra skis and boots, a spare first aid kit, and—most painfully—Georgy’s mandolin. Between selecting items for the shelter and stowing firewood for the night of their return, a significant portion of the morning was gone; and, after the shelter was secure, they were eager to push ahead.

  Rustem “Rustik” Slobodin shows off his burned jacket. Perhaps he left it to dry too close to the fire the previous night, January 31, 1959.

  Alexander Kolevatov (left) and Nikolay “Kolya” Thibault-Brignoles share a laugh at the campsite on the morning of January 31, 1959.

  At left: Igor Dyatlov, Nikolay “Kolya” Thibault-Brignoles, and Alexander “Sasha” Zolotaryov as they prepare to leave the labaz shelter site under worsening weather, February 1, 1959.

  The remaining photographs taken that day reveal the nine friends struggling through a terrain of increasingly sparse trees and blinding weather. There are no jocular photos left, just a group of serious young people determined to conquer a challenging landscape. Two of the images reveal the group skiing single file into a gray haze.

  Sunset would come at 4:58 that day, with twilight at 5:52, but because of the heavy cloud cover, they thought it best to set up camp early to avoid getting caught in the dark. They chose a spot on an east-facing slope, which would allow them to pack up quickly in the morning and head straight up the mountain. It took several hours to set up camp, and the hikers were in the tent by 9:00 PM, ready for the next day’s climb. But the nine would never see the summit of Otorten. In fact, they would never set foot on the mountain at all. The worst night of their lives lay in front of them, and not one of them would live to see the sun rise.

  The skiers advance to the location of their final campsite. This is one of the last shots taken by the Dyatlov group, February 1, 1959.

  19

  MARCH 1959

  INVESTIGATORS IN IVDEL WEREN’T ABOUT TO SUBMIT the word of a dressmaker into evidence, but her belief that the cuts to the tent had been intentional prompted another woman, scientific officer and criminal expert G. Churkina, to take a closer look. Disregarding the ice-ax gashes that had been made to the roof of the tent upon its discovery—and the various holes patched by the hikers themselves—Churkina focused on three tears at the back panel opposite the entrance. She was able to quickly confirm that the tears were, in fact, cuts. “Usually a tear spreads along the line of less resistance, i.e., either warp or weft threads are torn,” she wrote in her report. “Such defects are usually very even, with straight angles. A cut always damages both thread types at various angles. It is impossible to cut only warp threads or only weft threads.”

  Lev Ivanov and his investigators believed that the case rested on identifying the cause of these gashes, and when the tent had been initially brought in for examination, the condition of the fabric had suggested to some that there had been an outside attacker that night. The determination that the tears had been made by a knife seemed to support this theory, but upon closer examination of the threads under a microscope, Churkina made another discovery: The cuts had come from inside the tent. “The defects continue as thin scratches in the corners of the punctures on the internal side of the tent,” she wrote, “not on the external side. Nature and form of damage indicate that the cuts were made from inside by some blade/knife.”

  Diagrams from the criminal case files. Top image: “The approximate scheme of the Dyatlov group’s tent. Missing fabric pieces are cross-hatched. Cuts are marked by red arrows. Not all tears are marked.” Bottom image: “Scheme of fabric tear and cut. A) tear, b) cut.”

  The Dyatlov hikers’ tent in the prosecutor’s office for examination, 1959.

  Once the incisions were determined to have come from the opposite direction, new theories began to emerge. Yuri Blinov, who wrote of the development in his diary, was among those who speculated that the hikers had been caught by surprise by something or someone, and therefore had had no time to completely undo the latches at the entrance. “The tent was cut by a knife from inside in 3 places,” Blinov wrote. “It means that they were escaping the tent in panic.”

  The forensic examinations of Igor, Zina, Georgy and Doroshenko on March 4, and of Rustik on March 11, would conclude that the five hikers had died from hypothermia. This was an unsurprising conclusion, particularly to those who had found the bodies. The question now was not how they died, but under what circumstances. But if investigators were hoping that the remaining corpses would provide additional clues, they were in for a long wait. Miserable weather, weary volunteers and the March 8 Soviet holiday celebrating International Working Women’s Day slowed search efforts on the slope. In early March, Maslennikov flew to Ivdel to make an appe
arance in front of the search commission. With the unanimous support of his men, the engineer recommended that search efforts be suspended until April to allow some of the snowpack to melt. The commission, however, rejected Maslennikov’s proposal, opting instead to replace the entire search team and continue as planned.

  The commission chose Ural Polytechnic Institute physics professor Abram Kikoin, brother of famed Soviet nuclear physicist Isaak Kikoin, to lead the new team. Kikoin was an avid mountaineer and head of the university’s mountaineering club, which meant he had immediate access to the best volunteers. But once on the slope, Kikoin and his team encountered the same problems that Maslennikov had. The men battled daily against squall winds, deep snow and myopic visibility, turning up no immediate sign of the remaining four hikers.

  During the first week of March, while search efforts were stalling in the mountains, Yuri Yudin took time away from his studies to travel to Ivdel. Because he was one of the few people who knew all nine hikers, he had been summoned by investigators to identify their belongings. It was Ivanov who met Yudin at the Ivdel prosecutor’s office, and it was the investigator’s kindness that helped him get through the distressing process. “He was a good, caring person,” Yudin says of the lead investigator. “He told me, ‘Your conscience is clear—if you were with them, you would have been number ten.’ ”

  The searchers on the slope had gathered up the contents of the hikers’ tent haphazardly, having stuffed items into backpacks with little regard to ownership. “Everything was in a giant pile,” Yudin remembers of entering the office. The task of untangling the mass of objects and assigning each one to its proper owner fell entirely on him. It was a solemn procedure, and the head of the UPI physical training department and a reporter from Na Smenu! newspaper were both present as witnesses.

  One by one, Yudin separated the items into nine piles.

  TELESCOPIC TOOTHBRUSH . . . ZINA.

  HORN-RIMMED GLASSES IN GRAY CASE . . . IGOR.

  BOWIE KNIFE AND COMPASS . . . KOLYA.

  MANDOLIN WITH SPARE STRING . . . GEORGY.

  GRAY WOOLEN SOCKS RECEIVED AS A PRESENT FROM YUDIN . . . LYUDA.

  CHECKED VICUÑA SCARF . . . DOROSHENKO.

  HIKING BADGE . . . LYUDA.

  ISSUE OF THE SATIRICAL MAGAZINE KROKODIL . . . SASHA.

  BLUE MITTENS . . . ZINA.

  TEDDY BEAR . . . GEORGY.

  Yudin encountered all of the familiar items, but there were surprises too. In Kolevatov’s backpack, along with a broken comb, a grindstone and an aluminum flask, Yudin found a bit of contraband: a pack of flavored cigarettes. It looked as if the cunning Kolevatov had managed to feed his nicotine addiction after all, the no-smoking pledge be damned. And in Igor’s notebook, Yudin discovered a photograph of Zina tucked inside. Had Igor simply been using the snapshot of his friend as a bookmark? Or did this mean something more? It was now, of course, impossible to know. And so it went, until some time later, there lay a diminished pile of clothing and miscellaneous tools to which Yudin was unable to assign an owner.

  He left the Ivdel office emotionally spent, but the journey’s heartache was not yet over. On the ride back to Sverdlovsk, he shared a helicopter with a woman who was transporting some of the hikers’ organs to Sverdlovsk. Yudin remembers the ride as deeply unsettling, as he was painfully aware of the grim contents of the nearby containers.

  While the organs were being returned to Sverdlovsk for further analysis, the hikers’ families were encountering resistance in getting the bodies of their loved ones returned to them for a proper burial. Now, in addition to wrestling with their own feelings of grief and guilt, the parents of the dead had to contend with the opaque motives of local officials.

  Yudin remembers that the regional authorities were eager to get beyond the entire incident, and in private talks with family members, strongly suggested that their loved ones be buried in the mountains. The officials wanted “for nobody to come to the funeral, for nobody to show up,” Yudin says. “The authorities wanted to bury them where they were found so there would be no funeral and it would be done.”

  Rimma Kolevatova, the older sister of Kolevatov, in her testimony to investigators, called the organization of the funeral arrangements “disgraceful.” The search teams had not yet found her brother, but she was keenly aware of the ordeal the other families had endured. The parents of the hikers, she recalled, had been summoned by Party officials into private meetings, in which they were told their children should not be returned to Sverdlovsk, but buried instead in Ivdel. “They lived and studied and made friends in Sverdlovsk,” Rimma told investigators. “Why should they be buried in Ivdel?” According to Rimma, in these private meetings, each set of parents had been told that the other parents had already agreed to an Ivdel burial, with a mass grave and single obelisk marker. When the parents of Zina Kolmogorova proposed that all the families should be called together to come to an agreement, the secretary of the institute committee of the regional Communist party made excuses that the families were too spread out to make a single meeting feasible.

  “What kind of conspiracy is that?” Kolevatov’s sister asked. “Why should we go through so many hardships . . . in order to have our relatives buried in their native Sverdlovsk? This is a heartless attitude to people suffering such grave loss. Such an offense to mothers and fathers who had lost their children, good and decent people.”

  Yudin similarly recalls the families being infuriated with regional officials. “The families wrote letters and were in an uproar to have their funeral in the city.” He remembers them insisting: “We want to visit our families, our kids. We want to visit them at their graves.”

  When the families stood their ground, demanding the return of the bodies, a compromise was reached between city authorities and the parents of the deceased. They would be allowed to bury their children in Sverdlovsk, but under the condition that the funeral not be a single event. The memorial services, they stipulated, would be divided into two services held on two separate days. Minimizing the funeral turnout, and therefore minimizing the deaths of the young hikers, was the authorities’ express intention, Yudin says. “They wanted to pretend that nothing happened.”

  20

  2012

  MY COMPANIONS AND I HAD LESS THAN TWO HOURS TO find School #41 and be back in our seats before the train departed. The trains here, I was told, were Mussolini punctual. Much of Russia’s industry had been privatized, but the railway system remained stubbornly state owned. We dared not put its efficiency to the test.

  As we stepped out into Serov, I looked back at the old pre-Revolution station, pleased to see that the masonry structure hadn’t been rebuilt since the Dyatlov group set foot here. On that January morning in 1959, the attendants hadn’t allowed any of the passengers inside the station, and the ten weary hikers had been forced to look for shelter elsewhere. School #41 had become their impromptu hotel. We had no idea if the school still existed, but Kuntsevich suggested that we set out on foot toward the most concentrated area of town. We headed down a snowy road bordered by rustic houses and winter-beaten trees with their tops sawed off. I noticed that the log-cabin-style houses we were passing were the very same ones that appeared in the photographs Igor and his friends took here—images I had developed from the negatives Kuntsevich had given me on my previous trip. I remembered a slightly blurred picture of the oldest member of their group, Sasha Zolotaryov, standing between two such log houses, a duffel bag slung over his shoulder. Next, there was an image of a mother and her adolescent daughter, posing obediently for the camera, their heads wrapped in snug winter scarves.

  Along the way we came upon convenience shops that sold common items such as combs, lotions and toothbrushes. We stopped at one or two of these shops to ask for directions, but when Kuntsevich inquired about the school, the proprietors only shook their heads. I remembered from the hikers’ diary entries that the station had been fairly close to the school, close enough for the children to have followed the hike
rs back to their train. If we didn’t come across something soon, we’d have to try the other end of town. But about a quarter mile down the road, we found a building that stood out amid the houses. It was three stories of concrete painted a faded yellow, with red-framed windows and a peeling blue fence. There was nothing to indicate that this was a school, but the primary colors of the place seemed to evoke childhood. When I took a closer look at the windows, I could make out the universal sign of an elementary school: paper snowflakes taped to glass.

  We entered the building and found a security guard at the front desk. Voroshchuk and Kuntsevich made their inquiries, and after a moment, Kuntsevich gave me the signal that this was indeed School #41. Through Voroshchuk, I learned that the security guard was surprised by our visit: No one had ever come to ask about the hikers, at least not since he’d started working there. After a moment’s hesitation, he agreed to accompany us on a quick tour of the building.

  As we started down the main corridor, the first thing I noticed was that the building was oddly empty for a Tuesday afternoon. There were no children in sight and, aside from the guard, no staff that I could see. Like many of the Russian buildings I’d been in, the place felt suspended in time. The walls were painted in a two-tone parfait of lime green and off-white, a color scheme not unlike that of the hikers’ dorms. I later learned that this particular shade of green was often used in Soviet public spaces because of its durability and low cost.