Dead Mountain: The True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

by Eichar, Donnie

  Sleeping on a cot opposite me was our host, who I assumed to be the Mansi owner of the cabin. Lying across him was his dog, a German shepherd—the same breed that had been used during the search for the hikers. I was reminded of how the search dogs had slept in the tents with the volunteers each night. But the trade-off for their warmth had been the smell of wet fur, of which Ivanov had later complained to his family. This shepherd was now serving the same purpose, as a foul-smelling but affectionate electric blanket.

  After Kuntsevich set fire to some kindling with a butane torch, he boiled a kettle of water. Borzenkov rose from the cold floor, presumably roused by the aroma of the instant coffee Kuntsevich had been preparing. He held out his hands for a mugful and took appreciative gulps.

  The man and his dog awoke soon after, each stretching on the cot. He produced a large glass jar of what looked like stewed tomatoes, half slurped, half chewed the contents, and chased the mixture with swigs of vodka. The man and Kuntsevich exchanged a few words, but otherwise, things seemed to be business as usual. He put on his Valenki boots, threw a heavy jacket over his T-shirt and stepped out into the snow. I observed him through the window. He woke himself up with what I have since dubbed a “Russian snow bath.” He removed his jacket and began by grabbing a handful of snow and rubbing it on his underarms, chest, neck and face. After a few deep breaths and invigorating chest pounds, he returned to the cabin.

  After I finished my coffee, I put on my boots and stepped outside myself. The stillness of Ushma was otherworldly. Ivdel had been quiet, but at that moment, there was a silence to this native village that I had never experienced anywhere. I took in a sharp lungful of air. Then I stooped down and grabbed a handful of snow and stuck it beneath my clothing, attempting to replicate the snow bath. I braced for the shock of snow on my skin, but it was surprisingly pleasant and invigorating. Finally, with no one watching, I gave my chest a vigorous pounding. When I walked back into the cabin, I was greeted with a nod of comradeship, immediately realizing they’d witnessed my entire routine through the small front window. It seemed that I’d earned the man’s approval and he motioned toward me. His name was Oleg. Through Voroshchuk, he apologized for the lack of a proper welcome the night before and for his dog. He had been in a drunken sleep when we arrived, and from his perspective an intruder had busted into his room unannounced. It turned out Kuntsevich, who arranged our stay in Ushma, failed to mention to Oleg that he would be traveling with an American. Kuntsevich also failed to mention to me—until months later, after I’d returned home—that Oleg was not a Mansi, as I had assumed given the location and rustic nature of our accommodations. He was, in fact, a thirty-year-old Russian who worked in rescue services in Ivdel. Staying in a freezing cabin with his dog in one of the more remote areas of Russia had evidently been Oleg’s idea of a vacation.

  AS WE ATE BREAKFAST FROM A CAN, MY COMPANIONS AND I discussed with our host our plans for getting to Holatchahl mountain. Voroshchuk translated only fragments of the conversation, but from what I could understand, there were potential weather problems on the pass. As we had all agreed to let Kuntsevich call the shots, only he would be able to give us the green light. Kuntsevich knew my determination to make the trip, but he would make the call.

  As Oleg and the other three continued to weigh the risks of leaving that morning, I took the opportunity to step outside again and take in the village. Though it was mostly cloudy, some sunlight filtered through the evergreens and onto the snowy roofs of Ushma. A few of the cabins had smoke issuing from their chimneys, and I took a deep breath, pulling the smell of pine and burning firewood into my lungs. I learned later from a local Mansi man who visited our cabin that there were thirty villagers living here, mostly families, in about a dozen cabins. The Mansi here lived simply, supplementing government subsidies with subsistence farming and the sale from sable furs, the hunting of which is regulated by the government.

  Not unlike the plight of Native Americans, who were forced from their lands during Manifest Destiny in the United States, the Mansi have been confined to smaller and smaller areas of land, mostly remote regions of the Ural Mountains. Today, they are represented in small villages such as Ushma, as well as settlements on the North Sosva and Ob Rivers. While census data has indicated a slow increase in the number of people claiming Mansi ethnicity (from 5,179 in 1926 to 12,269 in 2010), there are estimated to be fewer than a thousand who still speak the language, which suggests that it could be bound for extinction.

  It took me less than thirty minutes to traverse the entire village over boot-trodden paths and through waist-deep snow. As I headed back to Oleg’s cabin, I spotted something 100 yards in the distance. It was a large wooden bridge that spanned the frozen Auspiya River—the same river along which the Dyatlov group had skied over a half a century before.

  23

  MARCH–MAY 1959

  WHEN INVESTIGATORS DEVELOPED THE FILM FROM THE Dyatlov group’s cameras, the negatives revealed nothing out of the ordinary, at least not at first glance. The rolls from the three Zorki cameras belonging to Igor, Rustik and Georgy totaled eighty-eight exposures taken over nine days. They were images one would expect from such a trip—ten young people enjoying each other’s company over winter break. Some of the shots were candid, capturing an arbitrary moment of preparation or rest. Others documented a charming vista, settlement or the locals encountered along the way. And then there were shots that were just silly, with the group striking comic poses in various combinations. About halfway into the rolls are the final images of Yuri Yudin in the company of his friends. He was in great pain at this point in the trip, pain that was forcing him to turn back, yet he smiled brightly in the direction of the photographer as he hugged his friends good-bye.

  It was the final exposure on Georgy’s camera that would continue to puzzle followers of the case. The image was dark, as if shot at night or in an enclosed space, but the camera was aimed toward an indistinct light source that dominated the left side of the frame. If the investigators in Sverdlovsk knew anything about photography, they would have quickly identified the octagonal circle of light at the center of the frame as a lens flare. But the large smear of light running up and off frame was mystifying, and would stoke half a century’s speculation as to what happened in the hikers’ final hours of life.

  Last exposure on Georgy’s camera, 1959.

  This last exposure failed to clear up anything about the hikers’ fate and, if anything, had only confused those looking for answers. In 1990, decades after the close of the case, Lev Ivanov wrote that exposures taken by hikers gave him “abundant information based on negative density, film speed . . . and aperture and exposure settings” but that it did not “answer the main question—what was the reason of escape from the tent.”

  But according to Vladislav Karelin, one of the search volunteers who became closely involved with the investigation, Ivanov didn’t need photographs—enigmatic or otherwise—to tell him that there was more to the case than some hikers running up against bad weather. The prosecutor had already been exploring the possibility that they had not died as a result of the elements. In an interview Karelin gave to Russian author Anatoly Gushchin for his 2009 book Murder at the Mountain of the Dead, he said: “[I]n the first days of the investigation Ivanov reiterated that the students had died not of natural causes, and it had been a murder.”

  Because Karelin had been both intimately involved with the search, and also a member of the hiking group that had witnessed “fire orbs” in the sky on February 17, he was brought in for questioning by Ivanov in April. In the conclusion of his testimony, Karelin supported the prosecutor’s murder angle. He conceded that there had been no evidence of a human assault outside the hikers’ tent, but he told investigators that the only thing that could have scared them into leaving their tent without proper clothing would have been “a group of a dozen armed men.” But Karelin retracted this statement years later in his interview with Gushchin: “I should say that this line appeared
in my witness report owing to Lev Ivanov himself. He imposed it on me by asking a provocative question and then demanded to write it down in the report.” How Ivanov imposed the theory upon him, Karelin doesn’t elaborate.

  In mid-March, Ivanov was called away to Moscow for reasons that he would not disclose to others in his office. Upon his return, Karelin and others noticed a pronounced change in his demeanor. “[W]e could not recognize him when he returned,” Karelin said years later. “He didn’t mention murder or spheres anymore. And he’d often advise us to ‘hold our tongues.’ ”

  In a 1990 letter to the Leninsky Put newspaper, Ivanov revealed that the regional Communist Party committee had instructed him not to pursue the connection between the strange lights in the sky and the hikers’ deaths. He wrote that during the Cold War, “Such topics were prohibited in order to prevent the slightest possibility of disclosing data on missile and nuclear techniques.” If Ivanov had up to that point been entertaining his own theories of murder and UFOs, he was told to set those theories aside for the good of his country.

  THROUGHOUT MARCH AND APRIL THE SEARCH CONTINUES in the mountains for the remaining hikers—Lyuda Dubinina, Sasha Zolotaryov, Alexander Kolevatov and Kolya Thibault-Brignoles. The radiograms from this period reveal that the searchers concentrated their efforts on an ever-widening radius beyond the cedar tree where the first bodies had been found. By the end of April, the search effort has been operating for more than two months, and signs of wear are showing in the volunteers. There are repeated radiograms sent to Ivdel requesting the usual mood-elevating provisions of coffee and cigarettes. But these are meager comforts in the face of daily battles with lashing winds, deep snow and no hope for a happy ending. In early March, one volunteer slips off his skis and onto an exposed rock, resulting in a knee injury that swells over the next few days. When his condition worsens, he is evacuated by helicopter. But the snow is so deep on the pass that the volunteers have to throw one hundred buckets of water onto the snow to create a helipad.

  On May 3, the Mansi searcher Stepan Kurikov comes across some unusual branches just under the snow in a ravine near the cedar tree. The branches appear to have been cut by a knife. Colonel Georgy Ortyukov, who is by that point overseeing the search operations, orders immediate probing of the area surrounding the branches.

  On the first day of probing, about six yards away from the branches, a volunteer discovers a piece of clothing at the end of his metal probe. With shovels, he and his team dig a large hole above the creek bed, a cavity that will eventually reach a depth of 8 feet and an area of 100 square feet. The digging proceeds in fits and starts until the volunteers hit upon something solid. Realizing it is only a tree trunk, they move to a different spot and begin again.

  Later that day, they hit upon a cache of clothing. What is odd about the articles is that they are abandoned in the snow, not attached to a person. Stranger still, some of the clothing looks to have been cut or shredded. There is a crumpled gray Chinese woolen vest turned inside out, knitted trousers, a brown woolen sweater with lilac thread, a right trouser leg and a bandage one yard long. The more Ortyukov and his men dig, the closer they come to the creek bed, which means, by the second day, that the men are digging through a combination of snow and slush. The second day of excavation reveals yet more clothing: black cotton sports trousers with the right leg missing—presumably the other half from the previous day’s trousers—and half of a woman’s sweater, belonging to Dubinina.

  On the second evening, the men’s shovels hit upon a body. It is clearly a man, though the decomposition from the water is such that the face is unrecognizable. He is wearing a gray sweater and, strangely, two wristwatches. The men continue to dig, soon uncovering three more bodies lying nearby. Lyuda’s is the only identifiable one of the four. She is dressed in a cap, a yellow undershirt, two sweaters, brown ski trousers and two socks on one foot. The other foot is wrapped in a torn sweater. Her head is pointed upstream, while the three men are oriented toward the center of the stream. Two of the men are found in a position of embrace, in what appears to be a desperate attempt to conserve warmth.

  When Lev Ivanov hears of the discovery, he flies to the mountains to assess the condition of the bodies, arriving on either May 5 or 6. The bodies, which have been lying in a soup of melting snow and creek water, are at various stages of decay. The volunteers have pulled them out of the slush at the bottom of the pit and have wrapped them in a tarpaulin to slow further decomposition. Ivanov notes that the body parts that have managed to avoid the water are mostly intact, but the flesh that was lying in the direct stream of melting snow has succumbed to the water’s microbes. The bodies need to be flown to Ivdel without delay, but the helicopter Ivanov himself flew in on has since left the area. Ivanov sends a radiogram to Ivdel stressing the urgency of the situation:

  Volunteer Boris Suvorov stands with the hikers’ clothing and a bed of twigs found beneath the snow, May 3, 1959.

  The bodies of the last of the four hikers are pulled from a ravine, May 5, 1959. Colonel Georgy Ortyukov is pictured in the middle of frame with striped hat.

  IF THEY ARE NOT EVACUATED TOMORROW THEY’LL DECOMPOSE.

  Burying the bodies on the spot is out of the question, of course, and not just because their families will be robbed of a respectable burial. The last four hikers are the missing link in the story of what happened on the night of February 1. If their bodies are not immediately transported to Ivdel for a proper autopsy, Ivanov knows it will be a disastrous setback from which his investigation may not recover.

  24

  2012

  BY THE TIME I FINISHED MY TOUR OF USHMA, A LIGHT snow had begun to fall. I returned to the cabin to find my companions still discussing the weather. The consensus seemed to be that a storm was headed our direction, but the group was divided on whether or not one would strike us on the pass. Kuntsevich had, in any case, given his consent for the day’s travel, though with some provisos. First, he was electing to stay behind as a point of contact in the village in case something were to happen to us on our journey. Second, we were to ride snowmobiles most of the way, at least to the Dyatlov incident’s unofficial shrine, Boot Rock. And finally, we would not be camping on Holatchahl mountain, but would instead be returning to the village that night. At the mention of these last two conditions, I started to protest, but Kuntsevich was in no mood for discussion on the subject. It would be foolish in this weather, he insisted, to attempt the entire 45-mile trek along the river on foot, let alone contemplate spending more than one day out there.

  But was the weather really any more dangerous than when the hikers had set out in the winter of 1959? Wasn’t that the very point—to set up camp on the slope of Holatchahl, just as they had? Perhaps Kuntsevich was simply trying to save us from spending the night in dangerous, avalanche-prone territory. Snowmobiles, after all, were notorious for disrupting precarious snowdrifts and burying riders who refused to heed the warnings. Why tempt fate by spending the night beneath unsettled snow? My plans to shadow the hikers’ exact movements were being checked at each turn, but in the chain of command, Kuntsevich had final say.

  I was dismayed we wouldn’t be making the trip in the same fashion as the hikers had—with skis strapped to our boots—but once our three snowmobiles had arrived, complete with three drivers, my objections fell away. Having never ridden a snowmobile, I found the entire prospect thrilling, and after climbing on behind my Russian driver, we were off on our terrestrial jet skis. But as we headed northwest from Ushma along the Lozva River, the hazards of our chosen mode of travel became quickly apparent. Driving on the frozen river itself was most efficient, but when the ice cracked beneath us, we quickly maneuvered to the bank. None of us was prepared for the roughness of the terrain: branches flying in our faces, rocks hidden beneath snow, and craters lying in ambush. Just staying on the vehicle required my intense concentration and there was little time to appreciate the landscape or to chat with my companions. The first hour passed without inc
ident, but by the end of the second hour, our drivers had each wiped out more than once. There was an art to wiping out; the moment you sensed the snowmobile was about to tip over, you had to bail before the vehicle landed on top of you or on one of your limbs. I didn’t need to be told more than once that breaking a bone out here would be bad news.

  For 40 miles, there was nothing but the hum of the engines and the dark mass of the woods on either side of us. If there was ever an archetypal wood for Russian fairy tales (or nightmares), this was it. Then suddenly, into our sixth hour of travel, the trees stopped, and we entered an endless moonscape of snow. It might well have been the lunar surface if not for the occasional tree—that is, if you can call a dwarf pine that doesn’t extend past one’s knees a tree. We continued on in this nearly featureless topography, and about half an hour later, after we crested a small hill, a mottled black-and-gray shape seemed to rise out of the snow. As we drew closer, I recognized it as Boot Rock—a formation that did, in fact, resemble a hiking boot, if a severely mistreated one. The 30-foot-high jagged stone seemed an unlikely blemish upon the barren tundra, as if it had either been dropped from above or thrust up by a subterranean force.

  It seemed wrong to ride up alongside the landmark, so after stopping at a respectful distance, the drivers turned off the engines and we headed to the rock on foot. For the families and friends of the Dyatlov hikers, and for followers of the case, Boot Rock has become a place of pilgrimage, at least during the warmer months when the rock is more accessible. Boot Rock has earned this sanctified distinction not because the hikers came here themselves, but because the search teams, who found themselves nearly a mile away from base camp, had taken shelter here from the February winds and snowfall. The rock had also served as a temporary grave marker for the bodies of the Dyatlov group, which had been stored here until they could be transported to Ivdel by helicopter.