On February 1959, nine experienced Russian hikers went missing while trekking in Russia’s Ural Mountains. They were ultimately all found dead in Dyatlov Pass with unusual injuries. The Soviet government at the time attributed the cause of death to a “compelling natural force.” But that hardy explains the bizarre frozen corpses that rescuers found. It took more than three months to locate all nine of their missing bodies.
Over the decades since, the strange state of the nine hikers’ cadavers has generated a wide range of theories ranging from avalanches to nuclear weapons testing. Although some theories are more plausible than others, the “Dyatlov Pass Incident” as it is called today, remains an unsolved mystery. For over 60 years, authorities and amateur sleuths have tried to figure out what happened, in a place now called “Russia’s Area 51.”
On 23 January 1959, ten hikers set out for a winter adventure trek through Russia’s northern Ural Mountains, far to the east of the Volga River. It was led by a 23-year-old hiker named Igor Alekseyevich Dyatlov. He led a group of nine, experienced Soviet hikers/skiers, eight men and two women. Most were from the Ural Polytechnical Institute. Their goal was to reach the peak of Mt. Ortorten, leaving from the small village of Vizhai. About five days into the journey, one of the students, Yuri Yudin decided to leave the team due to a sciatica flare-up and headed back.
Igor Dyatlov was studying engineering at the Ural Polytechnic Institute. He planned the trip with eight other students who were all in their early 20s and in excellent physical shape. All of the students were experienced hikers and skiers, as well as Semyon Zolotaryov, a sports instructor in his late 30s, who joined the expedition.
Before Dyatlov left, he told his local sports club that he’d send them a telegram as soon as they returned in about three weeks. But he never sent that telegram, and none of the hikers were ever seen alive again. When February 20 came and went, and there was still no communication from the hikers, a search party was mounted. The volunteer rescue force that trekked through the pass first found their last campsite … but no hikers.
The search party found their abandoned tent on February 26th.
It was collapsed and covered in snow. Inside, their belongings were more or less undisturbed. The hikers’ boots, clothes and equipment were neatly arranged in the tent. Food was sliced up on a plate as if the hikers were preparing to eat. The tent was slashed open, but someone had made the cut from the inside, as if trying to escape.
The rescue team called in military and police investigators to expand the search and determine what had happened to the missing team. By now, the investigators were not very hopeful. The route the hikers had chosen was highly difficult and accidents were common. With the hikers having been missing for so long, investigators expected to find an open-and-shut case of accidental deaths.
Over the next couple of weeks, the search party found the bodies of the first five hikers, spread out over the snowy pass. Surprisingly, some were in various states of undress and had bizarre injuries, with one appearing to have bitten off part of his own knuckle!
The first two bodies found were students Yuri Doroshenko, 21, and Yuri Krivonishchenko, 23, nearly a mile away from the tent, under a cedar tree next to the remains of a campfire. A medical examiner noted that the two had burned hands. Doroshenko had a “brown-purple” complexion with a grayish foam coming from his mouth. Krivonishchenko had inexplicably bitten off one of the knuckles of his own hand, and it was found still in his mouth.
Despite temperatures of −20 F/-29 C that night, both were shoeless and wearing only underwear.
The searchers then found the bodies of leader Igor Dyatlov and Zinaida Kolmogorova, 22, one of the two women, in a different location, hundreds of feet from the cedar tree. They were apparently trying to head back to the tent when they died. Finally, searchers found the body of Rustem Slobodin, 23, who also appeared to be trying to make his way back to the tent.
Their campsite had been made on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl (Dead Mountain), at about 3,600 feet/1,100 meters. Despite nasty weather and slow progress, their last diary entries found at the tent, reflected high spirits. They even produced a little mock newspaper about the trip, “The Evening Ortoten” which bore the headline: “From now on, we know that the snowmen exist. They can be met in the Northern Urals, next to Otorten mountain.” The ‘They,’ is thought to refer to themselves.
There were eight or nine sets of footprints in the snow, accounting only for the hikers and not another ‘attacking’ party. Many of them were clearly made by people with no boots on their feet. There was no sign of struggle. There was also no sign of animals at the campsite. There was a snowstorm the night of February 2, which is when, based on their diaries, investigators believed they died.
The skiers must have fled their badly damaged tent, cut open from the inside, with all their gear still inside. Why did they die of exposure if they still had access to their gear before going out? They appeared to have left the tent out of their own free will and in a desperate hurry. Zolotaryov fled the camp with his camera, but not his gear. Rustem Slobodin had a small crack in his skull. The investigators discovered no external wounds.
All five students appeared to have died from hypothermia, which can cause an erratic behavior called “paradoxical undressing.” The brain’s hypothalamus malfunctions and the body’s temperature feels like its rising when it’s really dropping. Victims illogically undress even though they are freezing to death. The various stages of undress was therefore somewhat explainable.
While the circumstances were odd, investigators found that all five hikers died from hypothermia.
But this did not explain the strange condition of Doroshenko and Krivonishchenko’s bodies. Slobodin had the skull fracture consistent with someone falling. Kolmogorova had a baton-shaped bruise on her side. These two hikers were also generally under-dressed and wearing some of each other’s clothes. This supported the idea that they’d fled suddenly into the freezing night for some reason, without being properly dressed, despite being experienced hikers.
It wasn’t until the other four bodies were found months later that the mystery only deepened. Three months later, on May 4th, when more of the snow in the area had melted, an Indigenous Mansi hunter discovered the remains of a snow den in a ravine about 250 feet from the original tent encampment. Inside, rescue workers found the bodies of Aleksander Kolevatov, 24, Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle, 23, sports instructor Semyon Zolotaryov, 38, and Lyudmila Dubinina, 20, the second woman.
For three of the bodies, the cause of death did not appear to be hypothermia. Thibeaux-Brignolle had a severe skull fracture with fragments of bone in his brain, Zolotaryov and Dubinina had major chest fractures caused by a force comparable to that of a car crash, not one another person could have inflicted. Both Zolotaryov and Dubinina’s eye sockets were empty. Zolotaryov had a twisted neck. Dubinina was also missing her tongue! Who would do this? And why? Did another hiker from the group cut it out?
The four dead seemed to have traded some of their clothing as well; Ludmila Dubinina’s foot was wrapped in a piece of Yuri Krivonischenko’s pants. Semyon Zolotaryov was found wearing Dubinina’s hat and coat. Some of the clothes had cuts in them, as though they were forcibly removed.
Based on the site and from their cameras and diaries, investigators were able to piece together what may have happened. On February 1, the team began to make their way through the pass towards Mt. Otorten. As they pushed towards the base, they were hit by a snowstorm. Due to low visibility, they lost their direction and accidentally strayed west to the slope of nearby Dead Mountain. To avoid losing the altitude they had climbed, Dyatlov called for camp to be made.
It was on this solitary mountainside that all nine hikers would die.
The initial Soviet investigation couldn’t determine that any crime had taken place. It ended up concluding that the hikers had died from a “compelling natural force.” They closed the case a month later in May 1959. Some Russians wondered if the Soviet government was covering up something darker.
The Soviet government speculated that the hikers’ own incompetence caused their demises. Investigators theorized a fast moving, violent avalanche was the culprit. The rumbling snow would have frightened the hikers out of their tents in a state of undress and sent them sprinting for the trees. An avalanche would have been powerful enough to inflict the injuries that killed the second group of hikers.
But the physical evidence of an avalanche just wasn’t there. When investigators found the bodies, there was no evidence that an avalanche had occurred. There was no damage to the tree line, and no debris. Plus the physical terrain wouldn’t have made sense in the Dyatlov Pass.
Early on, some suspected that the hikers’ deaths resulted from an ambush by the local Mansi tribe. A sudden attack would explain the way the hikers suddenly fled their tents and the wounds inflicted on the second group of four bodies. But the Mansi people were peaceful, and the evidence did not support a violent conflict. There was also no evidence of any footprints other than those of the hikers. Plus, the damage done to two hikers’ bodies was similar to a car crash, not a human attack.
Another theory states that the deaths were the result of some argument among the group that got out of hand and turned violent. There was a history of dating between several of the students. But people who knew the ski group well said they were largely a harmonious bunch of friends.
Perhaps most surprising was that the clothes of both Kolevatov and Dubinina contained traces of radiation! It fueled speculation that the hikers had died in some kind of weapons testing incident gone wrong. However, two years before, there had been a plutonium production accident known as the Kyshtym Disaster. One of the two hikers had lived in the contamination zone, and the other had helped with the clean-up effort. So their clothes could have still held traces of radiation.
The Soviets archived and classified the investigation files.
After the fall of the Soviet Union in the 1991, the new Russian government released all the details of the investigation, including photos of the dead. But parts of the case files were found to be missing. With the official theory leaving a lot unexplained, many alternative explanations have been put forward in the six decades since. Hypothermia without an avalanche doesn’t explain the strange condition of the hikers’ bodies.
The Soviet KGB were suspects. The last campsite was located on the pathway from Balikonur Cosmodrone to Chyornaya Guba, a Soviet nuclear testing ground. Some speculated that they drank contaminated melted snow. A 12-year-old boy who attended the skiers’ funerals claimed that the bodies had a “deep brownish tan.” Aliens and UFOs, of course, came into the minds of conspiracy theorists. Some claimed the hikers were killed by a menk, a kind of Russian yeti, citing the “snowmen” referenced in the students’ mock newspaper.
Others point back to the radiation, so the hikers had been killed by some sort of secret radioactive weapons testing. Another group of hikers camped over 50 miles away the same night reported orange orbs in the night sky, supposed missile launches. The sound of a weapon could have drove the hikers from their tents in a panic. Half-clothed, they died from either hypothermia or got caught in the blast and died from their injuries.
But had radiation been significant, it would have appeared on more than just two of the hikers. The corpses’ skin color isn’t surprising given the frigid conditions in which they sat for weeks. Other theories included illicit drug use that caused violent behavior in some of the hikers. Another blamed an unusual weather event known as infrasound, caused by mountain to valley “katabatic” wind patterns. They can lead to panic attacks in humans because the low-frequency sound waves create a kind of earthquake sensation inside the body.
Finally, in 2019, Russian officials reopened the case for a new investigation.
This time, however, they would only consider three theories: an avalanche, a snow slab, or a violent storm. And the case was once again closed with only a vague conclusion that no criminal activity was afoot. Investigators said that the hikers died of hypothermia after an avalanche or similar force pushed them out of their tent and into the cold, freezing half of then and crushing the others.
Two years later, two Swiss scientists claimed to have solved the mystery with their own theory about a special slab avalanche. The slope at the campsite wasn’t steep enough for a traditional avalanche. But it was still possible for a smaller slab of snow to slide down over the tent. They speculated that the hikers ran a safe distance from the tent, some starting a fire and others digging a snow den. The den could have collapsed, causing the severe injuries. Scavenging animals could have selectively eaten the missing eyes and tongue.
To this day, a scientific explanation for the deaths of these nine young hikers remains elusive The Dyatlov Foundation, established by Yuri Kuntsevitch — the child eyewitness at the skiers’ funerals in 1959 — still works to persuade the Russian Federation to reopen the investigation. The mountainside was named the Dyatlov Pass in honor of the lost expedition. A monument to the nine hikers was erected in the Mikhajlov Cemetery at Yekaterinburg. There lay the only people who will ever know the full truth of what happened that snowy Russian night.
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