“Part of the canvas was poking out but the rest was covered in snow. I used an ice pick lying nearby to uncover the entrance.” - Mikhail Sharavin
In the Winter 1959, between the 1st and the 2nd of February, nine experienced hikers ventured deep into the wilderness of Russia’s Ural Mountains and never returned. The group was formed for a skiing expedition across the northern Urals in Sverdlovsk Oblast, Soviet Union. Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old radio engineering student at the Ural Polytechnical Institute (now Ural Federal University) was the leader of the team and who the incident is now named after, assembled a group of nine others for the trip, most of whom were fellow students and peers at the university. They established a camp on the eastern slopes of Kholat Syakhl which later became known as ‘Dead Mountain’ in the aftermath. Each member of the group, was an experienced Grade 2 hiker with ski tour experience, and would be receiving Grade 3 certification upon their return.
When rescue teams discovered the missing hikers tent, what they found was chilling. Their tent had been cut open from the inside and all nine pairs of boots were all neatly lined up against one side of the tent. Shortly after they began finding the bodies. Some of the hikers were found undressed or some were wearing each other’s clothes. After the group's bodies were discovered, an investigation by Soviet authorities determined that six had died from hypothermia while the other three had been killed by physical trauma. One victim had major skull damage, two had severe chest trauma, and another had a small crack in the skull. Four of the bodies were found lying in running water in a creek, and three of these had soft tissue damage of the head and face, two of the bodies were missing their eyes, one was missing its tongue, and one was missing its eyebrows. The investigation concluded that a "compelling natural force" had caused the deaths.
Numerous theories have been put forward to account for the unexplained deaths, including animal attacks, hypothermia, avalanche, katabatic winds, infrasound-induced panic, military involvement, or some combination of these. The three that had suffered mysterious internal injuries, caused by a blunt-force trauma that was too powerful to have been inflicted by a human. Some of the bodies were found with abnormal levels of radioactivity. As disturbing as these details may seem, some of them have very simple explanations. Undressing is a common symptom of hypothermia, which unusually can make victims feel like they are burning or overheating when in fact they are freezing to death. The missing eyes and tongue were likely eaten by scavengers. The blunt force-trauma could possibly have come from falling down a ravine. The radioactivity could have come from thorium which was used in some camping lanterns at the time.
However, the biggest mystery of all isn’t so easily explained. What had caused nine experienced hikers to cut their tent from the inside and flee into the night, some undressed, some partially dresses, all with no boots on, into subzero temperatures that night? At the time the official Soviet explanation was “An unknown Natural Force” unsurprisingly this vague answer from a notoriously secretive government did not satisfy the public. This in turn, led to an abundance of conspiracy theories. In 2019 with rising public interest in the mystery, the Russian government reopened the case and they reached a new conclusion. An Avalanche. However, this was hard to believe for a few reasons. Firstly, the recovery team had found no trace of an avalanche at the discovery site. Most of the hiking team’s injuries were not consistent with an avalanche and the slope of the mountain appeared to be too gentle at the site for an avalanche to occur. On the night in question there was no new snowfall to trigger an avalanche. The only likely trigger that would cause an avalanche was when they cut into the slope to make their camp. But, forensic data suggests this would have happened nine hours before the avalanche occurred. If it was an avalanche, it would have to have been a freak one.
Moreover, new research published this year may just confirm exactly that. Aleksander Puzrin a geotechnical engineer wrote a paper on how earthquakes can cause delayed avalanche and Johan Gaume the head of a prominent snow avalanche simulation lab in Lausanne Switzerland built a computer simulation to recreate the conditions on Dead Mountain that night. The came to the conclusion that the slope was steeper than initially thought and it was steep enough to hit the threshold for an avalanche. Even though it had not snowed that night there were powerful winds that could have shifted the surface snow and crated unstable conditions. It could have been an avalanche that was big enough to impact the tent and create panic but small enough to blend in with weeks of regular snowfall by the times rescuers arrived. An avalanche, however, does not answer every question. Therefore, the mystery remains unsolved and continues to be debated.