Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

After Yudin departs, the hikers set out on the most challenging part of their journey so far. They will spend several days following the Lozva River and then the Auspiya River. The terrain is rough, as the Lozva is not always sufficiently frozen, while its banks are rocky and hard to navigate. The hikers sometimes argue, as everyone is tired and progress is slow. Trees become more sparse on the third day of hiking. The group celebrates Doroshenko’s birthday; he is 21. His gift is a tangerine—a rare treat in the USSR. He shares it with his friends.

On January 31, the weather takes a turn for the worse. Per the team’s journal, they “cover only 1.5 to 2 km in an hour” (234), but they find a cozy place to make camp for the night. On the morning of February 1, they have breakfast, write a mock newspaper about their expedition and the surrounding environment, and build a temporary shelter to store non-essential goods while they make the final trek up Hotlachahl and Otorten. They leave Georgy’s mandolin. Photographs taken that day show the team smiling, but dealing with increasingly adverse weather conditions. When it gets dark around 5pm, the group sets up their tent on the slopes of Hotlachahl. They will not survive the night.

Investigators examine the cuts in the tent fabric. To their surprise, they discover that the cuts were actually made from the inside. Nobody cut their way into the tent, but the hikers did cut their way out. This means that the hikers, for some reason, felt the need to exit their tent extremely quickly. Forensic examiners confirm that the five hikers found so far all died of hypothermia. Many members of the search party want to wait until spring to keep looking for the other four bodies, but the government overrules them. Yuri Yudin is summoned to Ivdel and asked to identify the belongings that have so far been retrieved from the tent. The process is heartbreaking; he identifies Georgy’s “mandolin with spare strings” and Lyuda’s “gray woolen socks received as a present from Yudin” (247). Igor’s notebook contains a photograph of Zina. Yudin has to share his helicopter ride home with his dead friends’ internal organs, which are undergoing further examination. Government authorities put great pressure on the families to have their children buried in Ivdel. They want to avoid publicity. When the families refuse, officials agree to allow them to bury their children at home, provided the funerals happen in only two days and remain quiet.

With only 90 minutes to spend in Serov, Eichar and his companions rush to find the school that the Dyatlov group visited. They locate it with some difficulty, and a security guard agrees to give them a brief tour. Nobody else has visited the school in connection with the Dyatlov incident. Before long, a man arrives and asks to see everyone’s papers. He tells them that they have to leave right away. Eichar accidentally left his passport on the train, so he slips away from the man without being seen. The group continues on to Ivdel, arriving near midnight. Ivdel used to be home to many gulags—harsh prison labor camps—and there are still prison work camps nearby. Instead of going to Vizhay and Sector 41, Eichar’s group takes a military van to a small village called Ushma. Concerned about an attack of vertigo, Eichar takes a Valium and sleeps through the journey.

The first five hikers are buried in Sverdlovsk in the second week of March. Yuri Yudin cannot attend, as he is still working with investigators in Ivdel. Yuri Kuntsevich, then just 12 years old, lives near the cemetery and goes to see what is happening. He believes that he sees undercover KGB agents watching the mourners. Over a thousand people attend the first day of funerals, which are open casket. The only hiker to be buried on the second day of funerals is Georgy, whose resting place is three miles away from the graves of his friends.

Families of the deceased look for explanations. Some people claim that on the night of February 1, they saw strange orbs in the sky near Otorten, bolstering the weapons test theory. Some suggest that the hikers might have left their tent to look at the lights and then been blown down the slope. Others wonder if radiation from the rockets could explain the corpses’ dark brown skin.

The van arrives in Ushma at 4:30am. Eichar’s group enters the cabin they are meant to be staying in, but inside they find an occupant and his large dog. After a gruff first meeting, all of the men settle down for a few more hours of sleep. When they wake, the man, Oleg, goes outside and rubs himself down with snow. Eichar copies him, which earns him Oleg’s respect. Oleg is on a rustic holiday in Ushma, which is a very beautiful little village. Most people who live in Ushma are Mansi, though Oleg is not. Eichar compares the Mansi people to Indigenous peoples in the Americas, as they have both been harmed by colonialism that has threatened their cultures and languages.