A few days ago, the police in the city of Ivdel were informed about the discovery of the body of an adult man at the Dyatlov pass. The pass became notorious after a group of tourists died on it in 1959 under mysterious circumstances.
The recent tragic event in the area of the Dyatlov Pass once again drew everyone's attention to this harsh and mysterious land.
On January 8, 2016, a group of tourists reported to the police in the city of Ivdel, Sverdlovsk region, that the body of a deceased man aged about 50 was found behind the Dyatlov pass. Investigators intend to go to the place where the body was found, however, not earlier than January 12 due to strong wind and snow.
The pass itself went into disrepute after the 1959 incident. Then, under circumstances that have not yet been clarified, a group of tourists died there under the guidance of a fifth-year student of the radio engineering faculty of the Ural Polytechnic Institute (UPI) Igor Dyatlov.
After this incident, many versions appeared about what really happened there. Some of them seem quite logical, while others are striking in their fantasticness.
The death of the Dyatlov group: what is known
A group of nine tourists headed by Dyatlov went on a ski trip through the mountains on January 23, 1959. The trip was dedicated to the 21st Congress of the CPSU. According to the classification of sports hikers adopted in 1949, it belonged to the 3rd - the highest - category of complexity. The path of tourists lay on the northern Ural mountains Otorten and Holatchakhl. One of the tourists - Yuri Yudin - fell ill just before the start of the most active part of the hike and had to return to Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg). As a result, he is the only one from the group who survived then (he died in 2013).
Promotional video:
Dyatlov's group (initially ten men) left Sverdlovsk for Serov by train on 23 January.
I got to the Ivdel station, then (in the morning of January 25) - by bus to the village of Vizhay, and in the evening on January 26 - by a passing truck to the village of the 41st quarter.
On the morning of January 27, getting up on skis, I continued the route lightly. Lightly - since the head of the forest site allocated the Dyatlovites an unconvoyed prisoner with a horse - they put their heavy backpacks in the sleigh. So the group got to the Second Northern mine, already uninhabited by that time a village that was once part of Ivdellag. Here the Dyatlovites spent the night in one of the surviving huts. On the morning of January 28, it was decided that Yudin, who had been blown in the back of the truck, would return on horseback, and the group would continue the route without him. He said goodbye to the group and came back. Then the tourists continued their journey in nine.
The events that took place in the future can only be judged by the diary entries of tourists from the Dyatlov group and photographs.
For 16 days, tourists had to ski more than 300 kilometers, make two radial ascents - Otorten and Oiko-Chakur (Oyka-Syakhyl) - and return to Vizhai by February 12. From there Dyatlov was going to send a telegram about the end of the campaign. However, even when parting with Yudin, Dyatlov doubted that he would meet the deadline, and asked Yuri to warn the travel club that they could stay on the route until February 14.
On February 12, the group at the final point of the route did not show up and did not get in touch in the following days.
Group detection and consequence
On February 22, at UPI, three search groups were formed from student tourists (leaders - Boris Slobtsov, Oleg Grebennik and Moisey Axelrod), which were thrown into different sections of the route Dyatlov. The military, operatives with search dogs, geologists and Mansi hunters were involved in the search.
Hunters reported that they saw ski tracks in the area of the Auspiya River. On February 26, Slobtsov's group found a tent cut from the inside on the slope of Mount Holotchakhl. According to the protocol of the site of discovery of the parking lot from the criminal case, nine backpacks with personal belongings, clothes and other things, including a route plan and notebooks, as well as food were found in it.
The next day, on the descent towards the Lozva River, 1.5 kilometers from the tent, they found the first victims - Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko. Both were in the same underwear. Later, about 300 meters from them, the dead Dyatlov was found, then, 330 meters from him, the dead Zina Kolmogorova. Unlike Doroshenko and Krivonischenko, she was in warm clothes, but barefoot.
In March, the body of Rustem Slobodin was found 180 meters from Kolmogorovaya under a layer of snow.
The rest of the group was only found in May, when the snow began to melt. The thawed scraps of clothing were led into the hollow of the stream. With the help of probes, under the snow, they groped and dug out a flooring of 15 thin trees, but there were no people on it. They were found even lower, almost at the very stream. The forensic examination subsequently established that they died from hypothermia, but Lyuda Dubinina and Semyon Zolotarev had broken ribs, and Thibault Brignolle had a skull fracture. On their bodies, as well as next to them, the clothes of Krivonischenko and Doroshenko were found, which, most likely, had already been removed from the corpses.
The funeral of the deceased group in Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg) took place from March to May. On May 28, the criminal case was closed with the wording: "It should be considered that the cause of their death was a spontaneous force, which people were not able to overcome."
Death version: mistakes of the Dyatlov group
Much in this story has been and remains unanswered. Why, for example, did the tourists cut up their tent, got out into the cold (according to reports, in those days it was about -30 degrees in this area), leaving their backpacks in the tent, and moved down the mountainside to the forest?
Investigators suggested that the avalanche was to blame for the tragedy, later they blamed wild animals, escaped prisoners from the surrounding colonies, soldiers who mistook tourists for escaped prisoners, local residents from the Mansi tribe, for whom Holatchakhl has ritual significance, the military, allegedly testing in remote areas some new weapon, and even space aliens.
The death of the Dyatlovites was tried to uncover the St. Petersburg scientist and master of sports in tourism Yevgeny Buyanov. His research "The Mystery of the Dyatlov Group Death" was published in Yekaterinburg. In 2013 Buyanov shot a documentary film "Unfinished Route" based on his book.
The essence of Buyanov's theory is that it was not some external "fantastic" or "criminal" factors that led to the death of Dyatlov's group, but the mistakes of the group, in which only Dyatlov had about 10 trips, the rest had only five trips each. six non-winter hikes. The group's strategic mistake was the decision to organize an overnight stay on the slope of the mountain - tourists always try to spend the night in the forest zone, where there is protection from wind and firewood.
The main tactical mistake was setting up a tent on the slope of the mountain, which is a multi-layered "board" - in the daytime in the sun the snow melts, at night it freezes, turning into ice, then fresh snow falls from above. If such a board is at an angle, then it does not slide out only because its upper edge rests on the lower one. External factors (strong wind, shock) can cause snow to melt on the slope, and the steeper it is, the higher the avalanche danger.
Leveling the place for the tent (it was set up in a storm-like manner - with burrowing into the snow), the Dyatlovites cut the base of the seam and created an emergency situation themselves - provoked a mini-avalanche. The avalanche crushed the tent and caused characteristic injuries - rib fractures due to squeezing. It was necessary to free myself before anyone suffocated from the weight that had piled on, so the tent was cut from the inside. The wounded were taken out through the holes: Thibault, Dubinina and Zolotarev.
The group found themselves on a mountainside, open to a hurricane wind, above the tent, crushed by a layer of dense snow, in the scorching frost, but it turned out to be impossible to quickly dig out the tent with bare hands and remove things - such snow is denser than usual and even difficult to shovel.
Dyatlov, most likely, understood what a critical situation the group was in: an urgent departure to the forest was necessary for rescue, but it was fatal to be left without warm clothes and the necessary tourist equipment. It was a choice between the worst and even worse, but it was impossible to hesitate - people were freezing. The calculation was as follows: to lower the wounded, to cover them, and then return for warm clothes. In the first place they put the rescue of the wounded, who could lose the ability to move and freeze. The group went downhill, leading Dubinin and Zolotarev under the arms, Thibault was carried by two guys with his arms on his shoulders (the organized departure of the group into the forest is "confirmed" by 8-9 pairs of tracks found by the search engines).
At a large cedar, the wind was weaker and firewood could be found, and there was no point in going down further because of the deep snow. The lower branches were broken by joint efforts. They lit a fire, dug a snow shelter with a flooring of cut fir branches for Dubinina, Tibo and Zolotarev on the slope of the brook hollow. Realizing that it was impossible to survive without clothes and shoes, the group decided to return to the tent with the help of three participants (Dyatlov, Kolmogorov and Slobodin). Doroshenko, Kolevatov and Krivonischenko remained with the wounded.
Under the onslaught of the hurricane wind, cold and fatigue, the departed froze on the slope. At the cedar, the accident turned into a phase of agony, when people stricken by the cold tried to keep warm, getting burns on their hands and feet. While waiting for their comrades, they also gradually fell asleep in the cold.
Other versions
In addition to the avalanche version, there are many other versions, many of them on the verge of fantasy.
Among them are the following: infrasonic version - rocks-remnants in a strong wind can generate low-frequency sound that drives people to madness, ball lightning, magnetic anomalies, and so on.
The most popular is the "military version": Igor Dyatlov's group became an accidental victim of testing secret weapons, among the options are vacuum bombs and toxic substances, nuclear tests and the fall of tactical and strategic missiles.
The "control delivery" version of the writer Alexei Rakitin suggests that Dyatlov's team was destroyed by a group of Western spies abandoned in the Northern Urals. Under the guise of tourists, they were supposed to meet with Dyatlov's group, in which there were several employees of the State Security Service, who were to hand over clothes with sprayed weapons-grade plutonium to the western resident (hence the radioactive trail on some things).
Books have been written about the death of the Dyatlov group, at least a dozen documentaries have been made.
In 2013, the famous Hollywood director Rennie Harlin shot the thriller The Secret of the Dyatlov Pass.
In the same year, Channel One hosted the premiere of the documentary Dyatlov Pass. Dismissed on the occasion of death."