Original subtitles

On the 23rd of January, 1959, a group of students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute set out

on a trip into the vast wilderness of the Ural Mountains. The eight men and two women that made

up the group were all experienced hikers, and had been on similar hiking and cross-country skiing

expeditions before. This excursion, undertaken in extremely challenging winter conditions,

would be a dramatic test of their knowledge and ability, and would earn them a special

certification awarded in the Soviet Union only to hikers who had completed such an arduous trek.

For this expedition they travelled by train to Ivdel, a small town in the province of Sverdlosk

Oblast, before journeying yet further north by truck and horse cart. The starting point for their

hike was one of the least populated settlements in northern Russia: the village of Vizhai.

The trek began in earnest from there on the 27th of January. The group of friends were in good

spirits as they set out into the wilderness, lead by 23-year-old engineering student

Igor Dyatlov. The group kept a record of their adventure with written journals and photographs.

All early images show the group smiling and laughing together as they set out into the snow.

After just one full day of hiking, however, the group suffered its first casualty. Twenty-one

year old Yuri Yudin, an economics student, was forced to turn back due to joint pain – a

result of chronic rheumatism that had troubled him for years. While his fellow hikers were

sad to see him go, his departure didn’t change their plans: they forged onwards.

Over the course of the next four days they tackled arduous, snowy terrain on foot and with skis,

eventually beginning an ascent of the eastern slope of a mountain known by the local indigenous

population as “Dead Mountain” – a reference to the lack of game to be found on its exposed slopes.

The weather conditions on the 1st of February were poor, with howling winds and driving snow causing

the group to veer off course. As night approached, they made camp on the side of the mountain,

digging out a flat platform there on which to erect the tent that would be their only shelter.

That night Igor Dyatlov made one final entry in the group’s diary:

“We’re exhausted, but start setting up for the night. Firewood is scarce, mostly damp firs. We

build the campfire on the logs, too tired to dig a fire pit. We have dinner in the tent.

It’s good and warm. Hard to imagine such comfort on a ridge, with howling wind outside, hundreds

of kilometers away from any human settlement.” That entry is the very last in the diary. Exactly

what happened next is unknown, but the group did not return on their expected return date

of February 12th. There was initially no sense of alarm. When Yuri Yudin left the

group due to his aching joints, he had been told they might be delayed,

and not to worry if they weren’t back on time. But days passed, and there was no sign of the

hikers. Eventually, on the 20th of February, a search party was formed. After nearly a week

of combing the snows, the lost hikers’ final campsite was found… and the scene that greeted

searchers was extremely worrying. The tent was partially buried by snow, with many of

the party’s possessions still inside. It appeared that the canvas had been slashed from the inside,

indicating that the group had cut their way out and fled their shelter in a panicked rush.

Footprints were found leading down the side of the mountain... but searchers noted that the prints

were shallow, and sometimes had no tread. Here was a group of people at least some of whom had not

been wearing shoes, and who had walked downhill at a calm and measured pace. Further downhill,

at the base of a large spreading cedar tree, they found the bodies of two of the missing hikers.

Considering the conditions they were barely dressed, wearing only light clothing that would

have been totally insufficient in conditions of as low as negative thirty Celsius (or

negative twenty-two Fahrenheit). The tree above them was damaged,

and the bodies were positioned close to the remains of a small campfire. There was some

evidence of burns and other injuries on the bodies. One of them was later found to have a

small chunk of his own flesh in his mouth. Three more bodies were discovered as the

search continued. These were positioned closer to the tent, and were also wearing

insufficient clothing for the conditions. The final three bodies were found lower

down the slope, in a ravine, partially buried by snow. These bodies showed signs of having

sustained serious impact injuries while alive, and were also hideously disfigured,

missing their eyes and tongues. To further compound the mystery,

some of the minimal clothing on the bodies was found to be radioactive.

None of the hikers had survived to divulge what had happened, and the scene posed a bizarre

mystery. No official narrative was ever settled upon, with the official report blaming their

deaths on “… a compelling natural force.” It was found that the cause of death in most cases was

either impact-related trauma or hypothermia. The latter was to be expected given the extreme cold…

but what had caused the impact injuries, burns and facial disfigurement, and – moreover – what

had caused these nine experienced hikers to flee their tent, leaving behind their clothing

and equipment, in the middle of the night? Many theories arose, including that the group

had been attacked by aliens, or that they had been accidentally caught up in the testing of

an experimental weapon. Some suggested that their deaths might have been caused by a yeti or other

unknown creature, or that they might have been attacked by persons unknown… but there was not

sufficient evidence to support these theories. One credible theory was that the group had

panicked as a result of infrasound – a particular low frequency of sound that

has been proven to induce stress, panic and irrational behaviour. The howling winds that

night could have created a sound distressing enough to force the group from their tent.

Besides this, two other theories as to what caused the group to leave their

tent stand out as particularly credible. The first is that the stove inside the tent

malfunctioned in some way, rapidly filling their shelter with smoke.

The slashes made in the canvas were an attempt to vent out this smoke, which failed, resulting in

the hikers rushing out of their shelter and into the snow, regrouping, and then proceeding down

to the trees to seek shelter in the extreme cold. The second theory is that a minor avalanche might

have struck the tent, partially burying it. This lead to the hikers slashing their way out of the

tent. Fear of a subsequent worse avalanche then prompted them to hurriedly evacuate their campsite

and make their way downhill to the trees. Whatever caused them to leave their tent,

once they reached the perceived safety of the treeline, the young hikers were blinded and

disoriented by the blizzard-like conditions. They started a fire in a desperate attempt to

stay warm, but – numb from the cold – were unable to feel when they huddled too close to it and were

burned. The hiker with a chunk of his own flesh in his mouth may have bitten himself in an attempt to

test for sensation in his numb extremities. Some of the group climbed the cedar tree to

try and see their way back to camp. Two died of hypothermia by the fire. Three hiked back

towards the tents but died of hypothermia on the way. And the remaining three retreated further,

only to be struck by an avalanche and carried into the ravine. Either the avalanche itself or

the fall into the ravine could be responsible for the impact injuries which killed them.

The disfigurement of their faces took place after their death, and was caused by scavenging animals.

The radiation could be accounted for by the fact that several of the group had previously

worked clearing a nuclear accident site, and their clothing remained contaminated.

This explanation could never be conclusively proven… but it did account for the circumstances

in which the missing hikers were found. Many years after the disaster, in 2021,

a Swiss avalanche research lab ran simulations to verify that an avalanche could cause the

injuries observed in the hikers in the ravine. Researchers used snow simulation software borrowed

from Walt Disney Animation Studios, who had developed it for their blockbuster film Frozen.

Simulations run with this software confirmed that an avalanche could have caused the injuries

observed in the hikers found in the ravine. While the reason for the hikers fleeing their tent in

the first place remains uncertain, the cause of death of each of those lost is, at least, known.

After the disaster, the pass was named in honour of the group’s leader, Igor Dyatlov. For several

years it was closed to hikers, but has since been re-opened. A small memorial stands at the spot

where the lost hikers built a fire in the trees. Those who died in the Dyatlov Pass Incident are

buried together in a cemetery in Yekaterinburg. They are: twenty-three-year-old Igor Dyatlov,

twenty-one-year-old Yuri Doroshenko, twenty-year-old Lyudmila Dubinina,

twenty-four-year-old Aleksander Kolevatov, twenty-two-year-old Zinaida Kolmogorova,

twenty-three-year-old Yuri Krivonischenko, twenty-three-year-old Rustem Slobodin,

and twenty-three-year-old Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle.

The sole survivor of the group, Yuri Yudin, who left the expedition early

due to his aching joints, lived on to the age of seventy-five, before passing away in 2013,

never knowing with absolute certainty the fate that befell his friends.