I Want To Believe Notes

Dyatlov Pass Incident

In January/February of 1959, a group of ten Russian ski hikers started a journey to Mt Ortorten from the small town, Vizhai. The group consisted of eight men and two women and was led by Igor Dyatlov. Dyatlov was 23 at the time and the rest were mostly University students.

However three days before beginning the journey- while the group was travelling between Ortoten and Vihai- one of the hikers Yuri Yudin was made to turn back because he was having knee and joint pain which made him unable to trek.

On January 31st they gathered supplies at the edge of Kholat Syakhl (Dead Mountain or Mount of the Dead) and on 1st of February they began to hike through the pass. They believe the hikers planned to travel across the pass and camp on the other side but due to bad weather conditions they got lost and started to travel in a different direction up towards the top of the mountain.

They decided to stop and camp there after realizing what they had done. What's weird is if they had just traveled 1.3 kms down the mountain they could have camped in a forested area which provided shelter from the elements.

Yudin, the hiker who stayed behind said about this decision "Dyatlov probably didn't want to lose the distance they had covered, or he decided to practice camping on the mountain slope".

Dyatlov was supposed to send a telegram to Yudin (the man who stayed behind) alerting him to when the group had made it back to Vizhai. They were expected to arrive back on the 12th but Dyatlov said it would take longer so no one was worried when they 12th came and there was no word of the group's return.

Fast forward eight days to February 20th- when relatives demand that a search is made for the hikers. At first this just included groups of volunteer students and teachers but later the army and milisiya forces were brought in to find the hikers.

Fast forward another six days. Their tent is found by a student named Mikhail Sharavin. He said "the tent was half torn down and covered in snow. It was empty, and all the group's belongings and shoes had been left behind".

It looks like the tent had been cut from the inside like they were trying to escape from someone or something and there were a set of nine footprints that were going the direction of the woods. All of them left either only wearing socks or completely barefoot.

Down at the the edge of the woods the searchers found a small campfire next to two bodies which were Krivonischenko and Doroshenko. They were dressed in nothing but their underwear. They also both had burnt hands. The two campers were next to a large tree which looked like it had been climbed by the two campers as the branches had been broken. This suggests that they were either fleeing something or went up to search for the camp or perhaps a way back down the mountain OR they were collecting wood for the fire.

Next they found the bodies of Dyatlov, Slobodin and Kolmogorova. They were all found in different intervals between the tree and the tent. Judging by the positions they were found in it seems they were all trying to head back to the tent.

It took another two months to find the other four hikers. It wasn't until May 4th that they were found under four metres of snow in a ravine which was less than a hundred metres into the woods than the tree.

They were found wearing clothes and it seems as though the first to die had their clothes taken and worn by the other hikers as they tried to warm themselves.

Before they had the found the four bodies in May it had been resolved that the hikers had died from hypothermia as they had no outside injuries apart from Slobodin who had a crack in his skull but it was ruled as not fatal. (My theory is he may have been the one to climb the tree and fell however wouldn't there be more injuries?).