The most mysterious disaster in camping history

Out of all the strange stories of people going missing on hikes and camping trips, nothing comes close to the level of mystery that still surrounds what has come to be known as the Dyatlov pass incident. The story involves a group of nine friends who went hiking across the Ural mountain range on a trip that was only supposed to last a few days.

Their journey began on 25 January 1959, in a town called Ivdel (Ивдель) after a lengthy train ride. The next day they managed to get a ride on a truck to a small trucking village which was the furthest northern settlement in the region, and they spent the evening eating bread to get their energy up for the next day. They left the village on 27 January and made their way into the wilderness, heading for another small village they hoped to reach within a couple of days.

The whole trip was well planned and even though it was 1959, their gear was sensible and in terms of equipment and supplies, they were very well prepared. On the second day of hiking, the 10th and definitely the luckiest member of the group started to suffer from joint pains and had to turn back, leaving the other nine to carry on.

For the next few days, everything went well and the group made good time, making it to the edge of a large highland area where they decided to spend the night and try to make it through the region in the morning. At first light on February 1, the group of hikers began their journey through the pass, a large and wide valley covered in forest and surrounded by steep and rocky hills. The distance was short enough so that they could make it through in a single day, but not long after they reached the valley floor the weather began to turn and made it difficult to navigate.

They made an error at one point and ended up walking towards the peak of Mount Kholat Syakhl, but when they realized their mistake the group leader, Igor Dyatlov, decided to make camp for the night on the side of the mountain instead of walking the 1.5 km trip back to the valley floor.

What exactly happened in the early morning hours of 2 February 1959 will forever remain a mystery, but at this point as far as everyone else was concerned, the trip was going well. The group leader was supposed to send a telegram to his sports club on the 12th of February when they reached their next village, but it wasn’t uncommon for expeditions like this to go over by a few days.

By the 20th of February, everyone’s relatives put enough pressure on the authorities to make them act, and a search party was sent out. At first, it consisted of volunteers and they found no trace of the group, but later on, the military and police sent out search teams, and on the 26th they found the campsite.

(One of the tents of the Dyatlov group)

The initial discovery was quite confusing, to say the least, and none of the investigators knew what to make of it. The group was staying in two tents and one of them looked like it had been cut open from the inside and the occupants just got up and ran out, seemingly without even getting dressed. Most of the group’s things were still there including footwear and coats.

It seems the group got up during the night and ran down the slope towards the trees on the valley floor, but at some point split into two groups, with five of them running towards the same area of the woods and the other four heading off in an unknown direction. The first two bodies were found within the trees sitting around a burnt-out fire and both appeared to have died from hypothermia. Both were only wearing underwear and socks, with one of them wearing a single boot and the other completely barefoot.

Three more bodies were found on the way back up the slope and each was frozen in a struggling position, suggesting they were trying to get back to the camp before they froze to death. It took two months before the other four bodies were found, located under several feet of snow about 75 meters away from the first five bodies.

What makes this story so strange is the cause of death for some of the hikers. Two of them were found to have huge chest trauma, which one inspecting physician compared to being equal to being hit by a car, though there was no visible damage to the skin in the form of cuts or bruising. The four who were later found all had soft tissue damage to their heads, with one of the group missing both eyes and another missing a tongue.

One of the group had a skull fracture and several of them had severe burns on parts of their bodies and clothing, which some reports said due to the manner of the burns could only have been caused by radiation.

(One of the bodies of the Dyatlov group as it was found)

People freezing to death is nothing new when it comes to wilderness survival stories, but people dying of massive chest injuries when the skin wasn’t broken is definitely new. The soft tissue damage is also very unusual because any mammal or insect that would normally eat dead tissue would be in hibernation during the time of their trip.

The main unsolved questions surrounding the most mysterious disaster in camping history

• Why did they cut their way out of the tent instead of using the entrance?

• What caused them to run almost naked and without shoes into snow covered arctic wilderness?

• If they thought it was an avalanche as suggested in some theories, how did they manage to run 1.5km before they realized there wasn’t one?

• How did two of the group suffer massive chest trauma without outer skin damage?

There are a ton of theories out there that range from bear attacks to storms and wild animals eating them after they simply froze to death, but they all leave more questions than answers. The official verdict on the police report is that they were killed by “compelling natural forces” but this verdict wasn’t accepted by most people including the chief investigator who resigned after the case.

One report from the case mentioned how one of the group’s jackets had abnormally high levels of radiation on it, and an autopsy concluded the chest injuries suffered by two of the group were not inflicted by animals or humans “because the force of the blows had been too strong and no soft tissue had been damaged”.

Bears were ruled out because the group would have fought it and there would be signs of claw marks and damaged outer tissue, and the native Mansi tribe were also quickly ruled out because the force needed couldn’t have come from a human. An interesting point about the reports of the case is that there isn’t a single mention of the state of the organs of the bodies, but the outer body and everything else in the case are frequently mentioned. It seems there was some kind of block on releasing the full autopsy report, but of course, with 1959 Soviet Russia, nobody knows anything about that. To this day the case remains open and unsolved.