On This Day in History: February 2

The Dyatlov Pass Incident

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Russians can be pretty fucking dark. What the English-speaking world refers to as the Dyatlov Pass Incident, Russians call “The Dyatlov Group demise.” The demise of nine hikers in the Northern Ural Mountains was a fucking mystery.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: February 2, 1959--

I wrote “was” a mystery. It’s been solved. Maybe. But it sure was fucked up, leading to a ton of conspiracy hypotheses that ranged from the deaths being caused by military testing, to infrasonic wind-induced panic attacks, to a goddamn yeti or fucking aliens.

They were a group of ski hikers from the Ural Polytechnical Institute, led by Igor Dyatlov, a 23-year-old engineering student. The pass was not yet named for him. It was the fucky circumstances of February 2, 1959, that a pass a mile away from said fuckery was later named in his memory. The fuck happened? Continues below …

I went skiing for the first time in two years yesterday (I was too paranoid to go when I wasn’t vaccinated) and it was awesome so if you want to contribute to my skiing fund please click the green button.

There were 10 people, eight men and two women, most of them fellow students of Dyatlov. All were experienced ski hikers with certifications and the whole bit. Their mission was to traverse almost 200 miles in difficult conditions to earn the highest of hiking certifications. They began on January 27 and one hiker, who had some health problems, including rheumatism, was suffering and turned back the following day. Lucky guy.

Four days later they got into some weather, went a bit off course, and cut a camp into the snowy slope of Kholat Saykhl. That name means “Dead Mountain,” which isn’t at all ominous. When the group never showed up, a search was conducted. What investigators found was a total headscratcher.

The tent, mostly buried in the snow, was cut open from the inside, with all their clothes and boots and other winter survival gear still inside. There were nine sets of footprints, mostly barefoot or only wearing socks, leading away from the camp toward the woods below. It took months of snow melt to find all the bodies, but what they revealed was strange indeed. They were barely dressed, scattered far and wide from the camp. The first five bodies found all died of hypothermia, with one only having a small skull fracture. But when they found the other four, holy shit. Some were missing their eyes, another lacked a tongue. On others, heads and chests were smashed.

The local Mansi people were interrogated; it was suggested the hikers were murdered for encroaching on Mansi lands. But this hypothesis was soon dismissed. It was labeled death by an “unknown unnatural force” and, being that this was the Soviet Union, hushed up. Then in 2019 the case was reopened, and the Russians said the deaths were due to an avalanche, which had been suggested back in 1959. But it didn’t add up, the conditions weren’t right and there was no evidence of an avalanche. Long story short, in 2021 researchers used computer modelling to suggest that a small avalanche, basically a 16-foot slab of ice, landed on them due to their cutting into the slope, causing injuries not immediately fatal, creating a panicked exodus from the tent. The eyes and tongue were likely eaten by scavengers.

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