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Hey everyone and welcome back to the Into the Dark podcast. I'm your host Peyton Morland. I'm so glad you are here and listening. I hope you guys have been loving the episodes we have been covering lately. I know I have. I've been enjoying talking with you in the comments. But yeah, let's just get right into it starting with my 10 seconds.
Today is actually the 4th of July. I am recording, but this morning I went to a parade in my city. I actually grew up going to this parade, and I just wanted to go back for the nostalgia of it all. It was so fun. It was so fun. I just sat down on the curb. I watched all the kids getting candy. I watched all the floats from my hometown, and honestly, it was a blast. It made me feel young, and I'm just really trying to find peace lately. I'm trying to just...
enjoy life as much as possible. And it's little things like that that really can help you get there. So I hope that you take some time today to just feel young.
Feel fun, feel peaceful, whether that's swinging on a swing set or jumping on a trampoline or going for a walk or watching your local parade or watching a show that you used to love. I hope that we can all just really connect to ourselves and find our roots. And I'm here doing it with you. So I love you guys. And let's get into the episode. So today's story is fascinating because of just how baffling it is. It is a true mystery.
Sometimes, when you look at an unexplained event from history, you can guess at what might have happened and come up with your own theories. But I think today's case is really interesting because there's really no way to explain it away. Nothing about it makes sense. And this is the story of the Dyatlov Pass incident.
Now, in early 1959, 11 students and recent grads at Russia's Ural Polytechnic Institute decided to go on a very challenging mountain climbing expedition.
And it would begin in late January and extend through early February 1959. These students all knew one another through the athletics club at their school, so it's not like this was a totally random plan. They were all experienced mountain climbers who knew their way around steep peaks and hikes.
So the leader of the expedition was named Igor Dyatlov and his name would eventually become synonymous with these guys' disastrous journey. Now the team consisted of nine men and two women. They were all friends and they ranged in age from their early twenties to their late thirties. Now they were all in great physical shape. So there was no reason for this mountain climbing trip to be beyond their capabilities.
Their plan was to hike up Mount Otorten. Translated into English, that means, quote, "Don't go there." So it's a very apt name because the hike up Otorten can be very difficult. This was in part because the mountain was very far to the north. Its peaks were cold and snowy even during mild winters.
And Igor and his team were planning to summit it at the chilliest time of the year. So right at the end of January. Plus, in general, the route up the mountain was particularly challenging with narrow trails and steep drops.
And if the group got into any kind of trouble, they'd actually be on their own because the area around the mountain was not very densely populated. So there were few locals who would be able to help the team if they needed it.
Now, in Igor's defense, he'd actually climbed Otorten once before and so had some of his teammates. So they knew what the route was like and Igor was confident that he was up for it and so was everyone else. So the journey began on January 23rd, 1959.
And almost immediately, this expedition starts to go wrong. So before they could even begin hiking, the team had to get there by taking a train and then they transferred to a bus and then they booked a truck to drive them to a small remote village where they then had to walk 15 miles and finally ski to the foot of Mount Otorten.
And then finally, after all of that travel, they could begin their actual expedition, their climb.
So on the very first day of the trip, January 23rd, one of the expedition members got to the gas station too late to catch the train. So the rest of the team left him behind because if they didn't get to the next stop on schedule, they might not be able to make the hike at all. They couldn't wait for him. So it was the very first day of their journey and they were already short one person. And then another problem came up three days into their journey. This is on January 26th.
The team was staying in a hostel. They had just finished the truck ride portion of the journey, and they had not yet begun the 15-mile walk that would then be followed by the ski. So that night, Nikolai Thibault Brinnell, a 23-year-old father of one, wrote in his diary, I can't, although I tried, which I'm pretty sure I have written in my diary as well. There was no other context to explain what he'd tried.
tried and couldn't do on this expedition, but it must not have been that serious because the climb went on until it abruptly ended for another team member on January 28th. By now, everyone had been traveling for five days and they weren't even to the hiking part yet. They'd been moving from one vehicle to the next with a lot of rushing and stress. It was not the ideal situation for hard exertion.
And it all caught up with a young man named Yuri Yudin, who during the truck ride, he felt unwell, but he thought he could power through the illness. Maybe he wrote it off as motion sickness. Instead, over the course of a few days, he got worse and worse and
And by the 28th, he decided that he just wasn't up for the remainder of the journey. So he had to go back to the nearest village to recover. So he told the rest of his companions goodbye, turned around and headed off alone.
And now there are nine left to start this hike. So as soon as Yuri was gone, the rest of the team began the actual hike. They spent their days trudging through the snow and every single night they shared the same extra large tent.
It would have been big enough to sleep the entire team if all 11 people had made it this far. And they always kept a small portable stove burning inside the tent when they slept. It's obviously necessary. The temperatures were as low as negative 15 degrees Fahrenheit some of the night.
So there was a very real chance that the hikers could literally freeze to death if they weren't careful, which sounds brutal to me. And on top of that, over the course of the trip, there were a few petty squabbles, which I mean is bound to happen when all you're doing all day is just like
like avidly in pain and hiking and cold and not getting good sleep and probably hungry. But by and large, I will say the trip seemed to go well for three days. It's hard to say for sure because all we have to go off are diary entries and pictures on cameras. But based on what we can tell from those records, they were on course and making progress toward their destination. Now, I'm not sure what exactly happened on February 1st because I
Nobody wrote a diary entry that day. Like all nine of these people did not document what happened that day. But I do know that they left the camp that they'd been at the night before when they wrote their final diary entry. So then they marched roughly nine miles off course. To this day, nobody knows why. No one knows if the entire group got lost or
or maybe there was an obstacle that they decided to try and get around. You'll remember that the goal of the expedition was to climb Mount Otorten, aka Mount Don't Go There.
So instead, they ended up climbing an entirely different mountain. They go nine miles off course and end up on a different mountain. Now, this mountain is called Colette Sakhil. And in English, this translates to either the mountain of the dead or more simply dead mountain. I'm just saying I would not hike either of these mountains.
But it doesn't seem like these hikers were especially alarmed to switch mountains. They don't seem to fear the fact that they are now on Mountain of the Dead. In fact, they had a camera with them and they snapped pictures of the ascent as they went. So they go nine miles off course and then we get proof that like they're still okay and they're snapping pictures as this is happening.
Now, when they presumably got too tired to go any further, they set up their camp on a gentle slope part of the way up the mountain. It was in a pass that would later be dubbed Diet Love Pass after the expedition leader, Igor Diet Love. Now, I know everyone probably went to sleep in the tent that night, but I'm not entirely sure because they didn't write anything about that day in their journals again.
And nobody knows what happened next. It's a mystery that endures to this day. They seem to be fine as they pitch their tent and go to sleep. But something happens. Now, way back before anyone even took the first step of the journey, while they were still planning the hike, Igor had actually told his friends that he expected to be back down the mountain by February 12th.
He figured it would take another two or three days to take the truck, the bus and the train back home, but that he'd see all of his friends and sleep in his own bed by the 14th or the 15th.
Now, of course, sometimes unexpected delays can come up. So he also said that as soon as he got down the mountain and could stop in a small village at the base, that he would send a telegram to say, hey, everything is good. We made it. Hike went well. Be home soon. That way, his loved ones could know he'd made it down safely. But he didn't show up when he predicted. So there was no telegram on the 12th and the hikers did not appear at the train station on the 14th or the 15th.
So everyone gives it a few more days just in case maybe they'd been held up somewhere on the climb. But by February 21st, or about a week after the team was supposed to make it home, it was clear that something terrible had probably happened on this expedition. So the authorities quickly assembled search teams.
These included local volunteers, students from the university that Igor and his friends had attended, police officers, and also members of the indigenous group that lived in the mountains. They knew the terrain better than anyone else could. It took two days to put these teams together and get them to the right area via emergency flight. So they try to go as fast as they can.
They assembled near Mount Otorten because nobody knew at this point that Igor and the others had actually gone off route to another mountain. Luckily, it didn't take long for the teams to find the old campsites where Igor and the others had stayed during the journey. So they begin basically tracking the group. They could follow ski tracks and footprints from one stop to the next in the snow and the cold. And after three days, they managed to track the missing hikers
to their final resting place. And yes, this is about to be brutal. It was February 26th when the search teams found the remains of what had once been the Dyatlov Expedition's last campsite. The tent was still standing, but about half of it was buried under snow.
The weight of that snow had actually made some of the ropes and other parts of the tent break apart. But for the most part, it was actually in pretty good condition, especially considering that it had weathered several storms in the month or so that it had been standing in this spot. I mean, it hadn't moved. The team's tent is still here for a month.
The tent had some of the hikers' clothes, boots, and other gear in it. Their cameras, their diaries, ski gear, cookware, and everything else was neatly put away. The cash, the valuables were there too. The expedition wouldn't have made it far without any of that, but this is the strange thing. They find the expedition's tent.
They find all of the people's belongings. The tent is still standing, but nobody is inside the tent. The hikers are missing.
And there was no sign any of those items had been used for weeks. Like the stove that they used to keep warm overnight was also there, but it was packed up and put away. So the team wasn't using it whenever they were in the tent the last time. Like the stove was clearly not used. And more clothes were actually scattered around outside of the tent. And interestingly, there were a bunch of footprints everywhere.
all over the campsite. But this is the important part. Most of these footprints were bare foot, like footprints, like bare feet, no hiking boots, no shoes, no skis, like bare footprints in the snow.
This was surprising because you'd think those footprints would have been buried in the snow or blown away in the wind. Again, there had been lots of storms since the Dyatlov team went missing. But for whatever reason, the search teams do not investigate these footprints.
and they don't compare them to any of the hiker's shoes to see if they belonged to the missing students or if there had been other people there, like maybe the sizes were off. So it's hard to say whose footprints these are, but it's also hard to imagine anyone but the missing team would be hiking around the campsite barefoot. So it's widely accepted that the prints probably came from the missing hikers. So it takes another day of looking and you can just imagine how strange this site is.
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Let's get back into the episode. It takes another day of looking, but on the 27th, the search team finds four bodies. It was Igor, the leader, and three members of his team. The other two was George Krivonshenko and Yuri Doroshenko. They were spotted about a mile away from the abandoned tent.
And get this, so they just find three bodies. They're like, finally, we found some hikers. But all three of these men were almost entirely found naked in the mountains in the snow.
They were wearing only their underwear and the remains of a campfire had burned down next to them. Which like, you have a stove back in your tent. Why are you lighting a fire naked somewhere else if you could be lighting it in your tent at your campsite a mile away?
It was almost like these men had gotten up in the middle of the night, wandered away from their nice warm tent with no clothes or shoes on, and then lit a fire to try and stay warm somewhere else. Now sadly, the cold had gotten to them anyway, and they froze to death.
There was another body found that of Zina Kolmagorovo and she was actually found near Mor Igor. So George and Yuri were kind of found next to that campfire. And then Zina and Igor were actually found a little bit between the tent and the campfire that Yuri and George had built. And they were lying face down on the ground with their heads both facing back toward the direction of the tent.
Almost like they were crawling back to the tent when they succumbed to whatever had killed them. But like, how'd they end up in that situation? It was impossible to say. And the rescuers are even more baffled.
So the best guess that they could make was that these four hikers had left the tent in the middle of the night for some reason. It's not clear why. They obviously aren't dressed for the cold. They couldn't survive for long without shelter. I mean, they're in their underwear. And George and Yuri must have decided to light the fire to keep warm while Xena and Igor took their chances with the short crawl back to the tent.
None of these methods were enough to keep them alive, but these were experienced mountain climbers, you guys. They all knew better than to wander off on a cold night without their coats and gear to keep them warm. So it just doesn't make sense.
Now the body of a man named Rustam Slabudem was found a little over a week later. So this is on March 3rd. He was actually not too far from Igor and Zina, but because of the snow, the search teams had kind of overlooked his spot for days. And then after his discovery, it took two more months. So until May to find the rest of the hikers. So the rest of them, there was four more of them. They were all found together in
and their names were Luda Dubinia, Alexander Kolevatov, Simeon Zolotaryov, and lastly, Nikolai Tibobrinov.
Now, these four bodies weren't too far from the other five, literally just 230 feet away. So that's the equivalent of three quarters of a football field. And it's kind of hard to picture. So I'm going to pause here and go over the layout so I can give you every detail. So all nine hikers were about one mile away from the tent.
And still nobody knows why all nine of them left in the middle of the night. Two of them froze to death while they were trying to keep warm around a fire. Three others died while looks like they were trying to get back to the tent.
And then the last four actually built themselves a shelter out of snow. And that is part of the reason that they were so hard to find because they were completely buried in that shelter by the time the search teams got out there. But it was obvious they hadn't just been snowed in or buried in an avalanche. Like their grave was clearly a man-made snow den.
It was reinforced with sticks and pretty well built, even though it still didn't save their lives. Now, none of the bodies were found in good shape. They all had frostbite, some bruises, some superficial injuries. But the four hikers who were found in the snow den looked like someone had died.
beaten them like severely, which is this story just takes weird turn after weird turn. Two of them had broken ribs. Two of their noses had been broken. Two of them had fractures on their skulls. And then two of the men who apparently died while crawling back towards the tent actually had scrapes on their hands. They were consistent with the kinds of injuries you'd maybe get in a fist fight.
And one of the hikers actually had bitten off a part of his own knuckle. Like literally there was a piece of his flesh missing from the back of his hand. And then when the medical examiners examined the bodies, they later found that missing piece of flesh in his own mouth. So truly bizarre just does not begin to describe what's going on here.
And on top of that, some of the deceased had what's been described as deeply tanned skin. In fact, their skin was so dark their family members didn't think they even looked Caucasian anymore. It was more like something had burnt them almost to a crisp when they died. And it wasn't clear what could have done that, especially on a remote Russian mountain back in 1959.
It's not like the expeditioners stopped at a tanning salon midway through their hike, and it was also unclear what their cause of death was. More accurately, it looked obvious at first all these hikers had frozen to death.
But cold temperatures wouldn't leave broken bones and tanned skin and bumps and bruises. So when the hikers were autopsied, the medical examiner said the damage almost looked more severe, like these guys had been in a car accident, not frozen to death on a mountain. So to try and make sense of all this, Soviet investigators looked at the campsite itself, which
has its own set of mysteries. Take the tent where Dyatlov and the rest were presumably sleeping on the night that they then left and died. So even though everyone was found dead outside of the tent, we can assume that at one point they were bedded down inside because most of their clothes and gear were all put away. Some of it was tucked around the tent walls to provide extra insulation. And when they left the tent, they didn't go
through the door. Someone inside the tent cut it open from the inside. And this is just why it's like they didn't all just go for a little walk and get lost because they would have left out the front door of the tent. You don't damage a tent like that unless you know for a fact that you won't be using it again, but they still days left of their expedition. There was no reason for the team to destroy the only shelter they had.
unless they were in an extreme hurry to get out and just panicked and cut through the tent.
Say if something terrified them so much that they couldn't lose even the few precious seconds it would take to unzip the flap, whatever they ran out to, it singed the trees. Now, again, going back to like the burning, but it's in the middle of winter. When these people got out of the tent, the woods near the campsite had clearly been lightly burned and there wasn't any similar damage anywhere.
anywhere else in the forest, at least not that the search teams could find. So it almost seemed like something very hot had just swept through this campsite, which kind of fit with one other detail that's almost impossible to explain. Two of the bodies had been exposed to radiation.
And it's pretty odd that we even know that at all. Even in 1959, it wasn't standard to test for radiation exposure in an autopsy. But when the chief investigator got called to the scene to look at these nine bodies that had been found, he showed up with a Geiger counter. Now, nobody asked him to do that, and he never explained where he got it or even what gave him the idea to bring it.
a Geiger counter to a remote mountain pass. Maybe he knew something the rest of us didn't, but I'm glad he did because the radiation is a major piece of the puzzle that we wouldn't have for his weird impulse. Now the hikers did carry some lamps that were powered by radioactive elements. It was the 50s after all, and the height of the nuclear age.
But even if those lamps tipped over and broke into whatever accident killed the team, the exposure would have been significantly lower than what the rescue teams detected when they found the bodies.
Now, another explanation is that some of the hikers had past military experience and had worked in areas with high levels of radiation. So maybe the exposure was high enough that it could be detected after their deaths. Except it wasn't just the bodies that had measurable radiation. It was the clothes, too. So clearly something very, very strange happened to this expedition in the middle of the woods on a mountain.
Now, if that's not clear from the state of their camp and the bodies, it should be obvious from the way the Russian authorities responded once the remains were discovered. Because as soon as the search teams found the bodies, they declared the past was a crime scene. And then they closed the entire area off to visitors for four years while they conducted their investigation. You heard that right. Four full years of investigation into this hike.
Now, it's hard to see how the hikers could have died as the result of a crime unless there were serial killers lurking in the inhospitable slopes of the Mountain of the Dead waiting for their chance to strike. And then also those killers would have had to have access to something that could singe trees and leave radiation behind. In addition to closing the pass and calling it a crime scene, Soviet officials also classified all of the files from the investigation until the 1970s. So
So interestingly, even once the information was made public, it didn't contain any explanation about what actually happened to Igor Dyatlov and the others. The only cause of death that was listed was the quote, spontaneous power of nature, meaning that they weren't sure if it was an avalanche, a storm or something else, but they were pretty sure it was something natural if those reports are to be believed.
But if it was the spontaneous power of nature that killed these hikers, whatever that means, why do a criminal investigation? Why classify everything for more than 10 years? Like it just doesn't make sense. The government knew something weird happened here.
Now, after the case was declassified, the Russian authorities did become a bit more forthcoming. They even allowed multiple investigations into how Dyatlov and his team might have been killed. And I'll go ahead and spoil it right now. None of those investigations solved the mystery in any satisfying way. But I will cover some of the major findings that have come out from those studies.
So in 2010, a group called the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation looked into the incident. And even though it had been more than 50 years since Igor and the others had died in a very strange and unexplainable way, this organization had a lot of technology and information that wasn't available back in 1959. But even with all of this, all the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation could come up with were more theories that couldn't be proven.
One popular suggestion of theirs was that the hikers might have died in an avalanche. Now, in theory, the team might have been sleeping in their tent when they either heard the snow rushing toward them or they heard something else that they mistook for an avalanche. They panicked, they cut their way out of the tent to get away, and they ran out into the night without their clothes or their shoes. And then either after the avalanche hit or alternatively, once they realized there was no avalanche,
They wanted to get back to the warmth of the tent, but they were also already starting to freeze to death. The night was dark and they were unfamiliar with where they had ran. And if the avalanche was real, it could have caused those serious injuries that medical examiner saw on four of the students. Remember the beatings? So frightened, confused, and underdressed, they all froze to death in the night.
This explanation also did help explain away some of the strange details that the search teams found. Those students who were almost naked might have stripped as their bodies cooled off and
This is a known phenomenon called paradoxical undressing. So when someone is freezing to death, they don't make rational decisions. And some people who are experiencing hypothermia will strip, making their death from exposure come even faster. The big problem with this theory was that there was no evidence that a large avalanche had even hit Dyatlov Pass. In fact, the initial search teams wrote in their reports that there definitely hadn't been one.
So they came to a different but still unlikely conclusion that the hikers had been blown out of the tent in a hurricane.
Now, part of the tent was broken and buried under the snow, but the damage was minimal, nowhere near what you'd expect in a deadly avalanche that could break bones. None of the hikers had been buried other than Rustam and the four who built a fort on their own, which would have been pretty hard to do if they were dying of their injuries at that point. And they certainly didn't have time to build a snow den before a sudden avalanche hit.
Plus, the slope that they were camped on wasn't steep enough for a major avalanche to even happen. The Dyatlov team members were all very experienced mountain climbers. They knew better than to pitch the tent in a dangerous area. And they would have known how to deal with what was, at worst, a minimal amount of snow falling on their tent and partially collapsing it. They wouldn't have run an entire mile away in panic.
But let's set that aside for a second. We'll imagine that they just weren't thinking clearly and they did make a fatal mistake in sprinting away from the tent. An avalanche that left the tent almost untouched wouldn't have broken multiple people's ribs or fractured skulls. It definitely wouldn't have burnt the trees or left radiation on the bodies and clothes. It wouldn't make them bite off their own knuckles or tan their skin.
There were similar problems with some of the Dyatlov Memorial Foundation's other theories, like that the stove they were using for warmth started a fire in the tent and everyone ran away in terror, or that a local indigenous group passed nearby and startled the team in the middle of the night. Those explanations could show how the hikers ended up outside of the tent, but it just didn't fit any of the other evidence.
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Even the authorities seem to understand that these solutions just weren't that credible. So in 2021, there was another investigation, this time run by Swiss scientists who used computer models to try and recreate the deadly disaster digitally and explain all the evidence. This time around, they determined that the Dyatlov expedition had died in an avalanche, but it
But it wasn't a complete repeat of their earlier findings. This time around, the Swiss scientists ruled that the hikers might have been caught in a special kind of avalanche called a slab avalanche. So it can get a little technical, but in simple terms, a slab avalanche happens when a slab of snow breaks off from a mountain and slides down the slope. The key thing you need to know is that it can happen even when the incline isn't that steep.
Meaning that while the conditions weren't right for a traditional avalanche, a slab avalanche could still have happened in Dyatlov Pass. And it might have been a factor in the deaths. But still, the scientists couldn't explain why the hikers cut their way out of the tent, why they ran a mile away.
They couldn't account for the singed trees or the radiation or any of the other issues I've covered. And when the Swiss scientists published their findings, they even said, quote, solving the diet law of past mystery is an enormous task, which is far beyond the scope of this paper. They also ended by saying, essentially, they thought it's likely we'll never know what really happened.
Now, given how dissatisfying the official reports were, it stands to reason that some people came up with creative explanations for the disaster all on their own. There's been speculation that Dyatlov and the others might have been killed by aliens, maybe some strange monsters on the mountain. In fact, for decades, there have been reports of Yeti sightings in that region. And as far as the alien theory, apparently there were strange lights spotted in the sky right around the time the Dyatlov hikers all died.
And the last photo they ever took appeared to show a bright white light streaking across the dark sky. Maybe it was an otherworldly ship that had come to Earth to perform brutal, torturous experiments.
Or given all of the layers of secrecy around the Dyatlov investigation, some think the Soviet government had something to do with their deaths. The area where they were hiking was right smack dab in the middle of a territory where the army did a lot of military exercises. So maybe Igor Dyatlov and his companions lost their lives to some kind of weapons test or drill that went terribly wrong.
Of course, if the Soviet army had a weapon that could do this, you'd think we'd have heard of it by now. It's been 65 years since this incident. That technology should be old news. That said, it's impossible to disprove any of these theories. We can't completely rule out strange energy weapons, aliens, cryptids, or any of the more out there possibilities.
Frankly, we also can't debunk any of the other wild tinfoil tells that have sprung up around the hikers. There are too many to get in here and I've barely scratched the surface of all the different speculation. Like how some people don't even think the hikers died in Dyatlov Pass. They could have been killed elsewhere and then their bodies dumped there. Or the speculation that the bodies buried in the graves weren't actually the hikers. But
But I do want to present one other possibility, that the deaths were covered up specifically because the Soviet government didn't know what killed Igor and the others. And I know it's a little complicated, but picture this. Nine young hikers turn up dead in highly suspicious circumstances. Nobody can explain it. Even the officials are baffled.
So on the off chance that there is something deeper and more mysterious going on, some low ranking government employee decides to keep the whole thing quiet just in case there's something else going on in the world that we're not aware of. And everyone else just follows their lead, treating the deaths as sensitive military information, although nobody quite understands why. And I'm not saying that's what actually happened, but it does feel likely as any other possibility. Because at the end of the day, when it comes to the Dyatlov incident,
There are a lot of unproven theories, tons of questions and considerably fewer credible answers. Which brings us to today. As of the summer of 2024, it has been 65 years since the Dyatlov Pass incident. Of course, there are a lot of people who believe we still don't fully understand what happened to Igor Dyatlov and the others.
and perhaps we never will. And that is the history of the Dyatlov Pass and the expedition that still to this day does not make sense. I will see you on the next episode of Into the Dark as we dive further, maybe I should say as we hike further into the dark together. Goodbye.