You're Wrong About - The Dyatlov Pass Incident with Blair Braverman

Episode Date: June 6, 2022

This week, Sarah tries to solve the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, in which nine experienced ski hikers fled their shelter and ran into the frigid night for reasons unknown. Digressions include yetis, snowmobiles, and Rachel Monroe. Sarah miraculous does not sing Rilo Kiley’s “Portions for Foxes.”Some Notes:The New Yorker The BBCCrackedNatureThe AtlanticThe New York TimesHere's where to find Blair:WebsiteTwitterSupport us:Bonus Episodes on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us:Sarah's other show, You Are Good [YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseLinks:https://www.blairbraverman.com/https://twitter.com/blairbravermanhttps://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/has-an-old-soviet-mystery-at-last-been-solvedhttps://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/SoLiOdJyCK/mystery_of_dyatlov_passhttps://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-with-really-obvious-solutions.htmlhttps://www.nature.com/articles/s43247-022-00393-x?utm_medium=affiliate&utm_source=commission_junction&utm_campaign=CONR_PF018_ECOM_GL_PHSS_ALWYS_PRODUCT&utm_content=textlink&utm_term=PID100094349&CJEVENT=89eb6401bf5311ec83a802f70a82b824https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/russia-dyatlov-pass-conspiracy-theory/605863/https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2020/02/russia-dyatlov-pass-conspiracy-theory/605863/http://patreon.com/yourewrongabouthttps://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-abouthttps://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpodhttps://www.podpage.com/you-are-goodhttp://maintenancephase.comSupport the show

You can't read a victim impact statement to a turtle, or like you can, but they won't know what you're saying. You cannot make a turtle regret. Hello, I'm Sarah Marshall. Welcome to You're Wrong About. Today, we are talking about the Dyatlov Pass Incident, which if you have wasted any of the last 20 years of your life on the internet, you may have heard quite a lot about. It's a mysterious event where the culprit could be aliens, but it's not aliens, or is it aliens? This is a story that I have been intrigued by ever since I was a young Cracked.com reader. And in recent years, we have had some new advances in our ability to understand what happened and why a group of experienced outdoors people died very mysteriously. So I brought my favorite outdoors person to talk about it, my friend Blair.

Blair is a writer, she is a long-distance dog sledder, and she has completed some of the toughest dog sled races in the world. She's been a survivalist on the TV show Naked and Afraid, and she's the author of three books, including her first novel, Small Game, which is about a survival reality show gone wrong. It's out this fall, it's available for pre-order, it's pretty fucking great. If you enjoy this episode and if you want to read more, and why wouldn't you, there are some links in the show notes to some of the fantastic articles that I use to research this episode. And there are so many more rabbit holes left to go down after the end of this conversation. If you want to hear some bonus episodes, you can go to patreon.com slash you're wrong about. We have talked recently about Shakespeare in Love, The Blair Witch Project, all the greats. You can hear our friends Dana Schwartz, Chelsea Weber-Smith, Jamie Loftus, and you can also spend your money on something else, like some great rainbow nail polish for Pride.

And over in our tea public store, we have some new designs for you, including one that celebrates the vocal fry. Thank you for listening. Stay warm out there. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where sometimes at the opposite end of the year from Halloween, we do scary stories. With me today is Blair Braverman. Hello. Hello. How are you? I'm so happy to be here. I am so happy to have you here.

Who the heck are you, Blair? I am Sarah's friend and I am a dog slitter and a writer. I write about many situations involving the outdoors primarily. My next book is called Small Game and it's about a survival reality show gone wrong. So I've been thinking a lot about survival, which may have to do with the theme of the day. We are talking today about the Dyatlov Pass incident, which is something you may or may not be familiar with. But it's a story that I think is part of the modern canon of stories encouraging people to not go outside. And I think one of the things I've had the most interesting conversations with you about over the years is,

why do we tell ourselves stories about how we shouldn't go outside? I mean, historically outside has been where a lot of bad things happen to us as a species. Most of our evolution has been about building barriers between ourselves and nature. And we're also discovering at this point that there are problems also with having too many barriers between us and the outside world. Yeah. So like we're kind of trapped between two fears. Well, I'm going to start out by asking you, what do you know about this? Okay. So I have heard of Dyatlov in the context of like campfire stories, you know, someone's like, oh, creepy things happen out in the woods. Here's one of them.

Right. I know there were some Russian mountaineers who were going on an expedition and in some mysterious way, the expedition went terribly wrong. My understanding is that these were very experienced outdoors people who know how to avoid sort of the obvious outdoor mistakes or emergencies you could get yourself into. But they never came back and their tent was found torn open from the inside and their bodies were found mangled in confusing and horrible ways. That is just about the extent of my knowledge and it may be wrong.

I can't hear any inaccuracies in that. So this is like an accurate story that inspires a lot of questions. But this is also a story where the truth can be disappointing to people because this happened in February of 1959 and the last bodies of this group were recovered in May of that year. And so the story first was growing inside of the Soviet Union and then worldwide to the point where it belongs to so many people that the truth can be disappointing. I was excited to talk about this with you because I feel like you think about fear a lot and you write about fear and fear of the forest or the scary thing or the Yeti who will appear in this by the way

or like just the everyday fear of like, can I do this? Am I enough? I think of you as someone who faces that also who thinks about fear and moves toward it. If I may tell a story about when we first met, we were just saying it was about six years ago. Sarah and I had met because she reviewed my first book. Welcome to the goddamn ice cube and we were both living in Wisconsin at the time. We realized I was just a couple hours north. So she came up, she went for a dog sled ride.

We became friends and that summer my husband, Quince and I were planning a backpacking trip and we're thinking of, you know, there were some cool people coming. We wanted to invite friends we wanted to hang out with and I was like, there's this amazing journalist a couple hours south of here. Maybe maybe we should invite her. So we invited you and you showed up and you had never been backpacking. I had specifically faked sick in 10th grade to avoid a class backpacking trip, actually. Right. See, so you had never been backpacking.

You had specifically avoided it before, but you showed up and we had a bunch of friends there. We had our friend who's like a taxidermist and a trapper. So he's always out in the woods and we had a marathon runner friend and we had like some friends who forage. These are people with a lot of outdoor experience and so people came over to our house the day before we left and we had like spread out a bunch of group gear, things that we collectively needed to bring as a group. Someone would pick up the cooker and someone would pick up a tarp. You know, then there were a few things left and my husband and I picked them up. And what we discovered once we'd gotten on the trip and you were wearing LL bean boots.

I really believe that those were like the correct boot at the time. It was only years later when you pointed this out as an oddity that I was like, oh, yeah, it was summer, wasn't it? Well, they worked, but they seemed a little painful. Like, you know, we were backpacking in the summer. They are cold weather boots. I've tested them and they are. They were sort of slipping around and we like got to the campsite and, you know, somehow said everyone pull out your group gear and you opened your backpack and you started pulling out the group gear

and you pulled out one thing after another and it became clear that like 90% of this extremely heavy stuff, you had simply like not known enough to not add all of it to your backpack for the group. And so you were the person with the least experience who was arguably afraid of this whole thing and you also did the most uncomfortable thing and were the best group member of everyone because you were carrying this stuff for all of us and you didn't even like complain or maybe notice. I don't know. So it was amazing and you may be afraid of the outdoors, but I've seen you do quite a lot in it. Maybe that's a good thing about being scared. Is it if you're already going into the unknown, you're like, why not go into the unknown with all these cans?

But I love that that's how you think of me because that's the way that I need to think of myself as opposed to thinking about whatever mistake I made most recently, which as we know is my normal way. Well, I can remind you. I know. Well, that's what friends are for. Well, and this connects to also another reason why this story is so appropriate for us to be talking about because this is a story that I first read probably in my teens. It was written about on cracked.com, which I used to read that it was like the golden age of listicles. And so cracked would often have like, I'm making this up, but like seven creepy facts about what happens to you when you die or whatever.

Yeah, I remember those. I think this is an incident Taylor made for an internet list. And also that at heart, this is a story about a group of young people who were having a really good time together. And one of the things that I think has been overshadowed in the years of like speculation about how the creepy things happened or what creepy things were behind the creepy things, what gets lost to sort of the characters and the personalities of the people who died. And so I'm going to focus on some accounts that try and bring details about who they were into the story more. But I think, and I understand why we kind of pushed that aside because it makes it scarier and it makes it sadder. Or maybe we prefer to be scared rather than sad.

But these were people who were just very really young adults who were like clearly having a fantastic time with each other. Seeing pictures of them reading diary entries from the trip because they actually had a group diary that they were all writing in. And just getting the texture of their lives and seeing that it wasn't like this ominous, spooky, doomed thing. They were just like having a lot of fun as a disclaimer, I guess. Well, and also let's say as a content warning, like if you don't want to hear about scary things happening to human bodies that kill them or that happen to their bodies after they have died, this is really not a good episode. That's we're going to talk about that a lot, unfortunately. I don't want to give you recurring mental images.

So I'm going to be as brief and clinical as possible and not get sensational about it. That's my promise to everybody. But the other thing I want you to promise me, the audience, is that to try not to let this dissuade you from going outside because there's really good stuff out there and you should bring a friend. I'm just going to start by telling you the names of the people in this party and with the expected caveat that I might bookshare the pronunciation because I'm unfortunately not a Russian speaker. So an interesting thing to me about the Dyatlov Pass incident is that the name, certainly to me, has implied that this was the location of the incident itself. But actually, it's a mountain saddle near to the location that was named after Igor Dyatlov, who was the leader of the group, in tribute.

And their destination was a nearby mountain whose allegedly cursed-ness we will get into. Okay. So here's the names of the people in the group. We have Igor Dyatlov, who was 23. We have Yuri Doroshenko, who was 21. Ludmila Dubinina, who's the youngest member of the group, who's 20. Yuri Krivonishenko, who's 23. Alexander Kolovatov, who's 24.

Zanayna Kolmogorova, who's 22. Rustem Slobodin, who's 23. Nikolai Tipo Brinol, who's 23. And Semyon Zulotaryov, who's 38 and who joins the group shortly before they leave and is kind of an outlier. In the initial group of 10, we also have Yuri Yudin, who's 21, but who turns back early in the expedition because he's having, I believe, a sciatic nerve flare-up. And he has some health conditions that means he has to abandon the trip. So he is the sole survivor of the initial group of 10 students. And they're all students at the Uro Polytechnic Institute in Yekaterinburg.

It's interesting. Even hearing you list the names and the ages, they are young. I mean, you said they were young, but they're really young. It's powerful. It's an important reminder. So they take a train north to a nearby town. They arrive on January 25th in the May 10th, 2021 edition of The New Yorker last year. There's a wonderful article by Douglas Preston about new information concerning the Dyatlov Pass incident.

And this is another piece that brings us some information about who these expeditioneers were and what their trip was like before things went wrong, which I really appreciate. One of the stories we learned from this New Yorker article, which I love is background information, is that Ludmila, who is also called Liuda by the group. I'm sure I'm saying that at least a little bit wrong, was an ardent communist who wore her long blonde hair and braids tied with silk ribbons on a previous wilderness outing. Dubinina had been accidentally shot by a hunter and survived. Quite cheerfully, it was said, a 50 mile journey back to civilization. Wow. All right. So these people know what they're doing.

Yeah. They've been cheerfully shot before. These are experienced outdoors people. That's one of the merit badges that you got. Bizarro Boy Scout. I mean, zooming out for a second, I feel like you've also done a lot of analysis on stories that we tell about scary things that happen to people in the woods. And it seems like one of the assumptions people tend to make is that people must have had it coming to them by being not experienced enough. Yes, absolutely.

Absolutely. I mean, if you see, I'm always interested when you see a story about some sort of outdoor thing go viral, become part of a national conversation. You know, there is someone gets mauled by a bear or survives overnight or for many nights or any of these things that sort of break into national news. The comments aren't almost always people saying like, well, here's how they had it coming. Often the people who experience sort of dramatic happenings or in the wilderness are people who are experienced enough to have come adjacent to those situations. You know, things can happen. But this pattern of people who almost certainly have far less experience than this outdoors person going over every single thing they did to point out how stupid and ignorant they were. It makes me feel like people are just comforting themselves and telling themselves it couldn't happen to them because if someone knows more and they end up in an emergency, you know, what does that mean for you?

Yeah. And I totally think that that's also relates to why people are so judgmental about parenting. Babies are very fragile and people I think are rightfully terrified that something bad is going to happen to the baby. And so we have to tell ourselves like, I will never make a mistake regarding my baby. All these other chuckleheads will, but like not me. Right. It's as if if we have enough disdain for someone, we'll never find ourselves in their situation. Well, yeah.

I mean, I think you just summarized the thesis of this whole show as well as anyone ever has. When I've heard this story recounted about the at-love, I've never heard it recounted with disdain, but I have heard it recounted in a way that is completely, it's not about these people and their experience. Right. Focke tales remain consistent. And yeah, I think this is a folk tale in other folk tales, especially, you know, it's easier if you have an individual person clearly rather than nine individuals. If you're telling a story around a campfire, you're probably not going to take the time to say this person was an engineering student and they studied economics. You're just going to get straight to the scary thing. Right.

I mean, the other thing about folk tales is they often have morals or warnings, which will be interesting. If we revisit that after you have told me the story, what is the moral or warning that gets incorporated into this story as it's passed around? That's a really interesting question. And I think maybe that illuminates something for me, which I think without giving away what we're going to learn, I think the moral that it has had is in some ways doesn't apply to what the fact. May turn out to be and that creates a dissonance. Let me I'm going to give you a little bit of media now. Okay. All right.

I sent you a link. I want you to click on that and tell me what you see. All right. I'm opening this link. Oh, okay. So we have a photo here, a black and white photo. Oh, these people are just beaming three young looking people wearing packs. Parkas or anoraks standing outside a little log cabin or a couple little log cabins that are covered in snow.

And there's two people in front. One is a woman. I can't tell what the other person just hugging and beaming and pressing their cheeks together. And in the background, there's a guy, his big pack and he's holding ski poles and he just has this huge grin on his face looking at the first two. Yeah, I love this picture and we'll put a link to this in the show description. But so I'll read you the description underneath this photo. This was published in the St. Petersburg Times and it says you're a Uden hugging Ludmilla Dublinina as he prepares to leave the group due to illness in late January 1959 as Igor Dyatlov looks on.

These people look like they care about each other a lot. I think that's one of the things that that gets me is like it's a specific kind of trip. Like this is a group of a very experienced outdoors people. They're going on a skiing cross country skiing expedition into the mountains. They're going on a track that when people go to this area today and a lot of people do, it's typical. I think to travel there by snowmobile. There's an account I'll read to you later where somebody describes a snowmobile trip. There is being like pretty arduous snowmobile trips are arduous.

I'll vouch for that. Right. It's more physically demanding than one might suspect. Something that my relatively limited experience tells me that maybe is maybe not everyone thinks of is that like if your body is exposed to the cold air and you're moving fast through it, then it is colder. That's absolutely true. Yes, that does have an effect. And so yeah, so in this picture, Ludmilla is hugging Yuri Uden because he is turning back and let me go to her journal. Right before they get onto the the trail itself toward the mountains, they get to see a movie.

She writes, we are extremely lucky. Symphony in gold was showing at the village club. The image was a bit fuzzy, but that didn't spoil our pleasure at all. Yurko Krivanichenko sitting next to me was smacking his lips and oohing with delight. This is real happiness and it is hard to put into words. The music is just fabulous. The film really lifted our spirits. Igor was unrecognizable.

He tried to dance and even started singing Oh Jackie Joe, which is a song from the movie. I wonder what Igor normally looks like if he was unrecognizable when he when he started dancing. He stands very still. He paints himself silver and he does he does one of those statue acts where you slowly turn around. Obviously, I had to check out Symphony in Gold and I am delighted to share with you the news that this is a skating film. What? Yes. Oh, wow. I want to watch it.

It's Austrian. I'm happy for this crew that they got to have this moment and just watch a really delightful film before they went out. Yeah. And I there's something about the way the story is told. I'm going to read this cracked dot com article or part of it to like just give us all a sense of tone and then compare. So this is a 2008 piece on February 2nd, 1959, during the cold winter on Kuliat Siegel, Mountain of the Dead in Russia, nine intrepid ski hikers decided to do what they do best, which is ski hike, whatever the hell that is. On February 26th, the first of their very dead bodies turned up. Man, who would have thought such a tragedy could strike on the mountain of the dead?

Very dead makes me feel gross. I don't like that. Cracked.com did many things well and like sensitivity in journalism was was never really one of them. But yeah, I love this thing that we do where if something scary happens, we sort of find little clues that it was fated to be scary. And so in this, it's like they were on the mountain of the dead. And actually, if you look at other reporting, there's people who say it's a mistranslation in this article by Ash on the BBC. She talks to a member of the Mansi people who were an indigenous group who lived in the area and were the first people, the first entity who was blamed for the deaths of the Dyatlov group.

It's horrific. It has come up since in media about it that the group was in a sacred area and they were therefore punished by spirits or the indigenous people or what have you. And her interview, he says, that's not true. It's not sacred. Wow. If you see it as the sort of dark, scary, hard to see yourself in journey to the scary place, the mountain of the dead, where all the scary spirits are, then it also feels farther away than if you're like one night you're watching a skating movie and then you're on a great ski trip and then something happens. Yeah, they start their journey by train north on the 25th.

They begin their expedition on the 27th. Yuri Yudin turns back on the 28th. They continue and then on January 31st, they reach the edge of the forested area where they are and prepare to begin up the mountains. February 1st, they begin going through the pass and then they set up camp that evening. One of the interesting things about where they set up their camp when it's later discovered is that they appear to have lost their way. And there's a forested area nearby that would be a more reasonable place to pitch a tent, but it appears that there was very bad visibility and they didn't know where they were. And so they were on a slight incline, what initially was believed to be about a 15 degree incline. This is where the puzzle pieces are going to start coming.

They dug a little bit into the snow in order to create what's the word I'm looking for, a depression. A flat surface. Yeah, and to also shelter themselves from the wind because apparently it was very windy and very cold. The current estimate is about 30 below Fahrenheit. That's very cold. What that feels like is every bit of skin that's exposed feels like it's being scraped or stabbed. So if your cheeks are the areas around your eyes, your hands and feet start aching no matter how big your mittens are, how thick your boots are. Your nose can freeze if it's not covered. You get a crust of ice over your face.

It's just a very intense sensory experience. There can be sort of pain around your head. If you lose warmth, like if you open your parka to go to the bathroom or something, it can take quite a bit to regain that warmth. You have to run around, but make sure you don't sweat because your sweat could start freezing or it could make you cold. That is a temperature where there is very close to zero margin for error. And they can, it will warm up a little bit in their tent with their bodies. They probably were focusing on putting insulation between themselves and the snow, having sleeping pads or being close together because the snow is really what's going to suck the heat out of them. We know these aren't people who are going out in these kind of extreme conditions without the kind of experience they need to do it.

And this kind of highlights that, I think. And because this is kind of forensic temperature gathering, because we weren't there at the time, the estimates range between, I think, negative one and negative 30. We have negative 20 in there. I mean, even at negative one, negative one's not really a picnic either. Like, I feel certainly less scared of that number. But you also look at it when it is that temperature and you're like, anything in the single digits is like a temperature you want to cover your head for. Right. And anything, especially when you're so far, when they're so far from an external source of heat.

This is why to build a fire is honestly the scariest piece of fiction I can think of. The story. Because it's like there's no ghost. No, I hate that story. Yeah. So they pitch their tent and then at some point in the night, everybody runs out of the tent into the wilderness. And they are found in different places. And I'll start by saying that it's interesting to me that we tend to cite as a spooky detail that the tent was cut from the inside.

Because wouldn't it be scarier if it was cut from the outside? I mean, it suggests they were in such a panic. They couldn't go out the door. Right. Whatever was happening was of such urgency that every one of them is pushing through whatever barrier is keeping them there. Right. Now that I think about it though, how can you tell what side a cloth is cut from? Well, this is interesting.

So the New Yorker article brings up how they learned this. I'll read you a little passage. So this is investigated by a prosecutor named Lev Ivanov. So they gather the evidence when they discover the campsite. They analyze it and quote, the tent and its contents were helicoptered out of the mountains and set up again inside a police station. This led to a key discovery. A seamstress who came to the station to do a uniform fitting happened to notice that the slashes in the tent had been made from the inside.

Is that unimpeachable? Like not really. You know, this is not a forensic expert. I know that she knows her stuff probably. Like if you work with fabric every day, you know what it looks like. But, you know. I mean, the fibers could have been pushed in one way or another. I don't know.

Yeah. This tent has been on a journey. It seems weird that it would have been cut open from the outside too. Either way is terrifying. I mean, maybe the zipper door was frozen shut. Like, you know, snow crystals getting in the zipper and it was jammed. Yeah. Did they have?

Yeah, they would have had zippers in 1959. Right? Yeah. Right? Yes. I'm going to say yes. Okay, wait. I'm going to guess when the zipper was invented before you tell me.

1885. Hmm. That would put it 12 years before Jell-O. All right. Originally patented in 1893. Really? Yeah. And then I think we got the modern zipper in the 1910s.

Oh. But yeah. Well before the 50s. This is my formal apology to everybody. Well, I'll tell you about also how and when all of this is discovered because I think one of the key things about the story is that everything takes a while. There's a lot of time in between the hikers setting off for their adventure and the world finding their bodies.

So they're expected back on February 12th. And so the plan is that Igor Dyatlov is going to send a telegraph back to their school, to their sport club, I believe, to say, hey, we got back all right. Everything's great. But because it's 1959 and people are less stressed out, if they see that someone has been off Instagram for six hours, then no one is particularly concerned about it until February 20th. There's about an eight day window where they're like, well, they could have caught some bad weather.

It could have taken longer than expected. It would be unusual for it to not take longer than expected. I would imagine if it's kind of the strenuous trip. Yeah, although there's this balance where you don't want to carry too much extra food because it'll slow you down. So probably at some point, they're like, even if they're camping out, waiting out a storm, like their friends and family are going to wonder if they're running low on food. What is the point at which you would become seriously concerned?

I mean, I've seen my husband go out in the wilderness and not quite show up what I expect. I would say a couple of days can go by before I get seriously concerned. But it just depends on the trip. But I feel like eight days, that's sort of a reasonable give. Like it certainly wasn't negligent for people not to worry. And yeah. And then after eight days, their family members are like, hey, eight days, huh? That's got to be hard.

I mean, I can imagine the family members are also sort of telling themselves stories as the days go by. The stories would get more and more desperate. So on February 20th, the relatives of the group are like, something's really wrong. We need to do something. And so a search party heads up and on the 25th, the plane manned by a search party member sees signs of the group's camp. And then the search party honors the camp on the 26th and they find some of the bodies,

all of the bodies on February 27th. So this is almost a full month after the incident turns out to have taken place. And so the first suspicion that the authorities have is that it was the local Mansi people who, again, are an indigenous group in the area. And so they, according to someone interviewed for the BBC article, it's possible that people were tortured for answers. People were definitely questioned for weeks. What?

I mean, one of the interesting things about this story is that we're talking about the Soviet Union where there's a lot of disinformation and violations of human rights. And so if you have a story where elements of that become part of the legend, then even if they didn't happen then, then we're living in a society where it's credulous that that could happen. And I feel like that's part of the context. And this is about treatment of an indigenous group. And one of the ironies of this is that the final group of hikers, Ludmila Dubinina, Alexander

Kolovatov, and Nikolai Tebow Brignol, they are found by an indigenous hunter one day out hunting with his dog. And so I think that's an important detail, too, that we know potentially what happened to everybody because of the work of somebody who was at least tangentially initially suspected for apparently no reason of causing these deaths. When you say the final group, are you going to explain what that means? Yeah. So there's the final group of four people.

They're found under 13 feet of snow. By final, do you mean those are the bodies they didn't find right away? Right. Okay. It's not that they lived longer. This hasn't been disputed really by many people. It appears that everybody died apparently that night, certainly within 24 hours of each other.

I don't think anyone has hazarded a theory where that doesn't happen. They're simply found much later than everybody else because they have fallen into a ravine, it turns out somehow. And so this is one of the other questions, is how and why did that happen? Their bodies have significant trauma. There's trauma to Nikolai's skull. We have fractured rib cages. For example, Ludmila, who has a fractured rib cage, the analysis of those injuries tells

us that she would probably have only lived for about 15 minutes with them. So really significant trauma to the bodies. The first bodies that are located are Yuri Durashenko and Yuri Krivonishenko. Yuri Krivonishenko is the mandolin player of the group and he was mandolinning on the train north from Ekaterinburg or present-day Ekaterinburg. They appear to have built a fire so they find the remains of the fire. They built a fire after they left the tent. Yeah.

Wow. We know they had to flee the tent very suddenly in the middle of the night. Famously, nobody is wearing appropriate attire. People ran out either with one boot on in socks and bare feet with kind of underclothes, sleep clothes, minimal stuff. They ran out in such a hurry that they didn't bring appropriate gear. So the way that a lot of pieces of various kinds about this have phrased the central mystery is what would cause the experienced outdoors people to flee their tent and run

into the night to very likely hypothermia. I mean, whatever it was, they were running for their life. So we know that we have two people who have made it into the forest, which is down the slope from where they have pitched their tent. The people by the fire are also found with burns on their skin, and Krivani Shanko has actually appears to have taken a bite out of his own hand, his knuckle, which is one of the details that will be added to the creepy detail list. Some of the hikers are found with some amount of radiation emanating from their clothing.

So we have burns, bit in hand, radiation. And then something that gets cited a lot is the fact that Ludmila is found with no eyes and no tongue. That seems like animals. That's my first thought. And this is something that comes up a ton in other crime, and well, I guess this isn't a crime story, but it comes up a lot in true crime stories. This actually leads us, if we feel like it, to a little connection to the satanic panic.

Take us there, Sarah Marshall. Take us there. So I'm going to read a little excerpt from Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe, which is a book that I've mentioned a fair amount on the show. It's about true crime and why it is. And this is specifically talking about the West Memphis Three, which is a case involving three young boys who were murdered. They were about eight years old and whose bodies were found in a state that the police

at the time, this is the early nineties in Arkansas, deemed to be consistent with satanic ritual homicide because the satanic panic was sweeping the nation at the time. And one of the reasons why they see this as part of the picture is that, again, the bodies are found in a similarly horrifying way. So there's the argument that they have been, quote, sexually mutilated and that there are human bite marks on their faces. And then years later, when forensic investigators who have more experience and are not being steered by the satanic panic as much, they decide most of the injuries were likely caused

by postmortem animal predation, probably by the turtles or possums that lived in the ditch where the bodies were found. Turtles. The local nickname for the area was Turtle Hill. Wow. Who knew? So yeah, and this is a story where because of the atmosphere of suspicion, because the police in town already suspect this goth kid, Damien Eccles, it becomes evidence of satanic

ritual abuse. And in fact, it appears to have always been turtles. Maybe we like having these things done by humans because we think we can avoid humans in a way we can't avoid nature, but also we can punish humans. Like a human is someone we can get our anger and our fear out on whether it's deserved or not, but you can't do anything to a turtle. You can't do anything to a mountain. And also there's this idea of like, who would mutilate a corpse?

And it's like, well, only like a really sick sicko, right? Like only a truly exceptional specimen of a person as opposed to like any turtle or any fox. Yeah. I'm realizing you can obviously do anything to a turtle, but you know, maybe it doesn't feel like a problem was solved in the same way. Yeah. I mean, there's at least a theory about criminal justice in America that like, if you put someone

on trial, I imagine we do it partly to confront someone with what they've done and to encourage them to feel guilt or to understand, you know, why do we read victim impact statements? I guess like you can't read a victim impact statement to a turtle or like you can, but they won't know what you're saying. You cannot make a turtle regret. It's true. I think it's revealing that like something that apparently is just part of nature, you know, that if you are a dead person in the woods, then foxes and ravens and whoever will

be like, oh, soft parts. I love soft parts. I just find that so comforting. I do too, but I understand that other people don't. It's so comforting to me that like anything that happens to you in nature will not have been caused by malice. But all none of these things want to harm you in the way people can want to harm you. Over and over, I would choose fox buffet for like the way that my body is disposed of.

Put it in your will. Put it in your will. It's interesting how little time people spent talking about avalanches as a possible reason when we when all of this was first discovered. And one of the reasons is because it was believed they had pitched a tent on a 15 degree slope and it was simply not slopey enough of a slope to cause an avalanche. And so I think a lot of people at the time were like, well, that's mathematically impossible. We've ruled that out.

So now what were they beneath the steeper slope? Well, okay, all right, I have some twists, but yes. But so the paradox has always been, why did they flee if they fled, they must have feared for their lives. And so what? Why? Avalanche was always in the cards and spoilers, the conclusion I'm going to take you towards and which you probably know if you've been reading the internet for the past two years

is that the science today is supporting avalanche. It was always in plain sight, as far as I can tell. And yet the theories, I'll just read you some of the theories. Let's do theories. So the first theory is that it's the Mansi people and there's connected to that the idea that they have taken psychedelic mushrooms and then they went on a homicidal rage, which we all know that's what psychedelic mushrooms are like. Oh my God.

And why people so often take them at folk music festivals. I mean, just the racism in that. Okay. Yuri Yudin, who is our hiker who turned back and who we saw hugging Udmila in a really beautiful hug, like the kind of hug where you're kind of trying to like press your atoms into each other. Or that's how I think of it. Yuri Yudin said later, if I had a chance to ask God one question, it would be what really

happened to my friends that night. And his theory about what happened to Udmila, who was found without her tongue, is that they were all murdered and that that was to send a message that she was the most outspoken of the group. Oh. Yeah. What do you think about that? I mean, a murderer would have to be just as experienced in outdoors.

People don't go on 10 day. Murder trips. In order to possibly run into someone on the top of a mountain. But maybe that's comforting. Maybe if you're the person who turned back, it's comforting to think that whatever happened isn't something you could have prevented by possibly noticing a risk before other people did. I agree.

If someone is close to a tragedy, like I feel like whatever belief they end up at, it has to be something that's serving them in some way. So bringing us into present day theories and kind of where the consensus has landed, here's another quote from the New Yorker article, in 2000, relatives and friends of the victims established the Dyatlov Group Memorial Foundation, whose purpose is to honor the memory of the skiers and seek the truth. Its president is Yuri Kuntsevich, who, as a 12-year-old boy, attended the funerals of some of the victims.

He went on to study and teach at UPI, which has since become the Ural State Technical University, and to join its sports club. Now in his mid-70s, he still leads tours to the Dyatlov Pass. Kuntsevich told me that Russians generally favor one of two theories. The skiers died because they had stumbled into an area where secret weapons were being tested. Alternatively, the party was, quote, killed by mercenaries, probably American spies. Oh, I mean, you know, if we think about the roles that these stories serve for people,

reaffirms mistrust of government, I mean, it's interesting because now I'm like, oh, if we've sort of landed on avalanche, what story does that serve, or what purpose does that serve for us? There must be- Good point. If everyone's sort of landing on their theory for a particular reason, we can tell ourselves it's the latest science, but there's a reason that we choose to believe it. Yeah, and there's a reason why I land on the theories that I land on, and I make this show partly because I derive comfort from the thing of like, what if we look at this

creepy story really closely and we can find out that like, it was turtles, because I love it when it was turtles. It was turtles. And you know what? And it isn't always turtles, right? Because like, sometimes it is some like surprisingly motivated person who does something awful, but I love it when he can find the times when it was turtles. That's my thing.

Yeah, and what I find interesting about this passage, too, is that what it's telling us is that the two dominant theories are equally blaming the Soviet Union and the Americans. I think it's important to have the context that this is happening in the Cold War. You know, one of the questions I bring to this is like, why as Americans are we so interested in this story? Because like, we really don't give a shit most of the time about things that happen to people in other countries. I mean, what are the odds that they stumbled onto some sort of weapon storage area?

Well, I mean, you could say that this is an inaccessible place to be, have people working on this kind of thing, but if you're sending weapons out remotely in some way, which people are working on technologies for, you know, this is kind of, could be the same principle that led us to do a lot of nuclear testing in Nevada. Right, right. And like, that really happened. I mean, I'm curious, radiation is one of the clues we have, right? That there's that their bodies had radiation.

Is there, do we know if there's ambient radiation in that area? So there's not, but there is an area where two of the hikers lived or work because there had been a nuclear disaster in the recent past. And so they were kind of in the force field around that. That's not the technical term. Yeah, I mean, that certainly explains it. Wherever you were living during the Cold War, I think you felt it. And this is also the period during which Americans are really freaked out about the

idea that the Soviets are winning the space race. Competitive technology is being developed. So I think, like, I think it's entirely reasonable to suspect the government about caring about advancing its own various technologies more than it cares about the health of random citizens and being willing to cover that up. So radiation is something that by itself connects to so much of what's sinister about how people are living their lives at the time. And another reason they could have had radiation on their clothing was because

they were using a camping lantern that had thorium as one of its components, which would have also. Oh, yeah. What? So it's like scary that the government might accidentally weapons test you. But it's also scary that like consumer goods also, you know, have radiation. Yes. Not buying lanterns at garage sales anytime soon.

Apparently this was discontinued in like the 90s. Yeah. So the new lanterns for everybody. There we go. Let's talk about my favorite theory, which is Yeti. I love a child like Desire to Believe in the Yeti. But there is alleged evidence of this, which is that the hikers were also taking pictures. They were.

Wait, alleged evidence of Yetis? Yes. Don't worry. I'm going to send it to you. It's great. Oh, OK. Yeah. All right.

This is a big link. I'm clicking on it. OK. It's just a grainy photo of Bigfoot standing in a snowy forest. Because some people have looked at this and said Yeti and like good for them. Is this a real photo that they took? Yeah. My first response is I don't believe it.

Well, my first thought is like that's a guy. It looks like, you know, the little Loch Ness Monster photo where you're like, well, this is clearly someone did a grainy Photoshop here. Well, interestingly, we have another photo from the end of the role of film that also has a spooky thing happening in it. And that also connects to one of our other theories, our Dark Horses, if you will. Because UFO, because obviously. This is a real photo from their cameras.

I mean, OK, all right, Yeti. Yeah, forget this avalanche. Don't you think that this could be a person with like dark pants and a slightly less dark coat or jacket and then like a balaclava or something like that? Yeah. So this figure that we're looking at is just sort of uniformly brown. Yeah. I mean, I think I'm looking at a Yeti. All right. So you're on Team Yeti and like I respect that.

That's my other favorite theory aside from avalanche. I really would not have predicted I'd be on Team Yeti. But like if this is a real photo from their camera role, all right, all right. Who knew if we agree on like the class of theory where something scared them for their lives, they ran out of their tent. And then after that, they were just screwed basically and got screwed by the elements in various ways. Right. Exposure, they couldn't find their way back.

Right. And then if if we're on that theory family, then like it really doesn't matter if I say avalanche and you say Yeti because like ultimately it's about kind of the same the same concept of like something terrifies you and then you run out into the night and the elements and that's enough. No, no, it does matter. It does matter because one of those theories involves the Yeti's existing. Sure. But it's like a force with no intent came from nature and then started a domino effect.

I think what we're looking at, here's my theory. But I think that he's got or they've got, I don't know who this is of, but I think this person has like the classic big foot stance that we're all used to. He does. Right. He's sort of like leaning in a slightly weird way. Yeah. I would say like proportionately his arms are narrow and his torso is a little wider, which is like you think a parka would have wide sleeves as well.

That I would be negligent if I did not recount that I have been in a very similar situation myself in which I was in an extraordinarily remote area in interior Alaska with only one to two permanent residents total in that entire area. I mean, tremendously remote and I was completely alone with my dog team and I saw a human-ish figure up ahead standing on the trail. I had not seen anyone for a long time. There was should not have been anyone near me. And it was a very thin pitch black figure with thin arms and legs and head,

everything pitch black. And it was just standing there sort of illuminated in the dusky light and it's OK. I'm hallucinating because this figure does not make any sense. Something is going on here that is going to like upend my understanding of the world when I get to this human like creature in the middle of the wilderness. And as we're going closer, the dogs are running closer, all the dogs hackles go up. And that was the moment that I knew it was real.

And it wasn't a hallucination I was seeing the dog sought to. But what were we going to do? Like stop and not pass it. We were moving forward. And it wasn't until my lead dog, Peppy, had reached the human figure that I recognized that my eyes sort of refocused and recognized what it was, which was a human ultramarathoner dressed in head to toe black spandex, including black gloves and a black balaclava.

Oh, my God. And he was walking slash running across the Alaskan interior and was just on the same trail and had run there. And then we were like, hey, we said, hey. And then until I was feet away from him, I was ready to have my understanding of the world completely blasted open based on what I was seeing in front of my own eyes. And that's sort of what I think when I see this photo,

that it can look exactly like a Yeti in this photo. And like you said, you get close enough and you see a person in a matching snowsuit. How are you going to guess ultramarathoner, right? Like who I would never have gotten to that. So here's the UFO photo. Embraced. The last one was more real seeming than I was prepared for. This one is going to be maybe a step down from that.

This is another photo from their camera roll? Yeah. Okay. Oh, okay. This is nothing. So what do you see? It's just some like light blobs. It's like flash of light or this sort of black background.

And then there's like a white hair in front. It just looks like the camera sort of malfunctioned. But then there's a photo next to it with all these red lines and arrows that are clearly explaining how the like nothing blobs mean aliens from outer space. This is one of the issues with ghost photography too. Like I really want to believe in ghosts. I want to believe in like alleged photos of ghosts, but you look at them and they're like, here's a blob of light

that is the kind of thing that happens to film cameras all the time. And you're like, give me better ghost evidence. That's all I want. Right. I want there to be ghosts so bad. I would really love to be convinced. I'm not convinced, but I would love it if I were. Yeah.

So we crossed off UFO. We crossed off Yeti, I guess, because we want to like confirm the existence of Yeti's first before we start suspecting them of murder is my thought on that. Yeah. And like we personally, I think have crossed off murder. Yeah. And I would cross off American mercenaries because like,

I mean, it's funny like in all these conspiracy theories, you're like the American government was doing the shadiest shit imaginable at this time, obviously. They just like, they weren't backpacking into the yearls to murder random students because, you know, for what? For what? It's a lot of effort. And we famously hate that.

I mean, I also just believe that for the most part, once people are in environment, I don't like the word hostile because that's a value judgment and nature, you know, it can be selfish, but I just don't think it can be hostile. I just sort of believe that once people have trekked deep enough into the wilderness, you reach a point where you're like on the same side as the people who you're out there with. While you're out there, you're so out of your element that like just having another human, you are aligned with each other.

This reminds me actually of a Twilight Zone episode, which is premised on the idea that it's like there is like one man and one woman left, I think on Earth and each of them represents the US or the Soviet Union in the Cold War and they're trying to kill each other. It's certainly an expression of the horror and resignation people felt about how determined this conflict was to endure. The idea that people trekked into the wilderness, like people who seem fundamentally innocent, right?

And there's also theories that say that the oldest member of the group was a KGB member and this was his fault for that reason. Like there's theories that implicate various members of the group as sort of creating the situation in some way or having some link to something dangerous. But most of the theories I think are about young people like full of excitement and adventure and like doing this hard thing together with a lot of joy who are sort of maybe innocently wandering into this global, slow global conflict that they're going to be casualties of. And that's obviously incredibly real.

Right, right. I mean all these theories, real fear is sort of transposed onto the situation. So we can break down the theories and there are more but we can break them down I think into the supernatural, the human and the natural. Which theory do you find most comforting? Before the avalanche theory really was bolstered by some new research, one of the theories that emerged before that that I remember reading in my IGuessCracked.com days and finding convincing is I'll read you this passage again from this New Yorker article.

A 2013 bestseller by the filmmaker and writer Donnie Eichar suggests that high winds passing over the mountain created infrasound vibrations below the range of human hearing and that this induced such terror that the skiers fled. Oh I had heard that, I'd heard that. Right, what do you think about that? I mean that one's very unnerving. Yeah and I remember finding this persuasive that there could be something that sort of is a feeling you've never felt that just sort of goes straight past your brain and

sends you into a mortal panic somehow. Hmm, do you find the infrasound theory comforting? Well I did and then I think now that we have the avalanche theory which has gained support recently because they re-open the investigation, we've had new studies I'm going to tell you about but essentially we learned that the conditions were more severe than we had realized. I think there was harsher wind, it was colder than the previous investigations had estimated and the avalanche theory basically hinges on the idea that this was a slab avalanche

which means that a slab of snow, when they pitched their tent that they created a fracture which over time led to a slab of snow dislodging and then sliding into their tent and weighing about 600 to 700 pounds. Oh so not a huge one. Yeah like a mini avalanche or what they would have perhaps taken to be a prelude to an avalanche. So they escape while they can, they cut their way out on the side of the tent that's facing away from the slope because if this happened then they would have been, the tent would have been kind of buried by the slab that was dislodged.

Was the tent buried? So when the camp was found there wasn't evidence of avalanche because everything was covered in snow. I mean covered in snow looks different if it's snow that came from the sky versus slid sideways, right, interesting. I mean it occurs to me that the avalanche of whatever size wouldn't need to be hitting them for them to be afraid that it might hit them. If you feel that somewhere around you there's the rumbling of snow moving and you're in the darkness presumably.

If you hear snow rumbling and there's a possibility that it might at all come toward you, you might run. Can you tell us about avalanches? Avalanches, I'm a little bit out of my league when it comes to avalanches. I've done a little bit of avalanche training particularly when I was like 18, 19. So I remember learning about how certain slopes are more conducive to it and I remember learning to do avalanche tests which are sort of curving out a cubic meter of snow and jumping on it and seeing if it crumbles which will suggest to you whether you're in an area where the

snow is conducive to crumbling or not. One thing I remember hearing about avalanches which I, it sounds true. You know if someone is an expert in this I'd welcome a correction but it sounds true to me. If you're in an avalanche you want to like swim. Like you move as if you're swimming and it helps you stay a little bit on top. A lot of people die in avalanches through ice plugs forming in their mouth if their mouth is open when the snow stops moving. Snow gets sort of jammed into their mouth and down their throat and it forms a plug.

So you want to have some sort of protection around your face to prevent that ice plug from happening. If you have any airspace around your head at all it's so disorienting that we were told to spit and see which way our spit went in the airspace in order to sort of indicate which way was up. You know if you're in a snow cave that gives way or something like that even if you have an airspace around you the snow that you need to dig through to get to the surface is packed and as you dig it out you can't simply like take a square foot of snow from the roof and like put it on the bottom of your chamber of air.

The snow will expand as you dig it out and you can't pack it to the same degree as it was packed when it was you know packed by natural forces and so you will eventually simply make yourself immobile if you don't reach the surface first because everything that you dig out will sort of fill up the space around you until you stop having space to move at all and you just sort of have to hope that you'll reach the surface before that point happens. To me the fear and the comfort I guess also within being aware of just the physical realities of what will or could happen in the world as it is you know that snow has no ill will for you at all like it's the the thing it's least possible to project that onto although not when you're digging

out your car like and it's just so many tiny little flakes you know but just that snow itself like that if you are buried there are just certain physical realities that are going to decide whether you live or die and it's not about anyone's feelings about you it's about just physics and I think we tell stories to try and get away from that idea but I know that we've also talked about how you find that to be like much less scary than most things. It's true it's true it's interesting I mean a dynamic that you and I have Sarah is that sometimes you will tell me about horrible things that happen to people and I feel upset people are like I could not watch saw yeah and you've talked about how you know in some ways

it's a relief of anxiety yeah to watch that sort of film or engage in that kind of story and so now we're sort of discovering where the reverse is yeah this is my saw this is your saw this is what creeps you out and this is what I find like almost a little bit comforting about the world these natural laws that mean no harm see and I was the kid who when I was a teenager I would be like how will I convince a serial killer not to kill me and I would think this through and it was like a thought experiment I spent real time on and what what I thought about as a kid was if shit gets really bad how will I survive in the woods and I grew up in the you know Davis California and that one has served you more than that one has served me more and it was something I never

had an explanation for it I always just assumed everyone thought about what they would do if they had to run into the wilderness and how they would survive like to me I assumed this was a universal thought and my husband and I were were talking at one point and he kept saying like why and I was getting really annoyed I was like because everyone would think that obviously obviously like this is what everyone thinks about as a kid and he's like no they don't Blair why why why and like finally I burst out because I'm Jewish and it was something that had never occurred to me in my life but suddenly it made so much sense like I was I was raised on the Holocaust right it was in you know my community was it still is you know recovering from the reverberation so that it's

not a thing that ever can be recovered from you know and the way that I process that was this is what I would have done I would have run into the woods and I mean just the stories that we get stuck on they tell us about who we are and I think that's another thing I love about scary stories is that like our fears are ways for us to to think about like what scares us and why and how does that show us kind of the priorities we have and the people that we are and the things we believe about the world and it's useful information and sometimes it can yeah it can be a relief like you find the way to interface with fear in a way that that makes you feel more in control I think that's good. Right right that gives you a way out and to me nature is that

so even the story even the outlaw I I find it deeply sad I don't think I find it frightening. So I was thinking about this law researching it that this is a story that's scary because no matter what happened I think most of the theories have in common something where it was impossible to predict. I wonder if the way the story functions for us is to say like avoid situations where something truly unexpected could happen so don't go camping because I I feel like we do have like a class of modern-day folktale that tells us that going out into nature is the enemy and this connects to what I think is happening with a lot of stories about serial killers and like we see because of the Oxygen channel we also have a ton of media about

women being at risk from specifically their husbands or their male romantic partners and this being you know if you watch Oxygen you can sort of say the liturgy which is the husband did it so that's represented in media but I think we've spent a lot of time specifically during the years you know the golden age of the serial killer was at least we've dubbed that happening during the 70s and 80s and this is during a time when we're seeing the peak and the results of of the women's lip movement and of revelations about you know the realities of who women have to fear and a lot of the time it's men and their own families and I think the same way that maybe we're using the story of like the lone scary stranger guy and there's enough of them to be like genuinely scared

about that but as a way to distract from the I think far greater multitude of scary guys at home and I think anything that tells you you know don't venture out into the world you know don't go on that road trip don't walk across that parking lot at night don't just don't avoid the scary guy and if it's about nature avoid the scary thing and just stay home and society as it is where you're not paid enough and you're at risk from people you know. Is that how you I mean when you've heard this story is that what you felt the moral is of the folktale? Well yeah I think I'm kind of describing my own growth hopefully where I feel like I grew up with a sense of generalized anxiety about the world and this feeling of like something is going

to hurt me and I have to be hypervigilant about like what it could be so stories about scary stuff in the outdoors I was like memo taken not going to the outdoors. I think when I hear this story the moral to me is that things are going to happen to you anyway that you do your best and one of the laws of nature is that things are going to happen to you anyway. Yeah that is what we have to accept right that like the world is full of adventures with friends and you can like go on this cross-country ski trip and you're like telling jokes and playing your mandolin odds are you'll have a great time and you'll come back safe and you'll like this particular thing won't go wrong like in your life you do a lot of things and like over time some

of them will go wrong and some will have bigger stakes than others but that's something unexpected and scary could always happen but not because you were doomed right not because you went to like the cursed place but just because things happen sometimes. Yeah I think I struggle with that just because I'm like well if it's chance then how am I supposed to live my life according to complex superstitions that keep me safe. I think the superstitions don't keep you safe they bring you comfort and comfort is important there's definitely things we can do in the world that keep us safer I don't mean to imply that's not true but they're not they're not superstitions they're the ones that are like you know remember that well you told me this and I think about it a

lot that people get hypothermia a lot when it's in the 40s because they underprepare and like that's news you can use. Right like 40 degrees and raining is really really a danger zone for hypothermia. Yeah so we're gonna make like a hairpin turn do you know how the story relates to the movie Frozen? No no no I don't. Frozen is a wonderful movie that Disney made more money than can be imagined with and if you've been anywhere near a child in the 15 in the last 15 years then you know something about it. It's a great movie it's about true love being not necessarily romantic and it's also a story where they had to animate a lot of snow so Frozen comes out changes the world and then there is a place in Switzerland called the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory and

it's directed by a guy named Johann Gohm and he sees Frozen I guess and he's like that movie has like some good snow effects so he contacts Disney and he asks for the code that they use to simulate snow in the animation so that their laboratory can do better snow simulation effects. Art and science always linked. So using that code he works with an engineer named Alexander Puzrin who's also in Switzerland and they create a model of the Dyatlov Pass campsite. Really? Yeah they are able to learn that essentially that some of the trauma that we saw on the bodies of the hikers right we have broken ribs broken skulls that are fractured skulls that this could be caused by an avalanche on in the conditions that we have knowing now

what we do about the actual slope and the weather and using Disney animation. Wow. Our guys in Switzerland Johann and Alexander made another trip this year to the area and they have video evidence of a slab avalanche in that location. Wow. Okay. So we started off with computer modeling and now we have basically returning to the same place at the same time seeing the theorized thing happening. So they went on a snowmobile expedition as well. On the 28th of January 2022 exactly 63 years after the Dyatlov group was seen alive for the last time two professional mountain guides from Ekaterinburg Oleg Demianenko and Dmitry Borisov left for the Dyatlov Pass on two snowmobiles. The initially favorable weather conditions quickly deteriorated

with wind and temperatures becoming similar to those on the night of the 1959 tragedy. Several times the 300 kilograms snowmobiles and their drivers were overturned by wind gusts. Visibility became extremely poor and then when after a few failed attempts the two mountain guides approached their destination the visibility briefly improved and revealed traces of two snow slab avalanches. They document this and then watch the snow cover them within an hour and so the reasoning that Puzarin and Gaum have is that the search party who arrives a month after the fact clearly wouldn't have found evidence of an avalanche either because everything is covered up so quickly and I'm curious what you think of that reavalanche forensics. That is out of my pay grade.

All right we got to do a follow-up avalanche show and I for one am looking forward to it. In Russia in 2019 the investigation is reopened and it's headed by a prosecutor by Andrey Kuryakov and so his initial thought is we're going to rule out everything except for Hurricane avalanche and slab. Hurricane? Yeah I would not have expected that myself. That group decides on slab avalanche. Our Swiss avalanche experts say well this slab was heavy enough and moving at a high enough speed to have caused the traumatic injuries that we see which is one of the paradoxes that the original investigation focuses on and is phrased as none of the bodies had external penetrating wounds so there's some kind of blunt trauma has

happened. And so the Swiss avalanche study says that the slab is responsible. Kuryakov has a slightly different approach so this investigation concludes or presents a theory where the slab looses itself, it crashes into the tent, the hikers flee, they run into the trees to shelter themselves. Some of them try to build a fire. We see also that there are branches from the nearby trees broken off and somebody has climbed up to get tree branches and there's traces of skin on the tree from you know scraping somebody scraping themselves trying to get firewood. The hikers who are discovered by the fire are burned because they're too close to the fire. I like this theory because it makes sense to me that you would be close to the fire and

that's where the burns are from. That does explain it. An argument also that this investigation puts forth is that there's the bite taken out of the hand because someone is because Krivonishenko who has the mysterious bite from a knuckle is testing his hand for frost bite and seeing if he has any feeling. Oh, if you don't have feeling you keep biting down waiting for the moment you feel it. Something people have talked about over the years about why everyone is so scantily dressed is that they had hypothermia and engaged in paradoxical undressing, which again you can speak to better than I can, but I mean this is one that I think the avalanche theory again, what I like about the avalanche theory is its simplicity because if we have the paradoxical

undressing theory then it's something scared them so much that they ran out of the tent and then took their clothes off as opposed to they just never had a chance to get their clothes at all. It could certainly be a combination, right? I mean they're asleep or they're in their sleeping bags, they're not wearing all their clothes so they run out in whatever they're wearing and if they were wearing layers they take some off at the end and that's because in the end stages of hypothermia your body has sort of pulled your blood closer and closer to your core to keep your organs warm. There's a point at which it sort of releases and floods your extremities with the blood that's been in your core and it can make your skin and

your body feel as if you're very warm, but in fact you're not. Yeah, and so the the Karyakov theory goes that the two hikers by the fire die first, people take the clothes off of them and divide them amongst each other, people are also found wearing other people's clothing. So we have in this theory seven remaining people, so three of them including Igor Dyatlov are found in the snow facing the tent as if they have been trying to get back to it. They're trying to find the tent and in this theory they just can't and they don't make it there and they succumb to hypothermia very quickly. How far was the fire from the tent? Do we know? The woods are about a mile away from the tent. But a mile is a long way, especially if they didn't have their skis, right? You know,

so you're sinking in, who knows how deep, chest deep with each step, you know, and you don't have your clothes and you don't have strength and you don't have warmth and it's 30 below, it's just it's it could become an impossible journey. It's a sad fact, but it's not a malicious fact. Yeah, right, that's the thing is that the world doesn't have it out for you, it just doesn't have it in for you either. So the four people who are found buried under snow in May with the most severe injuries, and I'm quoting from the New York article again, the other four who were better dressed decided to build a snow den to shelter in overnight. They needed deep snow, which they found in a ravine a couple of hundred feet away. Unfortunately, the spot they picked lay above

a stream, a tributary at the lows of a river. The stream, which never freezes, had hollowed out a deep icy tunnel, and the group's digging caused its roof to collapse, throwing them onto the rocky streambed and burying them in 10 to 15 feet of snow. The pressure of tons of snow forcing them against the rocks caused the traumatic injuries found in the group. It certainly sounds plausible. Yeah. I mean, once again, I'm just struck by how much these people knew what they were doing. Yeah. A snow cave once who've been in it for a while, if it's small enough, will always be at freezing. If it has a little bit of warmth inside, like you or a little something giving off heat, it will sort of, I guess I shouldn't say always, it will often end up around freezing. So

if it's 30 below outside, they could theoretically be in a snow cave where it's 60 degrees warmer than the outside air. I mean, they were doing everything they knew how to do. They were making all the right choices apparently. And that doesn't mean that they courted what happened to them. Brave, competent people who care deeply about each other. I don't know. I think it, to me, it's the story is really interesting because we have spent 63 years at this point kind of trying to come up with some story complicated enough to explain how nine smart, strong, experienced people who were looking out for each other all ended up dead. I mean, I find it grounding that it was just something extremely simple. There aren't cursed

places. There aren't, in my opinion, there aren't these mysterious forces that doom you if you set out on a trip to a certain mountain, to a certain place. It's just sometimes the snow falls in a certain way. I don't want this to be an anti-hiking story. If you want to honor the memory of these nine lovely people, then go build a snow cave. It's fun. I'll tell you what. We're in the woods right now, me and Sarah, in our separate little buildings. We're just in that sort of Northwoods dusky moment where you can still see through the forest, but very soon we won't be able to. And Sarah, when we hang up, let's put on our headlamps and go for a walk in the woods. Let's do it. I'll see you in the woods, Blair. All right, we'll see you there.

And that is it for our episode this week. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you learned something. And I hope you go have an adventure, whatever that means for you. Thank you, as always, to Carolyn Kendrick. See you in two weeks.