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Nine hikers were found dead in 1959 after a risky expedition in Russia's Ural Mountains. New research offers a plausible explanation.

1611931327 Play Video Mystery solved: What killed 9 hikers in Dyatlov Pass Incident? January 29th, 2021 Posted by ETH Zurich The tomb of the hikers who died in the Dyatlov Pass Incident at the Mikhajlov Cemetry in Yekaterinburg. (Credit: Дмитрий Никишин via Wikipedia) Share this Article Facebook Twitter Reddit Email You are free to share this article under the Attribution 4.0 International license. Tags athletesdeathshistoryRussiasnow University ETH Zurich New research offers a plausible explanation for the Dyatlov Pass Incident, the mysterious 1959 death of nine hikers in the Ural Mountains in what was then the Soviet Union. In early October 2019, when an unknown caller rang Johan Gaume’s cell phone, he could hardly have imagined that he was about to confront one of the greatest mysteries in Soviet history. At the other end of the line, a journalist from The New York Times asked for his expert insight into a tragedy that had occurred 60 years earlier in Russia’s northern Ural Mountains—one that has since come to be known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident. Gaume, professor and head of École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne’s Snow and Avalanche Simulation Laboratory (SLAB) and visiting fellow at the WSL Institute for Snow and Avalanche Research SLF, had never heard of the case, which the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office had recently resurrected from Soviet archives. “I asked the journalist to call me back the following day so that I could gather more information. What I learned intrigued me.” Dyatlov group preparing the tent for their last night alive. (Credit: Dyatlov Memorial Foundation) The rescue group responding to the Dyatlov Pass Incident discovered the tent on February 26, 1959. (Credit: Dyatlov Memorial Foundation) On January 27, 1959, a 10-member group consisting mostly of students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute, led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov—all seasoned cross-country and downhill skiers—set off on a 14-day expedition to the Gora Otorten mountain, in the northern part of the Soviet Sverdlovsk Oblast. At that time of the year, a route of this kind was classified Category III—the riskiest category—with temperatures falling as low as -30°C (-22°F). On January 28, one member of the expedition, Yuri Yudin, decided to turn back. He never saw his classmates again. When the group’s expected return date to the departure point, the village of Vizhay, came and went, a rescue team set out to search for them. On February 26, they found the group’s tent, badly damaged, on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl—translated as “Death Mountain”—some 20 km (12.4 miles) south of the group’s destination. The group’s belongings had been left behind. Further down the mountain, beneath an old Siberian cedar tree, they found two bodies clad only in socks and underwear. Three other bodies, including that of Dyatlov, were subsequently found between the tree and the tent site; presumably, they had succumbed to hypothermia while attempting to return to the camp. Two months later, the remaining four bodies were discovered in a ravine beneath a thick layer of snow. Several of the deceased had serious injuries, such as fractures to the chest and skull. What exactly happened? The Soviet authorities investigated to determine the causes of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, but closed it after three months, concluding that a “compelling natural force” had caused the death of the hikers. In the absence of survivors, the sequence of events on the night of February 1 and 2 is unclear to this day, and has led to countless more or less fanciful theories, from murderous Yeti to secret military experiments. This is the mystery that Gaume was confronted with. “After the call from the New York Times reporter, I began writing equations and figures on my blackboard, trying to understand what might have happened in purely mechanical terms,” he says. “When the reporter rang back, I told her it was likely that an avalanche had taken the group by surprise as they lay sleeping in the tent.” This theory, which is the most plausible, was also put forward by the Russian Public Prosecutor’s Office after the investigation was reopened in 2019 at the request of the victims’ relatives. But the lack of evidence and the existence of odd elements has failed to convince a large portion of Russian society. “I was so intrigued that I began researching this theory more deeply. I then contacted professor Alexander Puzrin, deputy head of the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering at ETH Zurich, whom I had met a month earlier at a conference in France.” Gaume, originally from France, and Russian-born Puzrin worked together to comb through the archives, which had been opened to the public after the fall of the Soviet Union. They also spoke with other scientists and experts and developed analytical and numerical models to reconstruct the avalanche that may have caught the nine victims unaware. The Dyatlov Pass Incident in folklore “The Dyatlov Pass mystery has become part of Rus...