National Post (National Edition)
PROBE
The Dyatlov Pass Incident has baffled experts since 1959. Did an avalanche sweep the hikers away? Jacob Dubé
A new theory emerges in the Dyatlov Pass incident, which has baffled experts for decades.
In February 1959, a group of nine mountaineers — mostly students at the Ural Polytechnical Institute in their early 20s — set off on a daunting expedition to the Ural mountains in Western Russia, never to be seen again.
The group, led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov, were all experienced hikers. They had planned to hike to the farthest reaches of the Sverdlovsk Oblast region. Considering the weather at that point in the year, the Soviet Union had classified the trek as extremely difficult.
Weeks passed with no word from the Dyatlov group and a search party was formed. On Feb. 26, 1959, searchers found the remnants of their tent, which was covered in snow and appeared to have been cut from the inside. There were tracks that looked like they had been made by someone walking either barefoot, in socks, or just a single shoe.
Then, over the course of the next few months, the bodies of the Dyatlov group were found. Two — Georgy Krivonischenko and Yury Doroshenko — were discovered under a pine tree, next to remnants of a campfire, wearing only their underwear. Three more — Zina Kolmogorova, Rustem Slobodin and Dyatlov — were found between the tent and the pine tree, seemingly trying to return to camp.
The final four — Nicolas Thibeaux-Brignollel, Ludmila Dubinina, Alexander Zolotaryov and Alexander Kolevatov — were found buried under four metres of snow, near a ravine about 75 metres away from the pine tree. They had suffered severe injuries, including a crushed skull and broken ribs. One member of the group was missing their tongue.
The news of the incident made waves across the Soviet Union and an investigation was launched. Based on the hikers' diaries, they had set up their tent on the slope of the Kholat Syakhl — which translates to “Dead Mountain” in the language of the Indigenous Mansi communities of the region — on the night of February 1.
Then something happened.
The investigation concluded that “a compelling natural force” led to the deaths of the mountaineers and the investigation was closed. In the years since, the Dyatlov Pass Incident inspired a slew of conspiracy theories. Everything from UFOs, infrasound-induced panic, yetis, a romantic dispute, nuclear-weapons tests, and a government cover-up were discussed at length.
But a team of researchers has released data suggesting a more simple outcome: a small avalanche could have hit the tent while the hikers were sleeping.
In 2019, Johan Gaume was contacted by a New York Times reporter. It was almost 60 years to the day of the anniversary of the mountaineers' deaths, Russia had reopened the investigation and the reporter was interested in Gaume's expertise in snow and avalanches.
Gaume is a researcher at the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne in Switzerland and head of its SLAB research lab, which specializes in simulating snow and avalanches on a large scale. He hadn't previously heard about the incident, but went down the rabbit hole after spending a few days researching it.
“I just got into it and I just couldn't leave,” Gaume told the National Post.
Gaume asked a colleague of his, the deputy head of the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering at ETH Zurich, Alexander Puzrin, to collaborate on the project. Puzrin has previously researched forensic investigations of natural events such as landslides and their effects on building structures.
Puzrin is Russian and Gaume said his colleague was excited to look into the Dyatlov incident, which has become a household name in the country.
“Alexander Puzrin and his wife were already well aware about the incident. I didn't know any person from Russia who knew the case so well. In Russia, everyone knows about the Dyatlov case,” Gaume said. “It was a great collaboration. Apart from the scientific part, he's an excellent scientist, and he's also a very nice person, and I had a great time working with him.”
Finding a solution to a 60-yearold tragedy wasn't easy. The team gathered all available reports on the incident, including the autopsies, photos and weather data. The first step was to estimate the amount of time between when the hikers set up their tent and when they died, which the researchers accomplished by cross-referencing information such as the time the mountaineers' watches stopped and the placement of the Sun on recovered photos.
“It's not a classical scientific work that I do every day,” Gaume said. “It was like being detectives.”
The researchers concluded that a small slab avalanche could have possibly crashed on the Dyatlov group while it slept, injured it and left the mountaineers helpless in the wilderness.
An avalanche was initially dismissed during the 1959 investigation, but Gaume suggests that many telltale signs of an avalanche would have been concealed in the 26-day period between the incident and the search party's discovery of the bodies.
“The mountain is living, the snow is compacting, you have transport of snow by the wind which smooths the landscape,” Gaume said. “In 26 days a lot can happen that would not allow someone to see any signs.”
According to the study, published on January 28 in Communications Earth & Environment, while a small avalanche would be unlikely in normal circumstances, several small factors came together that could have caused one here. The group dug a hole to place the tent, which weakened the ground beneath it, and, meanwhile, the researchers identified that there were winds in the area that deposited a significant amount of snow nearby.
“You need all these in combination to make something quite rare. That's the combination that is unfortunate for them,” Gaume said.
His investigation also took advantage of publicly available data from fatal impact experiments, conducted by the car manufacturer General Motors decades ago, to evaluate how intense a direct hit from an avalanche would be on hikers sleeping directly on the ground. They concluded that it would cause serious injuries, but not fatal ones — which could explain why some of the members were found far away from the campsite with broken bones.
But while the study provides data on what could have happened, Gaume insists that they haven't solved the Dyatlov Pass mystery, only suggested a possible outcome. The Russian investigators who reopened the case stated that they believed the group died due to an avalanche, but Gaume said they never explained how that could have occurred, and he wanted to expand on that possibility.
There are aspects of the case that the study didn't look into, like the traces of radiation on one of the garments and the missing tongue. But Gaume said that these things could be explained individually, but if you put them all together, it's easy to see how conspiracy theories are made.
“No one survived, so no one is there to tell the story,” he said. “There will still be some mystery about this.”
Though this study has inspired Gaume to do more research on naturally occurring avalanches, he said he was going to take a break from solving any more cold cases for the time being. Like many others who have fallen down the rabbit hole of the Dyatlov Pass Incident, he got roped into the mystery.
“It took so much time, I was doing late hours, working on the weekends, it was so fascinating that you could not stop.”