In
1956 a group of nine Russian hikers, mostly college students at Ural
Poly-technical Institute, died under mysterious circumstances while
camping in winter on the side of Holatchahl Mountain. Their deaths have
been commonly referred to the Dyatlov Pass Incident which is derived from the name of the leader of the group Igor Dyatlov.
I had heard about the Dyatlov incident before and even had watched a
documentary on it and a movie that was partly based on the story. Most
of what you read on the internet about Dyatlov is conspiracy theory and
borders on the absurd. When there is an absence of information about an
interesting story that void will often be filled with wild conspiracy
theories and the Dyatlov story is no different. People have floated
theories that aliens killed the hikers, the government was behind it,
local tribesman or escaped convicts murdered them or that one of the
group members went into a jealous lover's rage and did it. I had always
felt that science one way or another would come to solve this mystery
and that seems to be so.
The book I chose to read about this was Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story Of The Dyatlov Pass Incident (2013) by author Donnie Eichar. Ok, don't let that awful title that reads like a crappy made for television movie on Lifetime
dissuade you from this book because it is fairly thorough and
interesting. Eichar isn't the greatest writer and the book shakily
begins talking too much about himself but it improves as it goes along.
So if you can get beyond the narcissism there is a good story here.
The book does a well at explaining how and by whom the investigation was
conducted and it also does well at putting the time in which this
incident took place into context with the government of Nikita
Khrushchev.
This book provides a look into the backgrounds of the hikers and
explains at how well prepared they were to take on the challenge of
winter hiking in the Ural mountains. I learned from reading this that I
had a few things in common with the leader of the group Igor Dyatlov,
we both loved photography, hiking and radio communications. It was nice
to learn about the hiking club at the university and the levels of
hiking classification it offered to members. I do wish it had gone more
into the Mansi people but that might have been too much of a diversion for the book so there is something for me to learn about on my own I suppose.
The book does come to its own conclusion as to what happened to the hikers that night on the mountain. The theory he postulates is one that involves meteorology. With help from NOAA scientists in the United States and a friend of the author in Russia they suggest that infrasound and a Karman vortex street as a result of the landscape and weather that night is what compelled the hikers to abandon the safety of their tent and die as a result. The treeless dome shaped mountain with wind blowing over and downsloping over it created twin vortices which resulted in infrasound. That infrasound had negative consequences on the hikers in their tent with a low humming sound that caused confusion, panic, possible physical pain and forced them out of the tent into the cold night. Some died from hypothermia and some died from a combination of falling into a ravine injuring themselves with broken bones and hypothermia.
The theory presented is a believable scenario and one I find as a most credible theory that is based on science to explain the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. I would trust proven scientific theory or a conspiracy theory every time.
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