You're Wrong About
You're Wrong About
The Dyatlov Pass Incident with Blair Braverman
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:
Here's where to find Blair:
Website
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Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, You Are Good
[YWA co-founder] Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Links:
https://www.blairbraverman.com/
https://twitter.com/blairbraverman
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/05/17/has-an-old-soviet-mystery-at-last-been-solved
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/extra/SoLiOdJyCK/mystery_of_dyatlov_pass
https://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-mysteries-with-really-obvious-solutions.html
https://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=89eb6401bf5311ec83a802f70a82b824
https://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/yourewrongabout
https://www.teepublic.com/stores/youre-wrong-about
https://www.paypal.com/paypalme/yourewrongaboutpod
https://www.podpage.com/you-are-good
http://maintenancephase.com
Sarah: 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, and 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 used 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/yourewrongabout. 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 head over in our Tee 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.
Blair: Hello.
Sarah: Hello. How are you?
Blair: I'm so happy to be here.
Sarah: I am so happy to have you here. Who the heck are you, Blair?
Blair: I am Sarah's friend, and I am a dog sledder, 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.
Sarah: 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 cannon 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.
Blair: 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.
Sarah: Yeah. So like we're trapped between two fears. Well, I'm going to start out by asking you, what do you know about this?
Blair: Okay, so I have heard of Dyatlov in the context of campfire stories. Someone's "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.
Sarah: I can't hear any inaccuracies in that. So, this is an accurate story that then 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 this story first was growing inside of the Soviet Union and then worldwide to the point where it belongs to so many people. 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 just the everyday fear of, "Can I do this? Am I enough?"
Blair: 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 up 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 were thinking 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 we should invite her. So we invited you and you showed up and you had never been backpacking.
Sarah: I had specifically faked sick in 10th grade to avoid a class backpacking trip, actually.
Blair: 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 a taxidermist and a trapper, so he's always out in the woods. And we had a marathon runner friend, and we had 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 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, 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 L.L. Bean boots.
Sarah: I really believe that those were like the correct boots 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.
Blair: Well, they worked, but they seemed a little painful. We were backpacking in the summer.
Sarah: They are cold weather boots. I've tested them and they are.
Blair: They were sort of slipping around and we got to the campsite and 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 90% of this extremely heavy stuff you had simply 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 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.
Sarah: Maybe that's a good thing about being scared, is that 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.
Blair: Well, I can remind you.
Sarah: I know. Well, that's what friends are for. 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 about. It was like the golden age of listicles.
And so Cracked would often have, I'm making this up, but seven creepy facts about what happens to you when you die or whatever.
Blair: Yeah, I remember those.
Sarah: I think this is an incident tailor 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 speculation, about how the creepy things happened or what creepy things were behind the creepy things, what gets lost is 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 push 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 very real young adults, who were 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.
Blair: Oh wow.
Sarah: And just getting the texture of their lives and seeing that it wasn't this ominous, spooky, doomed thing. They were just having a lot of fun.
As a disclaimer and also let's say as a content warning, 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 what we're going to talk about 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 to try not to let this dissuade you from going outside, cause 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 butcher 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 cursedness, we will get into.
Blair: Okay.
Sarah: So here's the names of the people in the group. We have Igor Dyatlov, who is 23. We have Yuri Doroshenko, who is 21, Lyudmila Dubinina, who's the youngest member of the group, who's 20. Yuri Krivonischenko, who's 23. Alexander Kolevatov, who's 24. Zinaida Kolmogorova, who's 22. Rustem Slobodin, who's 23.
Nikolai Brignolles, who's 23 and Semyon Zolotaryov, who's 38. And who joins the group shortly before they leave and is 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 Ural Polytechnical Institute in Yekaterinburg.
Blair: It's interesting, even hearing you list the names and the ages, they are young. You said they were young, but they're really young. It's powerful. It's an important reminder.
Sarah: 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 expeditioners 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 Lyudmila, who is also called Luda 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, Lyudmila had been accidentally shot by a hunter and survived quite cheerfully, it was said, a 50 mile journey back to civilization.
Blair: Wow, alright. So, these people know what they're doing. They've been cheerfully shot before, these are experienced outdoors people.
Sarah: That's one of the merit badges that you got.
Blair: In bizarre Boy Scouts
Sarah: 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
Blair: Yes, absolutely, absolutely. 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.
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. So, the comments aren't almost always people saying 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, 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, what does that mean for you?
Sarah: Yeah, and I totally think that 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 I will never make a mistake regarding my baby. All these other chuckle heads will, but not me.
Blair: Right? It's as if we have enough disdain for someone, we'll never find ourselves in their situation.
Sarah: Well, yeah, I think you just summarize the thesis of this whole show as well as anyone ever has.
Blair: When I heard this story recounted about Dyatlov, 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,
Sarah: Right, folk tales remain consistent. And yeah, I think this is a folk tale, in other folk tales, especially, 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.
Blair: Right! 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?
Sarah: 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 facts may turn out to be. And that creates a dissonance. Let me, I'm going to give you a little bit of media now.
Blair: Okay.
Sarah: 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
Blair: 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 with 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.
Sarah: I, yeah, I love this picture and we'll put a link to this in the show description, so I'll read you the description underneath this photo. This was published in the St Petersburg Times, and it says, “Yuri Yudin hugging Lyudmila Dubinina as he prepares to leave the group due to illness in late January 1959, as Igor Dyatlov looks on.”
Blair: These people look like they care about each other a lot.
Sarah: I think that's one of the things that gets me, is it's a specific kind of trip.
This is a group of very experienced outdoors people. They're going on a 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 as being pretty arduous.
Blair: Snowmobile trips are arduous, I’ll vouch for that. It's more physically demanding than one might suspect.
Sarah: Something that my relatively limited experience tells me, that maybe is, maybe not everyone thinks of, is that if your body is exposed to the cold air and you're moving fast through it, then it is colder.
Blair: That's absolutely true. Yes, that does have an effect.
Sarah: So in this picture, Lyudmila is hugging Yuri Yudin because he is turning back. Let me go to her journal. Right before they get onto the trail itself, toward the mountains, they get to see a movie. She writes;
We are extremely lucky, Symphony and Gold was showing at the Village Club. The image was a bit fuzzy, but that didn't spoil our pleasure at all. Yuri Krovonischenko, sitting next to me, was smacking his lips and oo'ing 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.
Blair: I wonder what Igor normally looks like if he was unrecognizable when he started dancing. He stands very still.
Sarah: He paints himself silver. And he does one of those statue acts where you slowly turn around. Obviously, I had to check out Symphony and Gold, and I am delighted to share with you the news that this is a skating film.
Blair: What? Oh, wow. I want to watch it.
Sarah: It's Austrian.
Blair: I'm happy for this crew, that they got to have this moment and just watch a really delightful film before they went out.
Sarah: Yeah, and there's something about the way the story is told. I'm going to read this cracked.com article or part of it, to 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 Kholat Syakhl, 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've thought such a tragedy could strike on the mountain of the dead."
Blair: Very dead, makes me feel gross. I don't like that.
Sarah: Cracked.com did many things well and like sensitivity and journalism 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 faded 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.
Blair: It's horrific.
Sara: It has come up since in the 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 interviewee says, that's not true, it's not sacred. So, if you see it as this 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.
Then 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 pick 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.
Blair: Flat surface?
Sarah: 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.
Blair: 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, cause 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.
Sarah: We know these aren't people who are going out in these kinds 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 a forensic temperature gathering because we weren't there at the time, the estimates range between, negative one and negative thirty, we have negative twenty in there. Even at negative one, negative one isn't really a picnic either. 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
Blair: Right and anything, especially, when you’re so far, when they’re so far from an external source of heat.
Sarah: This is why to build a fire is honestly the scariest piece of fiction I can think of. It’s because there's no ghost.
Blair: No, I hate that story.
Sarah: So they pitched 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. 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.
Blair: I mean, it suggests they were in such a panic they couldn't go out the door. Whatever was happening was of such urgency, that every one of them is pushing through whatever barrier is keeping them there.
Sarah: Right.
Blair: Now that I think about it though. How can you tell what side of cloth is cut from?
Sarah: 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 discovered the campsite, they analyze it,
“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? Not really, this is not a forensic expert. I know that she knows her stuff, probably. If you work with fabric every day, you know what it looks like, but you know, the fibers could’ve been pushed in one way or another.
Blair: I don’t know.
Sarah: This tent has been on a journey.
Blair: It seems weird that it would've been cut open from the outside, too.
Sarah: So, either way is terrifying.
Blair: Maybe the zipper door was frozen shut. Snow crystals getting in the zipper, and it was jammed.
Sarah: Yeah. That seemed, oh, did they have, yeah, they would've had zippers in 1959, right?
Blair: Yeah.
Sarah: Right. Yeah. I'm going to say yes. Okay. Wait, I'm going to…
Blair: Okay, wait, I’m going to guess when the zipper was invented before you tell me, 1885.
Sarah: That would put it 12 years before Jell-O. All right, originally patented in 1893.
Blair: Really?
Sarah: Yeah. And then I think we got the modern zipper in the nineteen teens. Well before the fifties.
Blair: This is my formal apology to everybody.
Sarah: 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 hiker 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 twentieth. If 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 this strenuous trip.
Blair: 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, their friends and family are going to wonder if they're running low on food.
Sarah: What is the point at which you would become seriously concerned.
Blair: I've seen my husband go out in the wilderness and not quite show up what I expect. And I would say a couple 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.
Sarah: And yeah. And then after eight days, their family members are like, hey eight days, huh.
Blair: That's got to be hard. 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.
Sarah: 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 unearths the camp on the 26th. And they find some of the bodies, not 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. 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 we're living in a society where it's credulous 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, Lyudmila Dubinina, Alexander Kolevatov and Nikolai Thibeaux Brignolles, 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.
Blair: When you say the final group, are you going to explain what that means?
Sarah: Yeah. So the final group of four people, they're found under 13 feet of snow
Blair: By final, do you mean those are the bodies they didn't find right away.
Sarah: Right.
Blair: It’s not that they lived longer.
Sarah: This hasn't been disputed really by many people. It appears that everybody died, apparently that night probably, or with certainty I think 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, Lyudmila, 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 like really significant trauma to the bodies. The first bodies that are located are Yuri Doroshenko, and Yuri Krivonischenko. Yuri Krivonischenko is the mandolin player of the group, and he was mandoling on the train north from Yekaterinburg or present-day Yekaterinburg. They appear to have built a fire, so they find the remains of the fire.
Blair: They built a fire after they left the tent.
Sarah: Yeah. 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 under clothes, 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 experienced outdoors people, to flee their tent and run into the night, to very likely hypothermia.
Blair: Whatever it was, they were running for their life.
Sarah: 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 Krivonischenko 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, bitten hand, radiation. And then something that gets cited a lot is the fact that Lyudmila is found with no eyes and no tongue.
Blair: That seems like animals.
Sarah: 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 this satanic panic.
Blair: Take us there, Sarah Marshall, take us there.
Sarah: So I'm going to read a little excerpt from, “Savage Appetites” by 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 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 stared 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. The local nickname for the area was Turtle Hill.
Blair: Wow. Who knew?
Sarah: So, yeah. And this is a story where, because of the atmosphere of suspicion, because the police in town already suspect this goth kid, Damian Echols, it becomes evidence of satanic ritual abuse. And in fact it appears to have always been turtles.
Blair: 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.
Sarah: And also there's this idea of who would mutilate a corpse and it's well, only a really sick sicko, right? Like only a truly exceptional specimen of a person as opposed to any turtle or any fox.
Blair: I'm realizing you can obviously do anything to a turtle. Maybe it doesn't feel like a problem was solved in the same way.
Sarah: Yeah. There's at least a theory about criminal justice in America, that 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 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.
Blair: You cannot make a turtle regret.
Sarah: It's true, I think it's revealing that something that apparently is just part of nature, 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.
Blair: I just find that so comforting.
Sarah: I do too. But I understand that other people tell.
Blair: It's so comforting to me, that 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.
Sarah: Over and over, I would choose fox buffet, for the way that my body is disposed of.
Blair: Put it in your will
Sarah: 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 picked 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?
Blair: Were they beneath a steeper slope.
Sarah: 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.
Blair: Oh my God.
Sarah: And why people so often take them at folk music festivals?
Blair: Oh, just the racism in that.
Sarah: Yuri Yudin, who is our hiker who turned back and who we saw hugging Lyudmila and a really beautiful hug, like the kind of hug where you're trying to 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 Lyudmila, who was found without her tongue is that they were all murdered.
And that was to send a message that she was the most outspoken of the group.
Blair: Oh yeah.
Sarah: What do you think about that?
Blair: 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.
Sarah: I agree, when someone is close to a tragedy, 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 where the consensus has landed, here's another quote from the New Yorker article,
“In 2000 relatives and friends of the victims established that he outlawed group Memorial foundation, whose purpose is to honor the memory of the skiers and seek the truth.
Its president is Yuri Kuntsevichwho as a 12-year-old boy attended the funerals of some of the victims. He went on to study and teach at UPTI, which has since become the Euro state technical university. And he joined a sports club, now in his mid-seventies, 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, “killed by mercenaries,” probably American spies.”
Blair: Oh, if we think about the roles that these stories serve for people, reaffirms mistrust of government.
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?
Sarah: Good point.
Blair: If everyone 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.
Sarah: 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, what if we look at this creepy story really closely. And we can find out that it was turtles because I love it when it was turtles.
Blair: It was turtles.
Sarah: And you know what, it isn't always turtles, right?
Because sometimes it is some surprisingly motivated person who does something awful, but I love it when you can find the times when it was turtles. That's my thing. And I, 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. One of the questions I bring to this is like, why as Americans, are we so interested in this story? Because we really don't give a shit most of the time, about things that happen to people in other countries.
Blair: What are the odds that they stumbled onto some sort of weapon storage area?
Sarah: Well, you could say that this is an inaccessible place to 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, this could be the same principle that led us to do a lot of nuclear testing in Nevada.
Blair: Right. Right.
Sarah: And that really happened.
Blair: I’m curious, radiation is one of the clues we have, right. That their bodies had radiation. Is there, do we know if there's ambient radiation in that area?
Sarah: So there's not, but there isn't an area where two of the hikers lived or worked because there had been a nuclear disaster in the recent past. And so they were in the force field around that. That's not the technical term. Yeah. That
Blair: Yeah, that certainly explains it.
Sarah: 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 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 is 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,
Blair: Oh, what? Okay.
Sarah: So it's well, yeah, it's scary that the government might accidentally weapons test you, but it's also scary that like consumer goods also have radiation.
Blair: Yes, not buying lanterns at garage sales anytime soon.
Sarah: Apparently this was discontinued in the nineties. Yeah, so the new lanterns for everybody.
Blair: There we go.
Sarah: Let's talk about my favorite theory, which is Yeti. I love a childlike desire to believe in the Yeti, but there is alleged evidence of this, which is that the hikers were also taking pictures.
Blair: Alleged evidence of Yetis?
Sarah: Yes, don't worry. I'm going to send it to you. It's great.
Blair: Oh, okay. Yeah.
Blair: Alright, this is a big link. I'm clicking on it. Okay. Just a grainy photo of bigfoot standing in a snowy forest.
Sarah: Because some people have looked at this and said, “Yeti” and “Good for them.”
Blair: Is this a real photo that they took?
Sarah: Yeah.
Blair: My first response is I don't believe it.
Sarah: Well, my first thought is that's a guy
Blair: It looks like the little Loch Ness monster photo where you're like, well, this is clearly someone did a grainy photoshop here.
Sarah: Well, interestingly, we have another photo from the end of the roll of film that also has a spooky thing happening.
And it, and that also connects to one of our other theories, our dark horses, if you will, which is UFO, cause obviously.
Blair: This is a real photo from their cameras. Okay. Alright Yeti I'm yeah. Forget this avalanche.
Sarah: Don't you think that this could be a person with dark pants and a slightly less dark coat or jacket and then like a balaclava or something like that.
Blair: Yea, so this figure that we're looking at is just sort of uniformly brown. Yeah. I think I’m looking at a Yeti.
Sarah: Alright. So you're on team Yeti and I respect that. That's my other favorite theory aside from avalanche.
Blair: I really would not have predicted I'd be on team Yeti, but if this is a real photo from their camera roll, alright, alright, who knew.
Sarah: If we agree on 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.
Blair: Right. Exposure. They couldn't find their way back.
Sarah: Right. And then if we're on a theory family, then it really doesn't matter if I say avalanche, and you say Yeti because ultimately, it's about the same concept of something terrifies you and then you run out into the night and the elements and that's enough.
Blair: No, it does matter. It does matter because one of those theories involves Yetis existing.
Sarah: Sure, but it's 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 Bigfoot stance that we're all used to.
Blair: He does.
Sarah: Right?
Blair: He's sort of leaning in a slightly weird way. I would say proportionately, his arms are narrow, and his torso is a little wider, which is you'd 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. 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 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, okay, I'm hallucinating because this figure does not make any sense. Something is going on here that is going to 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 saw it too, but what were we going to do? 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 eye 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
Sarah: Oh my God.
Blair: And he was walking/running across the Alaskan interior and was just on the same trail and had run there, then we were like, “Hey”, we said, “Hey” but 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.
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,
Sarah: How are you going to guess, ultramarathoner, right. I would never have gotten to that.
So here's the UFO photo.
Blair: I’m braced. The last one was more real seeming, than I was prepared for.
Sarah: This one is going to be maybe a step down from that
Blair: Is this another photo from their camera roll?
Sarah: Yeah.
Blair: Okay. Oh, okay. This is nothing.
Sarah: So what do you see?
Blair: It's just some like light blobs. It's like a 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 nothing blobs mean aliens from outer space.
Sarah: This is one of the issues with ghost photography, too. I really wanna 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.
Blair: 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.
Sarah: So we crossed off UFO. We crossed off Yeti, I guess, because we want to confirm the existence of Yetis first, before we start suspecting them of murder, is my thought on that. And like we personally, I think have crossed off murder. And I would cross off American mercenaries. It's funny, in all these conspiracy theories, you're like, the American government was doing the shadiest shit imaginable at this time, obviously. They weren't backpacking into the Urals to murder random students because you know, for what, it's a lot of effort and we famously hate that.
Blair: I also just believe that for the most part, once people are in an environment, I don't like the word hostile, cause that's a value judgment and nature, 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 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 just having another human, you are aligned with each other.
Sarah: This reminds me actually of a Twilight Zone episode, which is premised on the idea that there is 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.
Blair: It’s certainly an expression of the horror and resignation people felt about how determined this conflict was to endure
Sarah: The idea that people trekked into the wilderness, people who seem fundamentally innocent, right? And there's also theories that say that the eldest member of the group was a KGB member and this was his fault for that reason.
There are 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, full of excitement and adventure, and doing this hard thing together with a lot of joy, who are sort of maybe innocently wandering into this global conflict that they're going to be casualties of. And that's obviously incredibly real.
Blair: Right, right. All these theories, real fears sort of transposed onto the situation.
Sarah: 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.
Blair: Which theory do you find most comforting?
Sarah: 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, I guess, cracked.com days, in finding convincing is well, I'll read you this passage again from this New Yorker article;
“A 2013 bestseller, by the filmmaker and writer Donny 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.”
Blair: Oh, I had heard that. I'd heard that.
Sarah: Right, what do you think about that?
Blair: That, one's very unnerving.
Sarah: 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 trans goes straight past your brain and sends you into a mortal panic somehow.
Blair: Do you find the infrasound theory comforting?
Sarah: Well, I did. And then I think now that we have the avalanche theory, which has gained support recently because they reopened 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, weighing about 600 to 700 pounds.
Blair: Oh, so not a huge one.
Sarah: Yeah. Like a mini avalanche or what they would've 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, the tent would've been buried by the slab that was dislodged.
Blair: Was the tent buried.
Sarah: So when the camp was found, there wasn't evidence of avalanche because everything was covered in snow.
Blair: I mean, covered in snow looks different, if it's snow that came from the sky versus slid sideways.
Sarah: Right.
Blair: Huh? Interesting.
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.
Sarah: Can you tell us about avalanches?
Blair: 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 carving 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 it sounds true, 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 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. If you're in a snow cave that gives way or something like that.
Even if you have an air space 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 take a square foot of snow from the roof and 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 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.
Sarah: 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, that snow has no ill will for you at all. Like it's the thing it's least possible to project that onto, although not when you're digging out your car and it's just so many tiny little flakes, but just that snow itself, 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, much less scary than most things.
Blair: It's true. It's true. It's interesting. 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. I could not watch Saw.
Sarah: Yeah.
Blair: And you've talked about how in some ways, it's a relief of anxiety, 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.
Sarah: Yeah.
Blair: This is your, Saw. This is what creeps you out. And this is what I find, almost a little bit comforting about the world, these natural laws that mean no harm.
Sarah: 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, it was like a thought experiment, I spent real time on.
Blair: And 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 Davis, California,
Sarah: That one has served you more.
Blair: That one has served me more. And it was something I never had an explanation for. 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. My husband and I were talking at one point, and he kept saying, why? And I was getting really annoyed. I was like, because everyone would think that, obviously, this is what everyone thinks about as a kid. And he's, “No they don't, Blair. Why?” And 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 raised on the Holocaust, right. It was in, my community was, still is, recovering from the reverberation so that it's not a thing that ever can be re recovered from, and the way that I process that was, this is what I would've done. I would've run into the woods.
Sarah: 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. Scary stories is that our fears are ways for us to think about 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 its useful information. And sometimes it can be a relief. Like, you find the way to interface with fear, in a way that makes you feel more in control. I think that's good.
Blair: Right, right, that gives you a way out. And to me, nature is that, so even the story, even the Dyatlov, I find it deeply sad. I don't think I find it frightening.
Sarah: So, I was thinking about this while 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, avoid situations where something truly unexpected could happen, so don't go camping. Because I feel we do have a class of modern-day folk tale, 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. 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, if you watch Oxygen, you can sort of say the liturgy, which is the husband did it. So that's represented in the media, but I think we've spent a lot of time specifically during the years, the golden age of the serial killer was, at least we've dubbed that happening during the seventies and eighties.
And this is during a time when we're seeing the peak and the results of the Women's Lib Movement and of revelations about, the realities of who women have to fear. And a lot of the time it's men in their own families. I think the same way, that maybe we're using the story of the lone scary stranger guy and there's enough of them to be 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, don't venture out into the world, 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,
Blair: Is that how you, when you've heard this story, is that what you felt the moral is of the folk tale?
Sarah: Well, yeah, I think I'm describing my own growth, hopefully, where I feel I grew up with a sense of generalized anxiety, about the world and this feeling of something is going to hurt me. And I have to be hypervigilant about what it could be. So stories about scary stuff in the outdoors. I was like, memo taken, not going to the outdoors.
Blair: I think when I hear the 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.
Sarah: Yeah, that is what we have to accept. Right? That the world is full of adventures with friends, and you can go on this cross country ski trip, and you're telling jokes and playing your mandolin.
Odds are, you'll have a great time and you'll come back safe. And you’re like, this particular thing won't go wrong. In your life, you do a lot of things and over time, some of them will go wrong and some will have bigger stakes than others, but that something unexpected and scary could always happen.
But not because you were doomed. Right. Not because you went to the cursed place. But just because things happen sometimes. 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.
Blair: 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.
Sarah: But they're not superstitions, they're the ones that are, 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 forties, because they under prepare and that's news you can use.
Blair: Right, 40 degrees in the rain, is really a danger zone for hypothermia.
Sarah: Yeah. So we're going to make like a hairpin turn. Do you know how the story relates to the movie Frozen?
Blair: No, I don't. I don’t.
Sarah: 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 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's a place in Switzerland called the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory. And it's directed by a guy named Johan Gaume. And he sees Frozen, I guess. And he's, “that movie has some good snow effects.” So he contacts Disney, and he asks for the code that they use to simulate snow and the animation so that their laboratory can do better snow simulation effects.
Blair: Art and science, always linked.
Sarah: 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.
Blair: Really?
Sarah: Yeah. They are able to learn essentially 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, in the conditions that we have, knowing now what we do, about the actual slope and the weather and using Disney animation.
Our guys in Switzerland, Johan and Alexander, made another trip this year to the area and they have video evidence of a slab avalanche in that location. 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 happen. So they went on a snowmobile expedition as well, on the 28th of January 2022, exactly 63 years after the Dyatlov group was last seen alive, for the last time. Two professional mountain guides from Ekaterinburg, Oleg Demyanenko & Dmitriy Borisov, left for the Dyatlov pass on two snowmobiles.
The initially favorable weather conditions quickly deteriorated with wind temperatures becoming similar to those on the night of the 1959 tragedy, several times the 300-kilogram 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 Puzrin and Gaume 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. I'm curious what you think of that re-avalanche forensics.
Blair: That is out of my pay grade.
Sarah: All right. We got to do a follow up avalanche show. And I, for one, I'm looking forward to it.
In Russia in 2019, the investigation is reopened, and it's headed by a prosecutor by Andrey Kuryakov. So, his initial thought is, we're going to rule out everything except for hurricane, avalanche and slab.
Blair: Hurricane?
Sarah: Yeah, I don't, 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 loses 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 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.
Blair: That does explain it.
Sarah: An argument also, that this investigation puts for us, is that there's the bite taken out of the hand, because Krivonischenko, who has the mysterious bite from a knuckle, is testing his hand for frostbite and seeing if he has any feeling,
Blair: Oh, if you don't have feeling, you keep biting down, waiting for the moment you feel it.
Sarah: 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 this is one that I think the avalanche theory again, what I like about the avalanche theory is its simplicity. 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.
Blair: It could certainly be a combination, right? 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 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.
Sarah: Yeah. And so the Kuryakav 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 this snow, facing the tent. As if they had 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.
Blair: How far was the fire from the tent? Do we know?
Sarah: The woods are about a mile away from the tent.
Blair: But a mile is a long way, especially if they didn't have their skis. So you're sinking in, who knows how deep chest deep with each step, 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 could become an impossible journey. It's a sad fact, but it's not a malicious fact.
Sarah: 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 were found buried under snow, in May, with the most severe injuries.
And I'm quoting from the New Yorker 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 of the lows of a river, the stream, which never freezes, had hollowed out a deep icy tunnel. And the group digging, caused its roof to collapse, throwing them onto the rocky stream bed and bearing 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.”
Blair: It certainly sounds plausible. Once again, I'm just struck by how much these people knew what they were doing.
A snow cave, once you'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, are 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. They were doing everything, they knew how to do,
Sarah: They were making all the right choices apparently and that doesn't mean that they courted what happened to them,
Blair: Brave, competent people who cared deeply about each other.
Sarah: I don't know. I think to me, 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 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.
Blair: 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, north woods 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.
Sarah: Let's do it. I'll see you in the woods. Blair.
Blair: All right, we'll see you there.
Sarah: 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 Carol and Kendrick. See you in two weeks!