Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

“The lead investigator, Lev Ivanov, wrote in his final report that the hikers had died as a result of ‘an unknown compelling force,’ a euphemism that, despite the best efforts of modern science and technological advances, still defines the case fifty-plus years later.”

Rumor, conspiracy, and Political Repression clouded the truth about what happened to the Dyatlov nine. Ivanov’s inability or unwillingness to give a more concrete answer raises far more questions than it answers. Determining what that force could be is Eichar’s main goal for the rest of the book.

“I was learning that everyone had his or her own ideas as to what happened to the hikers, and none seemed to match the others.”

The number of theories about what happened to the Dyatlov hikers and the strange circumstances of their discovery make untangling the truth almost impossible. The best Eichar can hope for is to craft a plausible explanation, as nobody will ever know the whole truth for sure.

“Arctic dwarves aside, nearly all of these theories involved a deep distrust of the Soviet government and a belief that the euphemistic conclusion that the hikers had died of an “unknown compelling force” had been used to paper over a darker truth.”

If the Soviet government did not have any reason to hide the truth about the Dyatlov case, their extreme secrecy is somewhat difficult to explain, though in a repressive regime no official wants to look as though something bad happened on their watch—whether they are responsible or no. The government’s actions, coupled with widespread distrust driven by decades of Political Repression, may have pushed some people to turn to conspiracy theories to explain the hikers’ deaths.

“My mother said to him, ‘You must not go, you have exams and you need to graduate.’ Igor replied, ‘Mom, this is my last trip.’ […] For forty years, our mother lived with the fact that her son had died, and that the circumstances of his death were still unsolved, that we might never know the truth.”

Igor Dyatlov’s mother was right to warn her son not to go on the hike. Although she could not have predicted what would happen, her warning was prescient. This is another moment of horrible irony where individuals in Eichar’s story imagine how the disaster could have been averted.

“Why should anyone in Russia trust me? Why, as Kuntsevich had asked me, did I care so much about nine hikers who had died in a foreign country five decades ago? I couldn’t answer these questions to anyone’s satisfaction, least of all my own.”

Eichar’s reasons for investigating the Dyatlov case are unclear to everyone, including himself. Nevertheless, he pursues the truth about what happened with Perseverance and Determination, demonstrating that he does share some personality traits with the hikers he is researching.

“To Yudin and his friends, the next best thing to international travel had been escaping into the wilderness, which held a romance all its own.”

Given that young people in Soviet Russia, like Yudin and his friends, could not travel outside of the USSR, the option to explore the countryside and experience The Destructive Power of Nature firsthand was one of the ways to vacation. Young people who did this kind of domestic travel were known as tourists—a word that in Russian has a connotation of wilderness adventure.

“Odder still had been Yudin’s expression of his devotion not just to Stalin, but to Communist rule in general. How was Yudin able to reconcile a deep affection for the Soviet era, while carrying around an intense suspicion of its government?”

Eichar asks interesting questions about Yudin’s political views, but he never seeks to answer them. He is much more comfortable discussing the Political Repression that impacted people’s lives than in unpacking what it was actually like to live in the USSR as a young person. While Eichar does not shy away from political discussion in his book, he is only willing to examine it from a fairly narrow viewpoint.

“Perhaps, then, the forester’s warning had the opposite effect to the one intended: It only convinced Igor that he and his friends were on the right path.”

More than one person tried to dissuade the Dyatlov group from going on their dangerous journey. Unfortunately, their Perseverance and Determination, and their desire to get their Grade III hiking certification, made them overlook or even relish the warnings they received. Although they were experienced, they still underestimated The Destructive Power of Nature on Holatchahl.

“More specifically, why would the tent—including all its contents and support posts—be left intact when the hikers had been swept away so forcefully? This seemingly innocuous question posed by radiogram would turn out to be one of the most baffling questions of the case, one that would ceaselessly plague investigators.”

Every theory about what happened to the Dyatlov hikers falls short of answering all of the questions about the case. Eichar dismisses strong winds and an avalanche fairly early in his investigation, but for some time, he has no idea what to propose instead.

“When my mother asked me again, ‘Why are you doing this?’ I didn’t have a satisfying answer for her. I told her not to worry and that I’d be home soon.”

Eichar’s mother’s questions echo those of Igor Dyatlov’s mother half a century earlier. Despite knowing what happened to Dyatlov and his friends, Eichar’s Perseverance and Determination push him to complete the very same journey, thankfully with happier results.

“The hikers themselves would not have damaged their own tent in this way, even by accident, so this seems to suggest one thing: Someone from the outside knifed his way through the tent on that terrible night.”

Eichar guides readers through the assumptions that investigators made, some of which seemed self-evident until they were later disproven. The details of this case as they were reported, coupled with the amount of time that has passed since the incident occurred, makes it difficult to be certain about what really happened.

“I wanted to imagine that I was occupying the same space as these people I had come to know, but the truth was that this building had been rebuilt and renovated over the years, and must have looked very different in 1959.”

Half a century on from the Dyatlov incident, it is no longer possible for anyone to make an exact recreation of the hikers’ journey. Everything Eichar does, including walking through train stations, is necessarily a partially imaginative act.

“Minimizing the funeral turnout, and therefore minimizing the deaths of the young hikers, was the authorities’ express intention, Yudin says. ‘They wanted to pretend that nothing happened.’”

By choosing to sweep the hikers’ deaths under the rug, the Soviet government inadvertently raised many people’s suspicions. Yuri Yudin, for instance, believed until the end of his life that his friends were murdered by members of the military.

“But the large smear of light running up and off frame was mystifying, and would stoke half a century’s speculation as to what happened in the hikers’ final hours of life.”

The final photograph captured on the hikers’ camera appears to lend credence to the orb or weapons test theory. However, the fact remains that the photograph does not contain enough information to definitively answer any questions about what killed the Dyatlov hikers.

“If Ivanov had up to that point been entertaining his own theories of murder and UFOs, he was told to set those theories aside for the good of his country.”

Ivanov initially spoke openly about his theories, but he later stopped abruptly. Eichar implies that Soviet Political Repression persuaded Ivanov to stop talking, but exactly what happened to make him change his mind is still a matter of conjecture today. Ivanov did write a public apology decades later, in which he admitted regretting his actions and the way that he treated the hikers’ families.

“I couldn’t imagine what I would be experiencing now had we not taken the snowmobiles most of the way. I marveled at the stamina of the young people who had come through here five decades ago in worse weather and with inferior outerwear.”

Eichar gains a new appreciation for the Perseverance and Determination the Dyatlov hikers demonstrated as he retraces their steps through the mountains. Although it is not possible to find definitive answers to solve the mystery, it is possible to get into the headspace that the hikers were likely in before they died.

“My entire strategy thus far had been process of elimination, not unlike the oft-quoted maxim of Sherlock Holmes: ‘When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth.’”

To resolve the central question of the book he is writing, Eichar lists and then dismisses all of the standard and outlandish theories about the Dyatlov incident. Unlike some researchers who veer into conspiracy theories, Eichar deliberately positions himself as having a rational and scientific approach to his work.

“I was coming to understand that infrasound as a method of short-range crowd control was feasible, but the existence of long-range infrasound weapons was implausible at best.”

When Eichar comes across the idea that infrasound might explain the strange actions of the Dyatlov nine on the night they died, he briefly wonders whether government interference might have had something to do with the incident after all. While it is possible for humans to build various machines that generate infrasound, Eichar concludes that the hikers’ experiences were probably caused by the shape of the mountain.

“The symmetrical dome shape of the summit, he explained, combined with its proximity to the tent’s location, would have created the ideal conditions for Kármán vortex.”

Although Eichar has long been aware that The Destructive Power of Nature probably played a big part in the hikers’ deaths, this revelation puts things in a new light. The environment may have been unpredictable in a way few people have ever considered.

“From what Bedard was telling me, it sounded as if the nine hikers, on the night of February 1, 1959, had likely picked the worst spot in that entire area of the northern Ural Mountains to pitch their tent.”

By sheer chance, the physical geography of the area the hikers camped in could have created the ideal conditions for infrasound and a Kármán vortex street. If Eichar’s theory is correct, it would explain what might have persuaded the hikers to leave their tent in a panic.

“Yet at that moment, listening to Dr. Bedard describe how the mountain and the wind could generate this elegant pattern of swirling air—and therefore the panic-inducing infrasound—I found it the most convincing theory I had yet heard.”

Rather than focusing on conspiracy theories about Political Repression, Soviet interference, or UFOs, Eichar attempts to provide an evidence-based theory to explain the Dyatlov incident. No theory is perfect, but this one does potentially shed new light on the case.

“Ivanov’s written conclusion on May 28, 1959, that the hikers had been the victims of an ‘unknown compelling force’ is one that has come to define the mystery surrounding the case. Though the phrase falls far short of an explanation, the conclusion had been strangely accurate.”

The phrase “unknown compelling force” was initially thought to refer to Political Repression or a Soviet cover-up, but it may have been Ivanov’s best attempt to explain concepts he had never heard of. Indeed, even today, many people have never heard of infrasound or Kármán vortex streets, even though both have been fairly well understood for years.

“It’s as if the tent is a swiftly sinking ship, and the hikers must abandon it, at all costs, even at the risk of drowning. Get out, get out, get out, is all they can think.”

Eichar speculates on the hikers’ psychological states on the night that they died, trying to explain why they cut their way out of their only shelter. He highlights The Destructive Power of Nature to make people act irrationally when they believe that they have no other option.