Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (26 page)

A DEEP, SPLITTING
CRACK!
FORCED ME AWAKE. I HAD TO
switch on my headlamp in order to see anything. Borzenkov was on the floor asleep, still snug in his Technicolor snowsuit, with Voroshchuk sleeping beside him. The noise had come from the direction of Kuntsevich, who was standing near a rudimentary cement-brick stove and was bringing an ax down on a wedge of wood. I was happy to see someone preparing a fire, as I had never experienced a morning so miserably cold.

The structure was a one-room cabin in the style of nearly every home I’d seen pictured in this part of Russia. There was no running water, and therefore no bathroom, kitchen or basin. The walls were exposed logs and, from what I’d seen of the hikers’ photos, similar to those of the Sector 41 cabins. The hikers must have awoken to a very similar view on their final morning in civilization.

Sleeping on a cot opposite me was our host, who I assumed to be the Mansi owner of the cabin. Lying across him was his dog, a German shepherd—the same breed that had been used during the search for the hikers. I was reminded of how the search dogs had slept in the tents with the volunteers each night. But the trade-off for their warmth had been the smell of wet fur, of which Ivanov had later complained to his family. This shepherd was now serving the same purpose, as a foul-smelling but affectionate electric blanket.

After Kuntsevich set fire to some kindling with a butane torch, he boiled a kettle of water. Borzenkov rose from the cold floor, presumably roused by the aroma of the instant coffee Kuntsevich had been preparing. He held out his hands for a mugful and took appreciative gulps.

The man and his dog awoke soon after, each stretching on the cot. He produced a large glass jar of what looked like stewed tomatoes, half slurped, half chewed the contents, and chased the mixture with swigs of vodka. The man and Kuntsevich exchanged a few words, but otherwise, things seemed to be business as usual. He put on his Valenki boots, threw a heavy jacket over his T-shirt and stepped out into the snow. I observed him through the window. He woke himself up with what I have since dubbed a “Russian snow bath.” He removed his jacket and began by grabbing a handful of snow and rubbing it on his underarms, chest, neck and face. After a few deep breaths and invigorating chest pounds, he returned to the cabin.

After I finished my coffee, I put on my boots and stepped outside myself. The stillness of Ushma was otherworldly. Ivdel had been quiet, but at that moment, there was a silence to this native village that I had never experienced anywhere. I took in a sharp lungful of air. Then I stooped down and grabbed a handful of snow and stuck it beneath my clothing, attempting to replicate the snow bath. I braced for the shock of snow on my skin, but it was surprisingly pleasant and invigorating. Finally, with no one watching, I gave my
chest a vigorous pounding. When I walked back into the cabin, I was greeted with a nod of comradeship, immediately realizing they’d witnessed my entire routine through the small front window. It seemed that I’d earned the man’s approval and he motioned toward me. His name was Oleg. Through Voroshchuk, he apologized for the lack of a proper welcome the night before and for his dog. He had been in a drunken sleep when we arrived, and from his perspective an intruder had busted into his room unannounced. It turned out Kuntsevich, who arranged our stay in Ushma, failed to mention to Oleg that he would be traveling with an American. Kuntsevich also failed to mention to me—until months later, after I’d returned home—that Oleg was not a Mansi, as I had assumed given the location and rustic nature of our accommodations. He was, in fact, a thirty-year-old Russian who worked in rescue services in Ivdel. Staying in a freezing cabin with his dog in one of the more remote areas of Russia had evidently been Oleg’s idea of a vacation.

AS WE ATE BREAKFAST FROM A CAN, MY COMPANIONS AND
I discussed with our host our plans for getting to Holatchahl mountain. Voroshchuk translated only fragments of the conversation, but from what I could understand, there were potential weather problems on the pass. As we had all agreed to let Kuntsevich call the shots, only he would be able to give us the green light. Kuntsevich knew my determination to make the trip, but he would make the call.

As Oleg and the other three continued to weigh the risks of leaving that morning, I took the opportunity to step outside again and take in the village. Though it was mostly cloudy, some sunlight filtered through the evergreens and onto the snowy roofs of Ushma. A few of the cabins had smoke issuing from their chimneys, and I took a deep breath, pulling the smell of pine and burning firewood into my lungs. I learned later from a local Mansi man who visited our
cabin that there were thirty villagers living here, mostly families, in about a dozen cabins. The Mansi here lived simply, supplementing government subsidies with subsistence farming and the sale from sable furs, the hunting of which is regulated by the government.

Not unlike the plight of Native Americans, who were forced from their lands during Manifest Destiny in the United States, the Mansi have been confined to smaller and smaller areas of land, mostly remote regions of the Ural Mountains. Today, they are represented in small villages such as Ushma, as well as settlements on the North Sosva and Ob Rivers. While census data has indicated a slow increase in the number of people claiming Mansi ethnicity (from 5,179 in 1926 to 12,269 in 2010), there are estimated to be fewer than a thousand who still speak the language, which suggests that it could be bound for extinction.

It took me less than thirty minutes to traverse the entire village over boot-trodden paths and through waist-deep snow. As I headed back to Oleg’s cabin, I spotted something 100 yards in the distance. It was a large wooden bridge that spanned the frozen Auspiya River—the same river along which the Dyatlov group had skied over a half a century before.

23

MARCH–MAY 1959

WHEN INVESTIGATORS DEVELOPED THE FILM FROM THE
Dyatlov group’s cameras, the negatives revealed nothing out of the ordinary, at least not at first glance. The rolls from the three Zorki cameras belonging to Igor, Rustik and Georgy totaled eighty-eight exposures taken over nine days. They were images one would expect from such a trip—ten young people enjoying each other’s company over winter break. Some of the shots were candid, capturing an arbitrary moment of preparation or rest. Others documented a charming vista, settlement or the locals encountered along the way. And then there were shots that were just silly, with the group striking comic poses in various combinations. About halfway into the rolls are the final images of Yuri Yudin in the company of his friends. He was in great pain at this point in the trip, pain that was forcing him to turn back, yet he smiled brightly in the direction of the photographer as he hugged his friends good-bye.

It was the final exposure on Georgy’s camera that would continue to puzzle followers of the case. The image was dark, as if shot at night or in an enclosed space, but the camera was aimed toward an indistinct light source that dominated the left side of the frame. If the investigators in Sverdlovsk knew anything about photography, they would have quickly identified the octagonal circle of light at the center of the frame as a lens flare. 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.

Last exposure on Georgy’s camera, 1959.

This last exposure failed to clear up anything about the hikers’ fate and, if anything, had only confused those looking for answers. In 1990, decades after the close of the case, Lev Ivanov wrote that exposures taken by hikers gave him “abundant information based on negative density, film speed . . . and aperture and exposure settings” but that it did not “answer the main question—what was the reason of escape from the tent.”

But according to Vladislav Karelin, one of the search volunteers who became closely involved with the investigation, Ivanov didn’t need photographs—enigmatic or otherwise—to tell him that there was more to the case than some hikers running up against bad weather. The prosecutor had already been exploring the possibility that they had not died as a result of the elements.
In an interview Karelin gave to Russian author Anatoly Gushchin for his 2009 book
Murder at the Mountain of the Dead
, he said: “[I]n the first days of the investigation Ivanov reiterated that the students had died not of natural causes, and it had been a murder.”

Because Karelin had been both intimately involved with the search, and also a member of the hiking group that had witnessed “fire orbs” in the sky on February 17, he was brought in for questioning by Ivanov in April. In the conclusion of his testimony, Karelin supported the prosecutor’s murder angle. He conceded that there had been no evidence of a human assault outside the hikers’ tent, but he told investigators that the only thing that could have scared them into leaving their tent without proper clothing would have been “a group of a dozen armed men.” But Karelin retracted this statement years later in his interview with Gushchin: “I should say that this line appeared in my witness report owing to Lev Ivanov himself. He imposed it on me by asking a provocative question and then demanded to write it down in the report.” How Ivanov imposed the theory upon him, Karelin doesn’t elaborate.

In mid-March, Ivanov was called away to Moscow for reasons that he would not disclose to others in his office. Upon his return, Karelin and others noticed a pronounced change in his demeanor. “[W]e could not recognize him when he returned,” Karelin said years later. “He didn’t mention murder or spheres anymore. And he’d often advise us to ‘hold our tongues.’ ”

In a 1990 letter to the
Leninsky Put
newspaper, Ivanov revealed that the regional Communist Party committee had instructed him not to pursue the connection between the strange lights in the sky and the hikers’ deaths. He wrote that during the Cold War, “Such topics were prohibited in order to prevent the slightest possibility of disclosing data on missile and nuclear techniques.” 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.