Gigi Wu: The Tragic Case of the "Bikini Hiker"

Today we're starting with a woman known as the Bikini Hiker. After she experienced tragedy in the mountains, the internet turned her into a punchline, just another reckless influencer chasing attention. But the internet was wrong, and the real story is more complicated than anyone realized. Then we're going to Lennon Peak, where 45 climbers were sleeping in their tents on what was supposed to be a routine night, until the mountain erased almost the entire camp in just seconds. Now our first story involves some photos, but if you're listening audio only, don't worry, you don't need to see these photos to understand what happened. And if you've been enjoying the show, please help us out by hitting the follow button. And if you're a new listener, I'm gonna do my very best to earn your follow by the end of this episode. So listen on if you dare. Photos like this one right here made Gigi Wu the most famous hiker in all of Taiwan. She had managed to carve out a unique and somewhat controversial niche for herself on social media, routinely posting photos of herself on top of mountains, wearing nothing but a bikini. The more of these photos that she posted, the more followers that she would gain. Hundreds of followers quickly turned into thousands and before she knew it, Gigi Wu's body had been viewed by so many people that it's almost disturbing to comprehend. But that's just my opinion, who herself clearly didn't care. After all, she was doing what she loved. She was using her platform to inspire body confidence and to provide valuable updates and information about the trails that she was hiking. Every time that she posed on a mountain, thousands and thousands of people would be touched. And while she did remain humble about this, there's also no doubt that she enjoyed it. Gigi Wu was figuratively and somewhat literally on top of the world. But unfortunately, that would all come crashing down in January of 2019. Media outlets learned that Taiwan's most beloved hiker had not only died, but had died from hypothermia of all things. Headlines such as woman known as bikini hiker freezes to death on mountain, quickly spread all over social media and this created a wave of backlash and hate against Gigi Wu. That seems like the natural conclusion to hiking in a bikini honestly. As long as her t*cks looked good on Instagram, I'm sure it's how she would have wanted to go. She hit bikini bottom. So sad that she risked her life to get likes. I think those four comments sum up pretty well what the online reaction was after the story of Gigi Wu's death broke in the media. But do these comments actually reflect the truth about Gigi Wu? Is it actually accurate to say that she put herself in danger and ended up dying in the process just to get clout on social media? Was she truly just some ignorant and reckless social media influencer with no knowledge about backcountry travel as a lot of these online commenters proclaimed? The truth about Gigi Wu is much more complicated than the clickbait headlines about a bikini hiker freezing to death made it sound. In fact, as Wu's fans and online defenders will quickly point out, she wasn't even wearing a bikini when she died. With that said, and putting the haters and trolls aside for a minute, there are still some legitimate questions about Gigi Wu's death. And I don't want you to get me wrong about that. Was she properly prepared for the hike that she was undertaking? Was a solo hike in her chosen area, the type of decision that a safe hiker would have made, and finally, did her social media stardom contribute to her death in any way? I'll attempt to answer these questions and more in today's video. This is the full story, the truth about Gigi Wu, the bikini hiker. (soft music) Folks, if you couldn't tell already, this is gonna be a controversial one. And I say that for a few different reasons. First of all, this story has launched a debate about risk taking and gear choices in the outdoors. And second of all, obviously the nature of Gigi Wu's photos or her social media brand for the lack of a better term is also very controversial. These two topics are completely different, but they're also loosely related in this story. And so make sure you watch all the way to the end of the video because it's probably gonna take a while for me to kind of pull everything together. At some point in the early 2010s, Gigi Wu, she lost a bit. The Taiwanese woman had recently begun working on a peak bagging list called the 100 Peaks of Taiwan, which as the name implies, is a list of 100 Peaks above 3,000 meters or 9,800-ish feet tall. Now, I'm a peak bagger myself. I haven't hiked in Taiwan, but these peak bagging lists are common all over the worlds and definitely here in the US as well. The Colorado 14ers or the Adderondack 46ers. These are some popular ones. Basically, the idea is that you take the list and then you hike each peak, checking them off one by one as you do them until you conquered the entire list. The tons of people myself included love peak bagging because it's like a fun, but goal-oriented way to get yourself out into the mountains. For Gigi Wu, there was actually an extra challenge when it came to her journey to conquer the 100 Peaks of Taiwan. She had actually, again, lost a bet to a friend and her punishment, you could say, was that she had to pose for a photo in a bikini when she summited her next mountain. Now the details of this bet aren't known to me, but one way or another, this photo that she had to take as her punishment would end up on Gigi's Facebook page and it would unsurprisingly end up attracting some attention. One thing led to another and posing in a bikini quickly became a regular part of Gigi Wu's mountain top routine and it's unclear to me exactly why beyond just the bet at least. Now, those of you that are more cynical might assume that it was being done out of vanity and that Gigi enjoyed the compliments and the attention that she was getting on Facebook about her body and this is a totally reasonable assumption, but according to those who actually knew her in person, her mission with her Facebook photos was actually much deeper than just flexing her attractive figure. We're gonna talk about that a little bit later in the video but regardless of what her intentions were with every new bikini photo that she posted, Gigi Wu's likes, her shares and her followers obviously went up and well, they went up fast. In July of 2016, Gigi Wu reached the top of her final peak having officially conquered the 100 peaks of Taiwan. And at this point she'd been doing it for a few years and had gathered quite the following on social media and she was definitely becoming a very well-known figure within the Taiwanese hiking community. Now I can speak from experience here, anytime you get past a certain number of followers or views or whatever, you're gonna get some haters, you're gonna have some detractors. This was definitely the case with Gigi Wu, but I'd be willing to bet that most of these people were just jealous. I mean, at this point it was becoming very difficult if not impossible for anyone to argue that Gigi Wu was only seeking praise and attention for her body. And I say that because, I mean, after all, if vanity was her only motivation at all, then why was she going through the effort of climbing all these peaks, pushing herself physically, mentally, taking the time and spending the money to travel around to these different mountains. I mean, she could have easily just posted up at one of Taiwan's many beaches, snapped a few bikini photos there and probably gotten the same amount of attention. She also would routinely post photos of the scenery that she encountered on her hikes, without her or her bikinis in the photos at all. And so clearly there was something else that was driving her beyond just the attention to her body. Those that knew Gigi Wu personally came to realize that she was using her platform to serve and to grow Taiwan's hiking community. Right ups that detailed her routes and also the potential hazards of the trails that she hiked would accompany her provocative photos on Facebook. These right ups and these details were the type of information that was incredibly useful and even invaluable for future hikers that were going to be attempting the same routes as she was. Now, could she have posted this helpful information without the addition of the bikini photos? Well, of course she could have done that, but would it have reached and thus helped nearly as many potential hikers? The answer to that is an obvious no. Don't get me wrong, I'm not arguing that the only reason she was doing this was to help other hikers either. I'm sure that she did enjoy the attention, but I'm just trying to illustrate here that the attention and the compliments on her body and stuff certainly was not the only driving factor for Jiji Wu. By the time that she had finished the 100 peaks of Taiwan, she had gathered so much hiking experience that she was actually. feeling perfectly comfortable taking solo trips through the mountains, which is something that I'm sure she never would have considered possible when she was just a beginner, a novice hiker. And on the topic of solo hiking, creating these YouTube videos, telling these stories for you guys has definitely taught me just how controversial solo hiking is. I mean, of course, I always knew that hiking by yourself is going to be more dangerous than hiking in a group, but the truth is that a lot of experienced hikers, myself included, hike solo, and this is done for a variety of different reasons. Sometimes you want to take a route that doesn't interest any of your friends or hike a mountain they're not interested in. Sometimes your hiking friends don't have the same physical abilities as you. Sometimes these friends just aren't available to go hiking at all. And it's also worth saying that enjoying the mountains with like total solitude, nobody else around is also fun and very rewarding. And so yes, there is added risk that comes with solo hiking, but for those of us that really like getting out there on a regular basis, a lot of the time, it's either hike solo or you just don't hike at all. And based on the progression of Gigi's hiking experience and her skill level, I'm guessing, you know, it's an assumption, but I'm guessing that she felt the same way as I do. With all that said, the risk factor of each individual hiking trail is different. And so hiking solo on a trail that's relatively safe is not the same, in my opinion, as hiking solo on a trail that's a lot more dangerous. Like there is a limit that I would feel comfortable with. Like there's a lot of trails that I would not hike solo. And there's a lot of trails that I would feel totally fine with it. And like I said, I do it fairly regularly. I've never been to Taiwan. I'd love to go someday, you know, but I've never been there let alone actually hike there. So I'm not going to pretend like I know exactly what the trails are like there in the conditions and stuff. Actually, if you've hiked in Taiwan, please leave a comment and enlighten us. But with that said, I did do some research on trail conditions in Taiwan. And I did this because, well, I know here in the United States, just how wildly they can vary even within the same regions. Again, correct me if I'm wrong here, but my loose understanding is that back in the 2010s, there were many unofficial trails in Taiwan, you know, these trails that would receive some foot traffic, but they were technically closed in off limits. My assumption is that these trails would almost certainly be like unmaintained. They're probably very remote. And because of these factors, they're probably more dangerous than the small amount of official trails in the country. Again, I could be totally wrong, but that's kind of what I took away from my research. And I also learned that Gigi Wu was one of the many hikers who would frequently hike on these unofficial, I guess, illegal trails. Now, even though Gigi Wu had finished her original peak bagging goal, she didn't stop hiking. And she also didn't stop posting her mountaintop bikini photos either. If anything, it was actually quite the opposite. It's reported that by 2018, she was spending just as much time in the mountains as she was in her own home, which was a trend that I'm sure she planned on continuing into the year 2019. But unfortunately, this wouldn't materialize because 2019 was a year that was cut very short for Gigi Wu. On January 11th, 2019, Gigi Wu began what was supposed to be a two-week backpacking trip through Yushan National Park, and she was going to do this trip completely solo. Her plan was to essentially make a giant loop through the mountains, starting and ending at the Dong Poo hot springs. She started off on one of these official and marked trails, and she actually followed that for the first few days of her trip. But then on January 19th, Gigi reached a critical trail intersection. It was actually here that she left the official trail, and she began hiking on one of those unofficial, unmaintained trails through the park. Again, I haven't hiked in Taiwan, but I'm assuming that the conditions on this trail would have been very difficult. From what I've been able to tell through researching, the trail was incredibly steep. It had these really steep climbs and descents over uneven loose terrain. It would have been wet, muddy, and it definitely would have been slippery. This is the type of trail that a beginner hiker, a novice, would want to avoid at all costs. But as we've established, Gigi Wu was far from a novice hiker at this point. This is going to be an assumption here, but I'm almost certain that she would have encountered similar if not even more dangerous trail conditions on some of her previous hikes, probably more times than we can even count to be honest. Yes, this type of hiking is dangerous, especially solo, but at the end of the day, if anyone was going to be capable of doing it, it was Gigi Wu. All that she had to do was to trust her experience and control her movements safely. With that said, one of the things that was out of Gigi's control was the weather. Bad weather can put even the strongest of hikers in extreme danger, especially when this weather is unexpected and not anticipated. That is exactly what happened to Gigi Wu on the afternoon of January 19th. Now to be clear, I'm not suggesting that she didn't pay attention to the weather forecasts. It's actually known that she did check weather reports in the area prior to leaving and while she was on her trip. So it's not like she just set out with no research on weather whatsoever. But as many of you watching this probably know from experience, the weather in the mountains can be incredibly volatile. And even though the forecast says that it's going to be clear that can often fail to materialize. So on January 19th, Gigi Wu messaged a friend around noon and she reported her condition and her plans for the rest of the day. At this point, she was roughly 8,000 feet in elevation or around 2400 meters and she planned on descending about 300 feet before finally setting up camp for that day. She actually planned on checking in with the same friend again once she was like safe and in her tent. But instead, the next contact that Gigi Wu made with the outside world was much more disturbing. At 4.30pm, one of Gigi's friends who was also an experienced hiker himself received a desperate call from her. Now she was calling from a satellite phone and she told her friend through a broken connection by the way that she had fallen down a cliff, couldn't move her legs at all and that she needed help. She managed to tell her friend which unofficial trail that she was traveling on and after this the call went completely dead. In total, this call lasted for no longer than 30 seconds. So obviously this was very worrying for Gigi's friend and he wasn't just worried about her legs and her physical injuries by the way. He was very worried about the temperatures that she was likely to experience that night. Now this friend had spent enough time in the mountains himself to know that if Gigi was wet and she was unable to shelter herself and warm herself up, hypothermia would be a very real and very serious concern. And so this friend alerted the authorities at the national park and he also repeatedly tried to call and text Gigi back in order to get more information and despite doing this over and over and over despite these stubborn efforts, he was never able to get through to her again. This meant that Gigi's initial 30 second call for help would end up being the last time that she was ever heard from alive. Now even though Gigi's dire situation had been reported pretty quickly, the difficult weather conditions likely the same conditions that led to her falling in the first place made it impossible for a rescue to be mounted that first evening when they found out that she was in trouble. And so she had to spend the night and then by the morning the weather wasn't much better and though they had helicopters ready to go, they were on standby. The conditions just still wouldn't allow for it. In the meantime, a few rescuers did set out on foot into the mountains that morning. Even though they had like the rough coordinates of where Gigi was, it would end up taking almost two days for searchers to finally locate her. And that should tell you just how remote and inaccessible her final resting place was. Eventually, searchers were able to spot what they thought was her and her gear on the evening of January 20th. But at this point, night was fast approaching and just because of how difficult it was to move around in this terrain, they decided that they had to wait. And thus, it wasn't until noon on the 21st of January that they finally reached Gigi Wu and tragically also unsurprisingly at this point she had already passed. The initial The initial reason for why she fell has never been determined, it probably won't ever be. But it was determined that she fell roughly 65 feet down into a ravine, and it's at that point that she made the initial call for help. Her condition would have deteriorated quite quickly, and due to the fact that she was unable to move around very well, she couldn't set up her tent, and because she wasn't sheltered, hypothermia would have set in pretty quickly. Her jacket was found laying next to her, which might seem odd to you at first, but one thing that I've actually learned since I started making these videos is that people who are suffering from the advanced stages of hypothermia often feel this false sense of warmth and end up shedding their layers before ultimately falling into a coma and passing away. It appears that this is what happened to Gigi Wu, and I do want to note that it's frustrating that the rescuers couldn't reach her more quickly and reach her in time to save her, but I'm not trying to criticize them for this, and I don't really think it's fair for anybody to criticize them. Remember, she was hiking off an official trail in a very remote and treacherous area during a spell of bad weather. I mean, I think these rescuers reached her as fast as they possibly could without putting themselves in too much danger. It took a few more days for Gigi Wu's body to finally be removed, and by the time it had, the story of her death was making headlines all around Taiwan and all around the world. Actually let me correct that, a version of her story was making headlines, and many of these headlines by the way were not false, but very misleading to put it mildly. In fact, let me read a few of them to you right now. From vice news, women known as Bikini Hiker freezes to death on mountain. From the week, Bikini Hiker freezes to death after mountainfall. And from global news, quote, "Bikini climber Gigi Wu dies in the cold after hiking accident in Taiwan mountains." Many other outlets published similar headlines, all of which clearly imply that Gigi Wu had froze to death because, or at the very least, while she was wearing a bikini. And the problem with these headlines was, that's not what happened. Gigi Wu was not wearing a bikini when she fell, and she was not wearing a bikini when she ultimately died of hypothermia. She was found wearing completely normal, appropriate clothing for someone who was hiking in the mountains. Those that knew her and had hiked with her attested to the fact that she would never actually hike in her bikini. She would hike up the mountain in normal clothing and then change into the bikini once she was ready for her photo shoot on top of the mountain. Now due to these headlines and also due to the fact that she was popular on social media, a lot of sarcasm and sometimes just straight up hate was thrown at Gigi Wu in the aftermath of her death. And those who understood that she wasn't wearing a bikini when she died still criticized her saying that she only attempted her hikes because she wanted to be famous and get attention. Other people suggested that she was just another one of those social media influencers who was taking extreme risks so they could get likes and clout in online validation even though she had no business being out there. Now as I established earlier in the video, those claims were completely false. That was not Gigi Wu's purpose and I think it's very unfair to characterize her in this way. She was obviously a lot more than just a pretty girl in a bikini. She was an extremely experienced and accomplished hiker who had inspired thousands of other hikers over the years that led up to her death. Her love for the mountains ran so deep that I'm almost 100% certain that she would have been out there doing all of these hikes regardless of if she had 14,000 followers on Facebook or if she had just one follower. But while I do think that many of the mean spirited criticisms of Gigi Wu were and are unfair, that's also not to say that there is no room for criticizing her actions and her choices leading up to her death either. I'm always careful not to victim blame in these situations. With that said, I hope you can understand that we can take a close look at what caused her accident with the goal of extracting lessons for future hikers and without the goal of just putting her down after her death. I think there's two somewhat obvious things that Gigi Wu did on her final hike that were risky. I've actually already touched on one of these things a little bit, but the other one I haven't mentioned at all yet. So the first thing is that once again, Gigi Wu was hiking on an unofficial, un-maintained trail all by herself. And as I said earlier, I'm not against solo hiking, but I do think that if you're gonna do it, that it's probably safest to either go on a trail that is at least somewhat well traveled or go on a trail that you're already familiar with. And of course, that's not gonna eliminate all risk, but it will eliminate a lot of it. It's my understanding that Gigi Wu had never hiked on the trail that she died on. And so if she had been with a hiking partner, it's certainly possible that her partner could have set up her shelter, gotten her into her sleeping bag, and just kept her warm. And maybe she wouldn't have died from hypothermia. Now the other risky thing that Gigi Wu did is a little bit more controversial, maybe a little bit harder to like pinpoint. So apparently on a lot of her hikes, she was known to carry a pretty heavy backpack with a lot of gear. Now there's no like perfect number for how much your pack should weigh, but I can definitely tell you from experience, I mean, I've hiked thousands of miles to heavier your pack is, the harder it is on your body, the harder it is to balance, and this is especially true in slippery conditions. Now it's also true that you can definitely go too late, like you obviously still need to carry sufficient gear to be safe and to survive out there, but Gigi Wu was apparently known for carrying a lot of like extra weight on her back. Now I didn't know her obviously, and I definitely don't know exactly what her pack weight was, but it has been reported that for her longer trips, like the one that she was on when she died, she was sometimes carrying up to 70 pounds on her back. Again, I don't know if that was exactly what she was carrying on her last hike, but that was apparently common for her. If you're like an old school backpacker, 70 pounds might sound normal to you, but I'm going to tell you right now by 2019, there was almost no reason for a backpacker to carry 70 pounds on a three season hike. I'm assuming some of her probably a lot of that weight was like food and stuff that you kind of need, but the point I'm trying to make here is that backpacking gear technology has advanced so much in recent years. And as an experienced hiker, I'm sure that Gigi was aware of the ultra light gear that she could have been using again, I don't know exactly what like the gear culture in Taiwan is like, but I don't know. She had enough experience. I'm sure she knew this. And so I'm really not sure why she didn't make an effort to go lighter with her gear. Maybe there's a reason. It's something I'm missing. And so you can let me know what your thoughts on this are in the comments. Now, something I saw in my research is that because of her social media pages, it was reported that she carried like a lot of camera gear and that definitely added some weight to her pack. And to be clear, I'm not saying that this is like a definitive reason for why she lost her life. It's just something to consider packing smart, but also packing light weights in the backcountry. In my opinion, is the safest way to backpack. And I know a lot of hikers with thousands of miles under their belts, who definitely would agree with that. And so maybe her pack weight contributed to her death. Maybe it didn't. Maybe the fact that she had the camera stuff because of her page on social media contributed. We just really don't know, but I still just think the pack weight thing is an important lesson for all hikers to take away from this story. There was a silver lining to the end of GG Wu's story. Her death brought a lot of attention to these like unofficial network of trails that existed in Taiwan. And because of this, the government actually made some enormous changes. Millions of dollars were to be invested in restoring unofficial trails, renovating backcountry cabins. And perhaps most importantly, building new cell phone towers so that hikers would have an increased chance of being able to call for help. So with all that said, what do you guys think of GG Wu's story? Do you think that the media was fair in their coverage of her death or do you think they, you know, were misleading? Do you think her accident was just bad luck or was it only a matter of time before something happened to her when she was solo hiking on these trails? And of course, if you can think of any other takeaways, any other lessons for hikers from her story, please leave them in the comments below. So that story shows how quickly the world can turn a tragedy into a headline, but on Lennon Peak, and our next story, there was no time for headlines, only a few seconds between a quiet night and camp and the deadliest day in mountaineering history. Listen to me, see if you agree with this. So for me, the idea of dying is terrible. terrifying, but the only thing that's even more terrifying is that moment right before it. You know, those few seconds where you know that you're about to die, but there's absolutely nothing that you can do to stop it. And listen, I know that's a heavy way to start this video, but on a summer day in 1990, 45 climbers high up on Lennon Peak were about to experience that exact horrifying realization at the exact same time. This would become the deadliest single day in mountaineering history, and yet somehow, that's not even the most disturbing part of the story. It was the evening of Friday, July 13th, and 45 climbers from eight different countries were camped at 17,400 feet on this Soviet mountain that most of them had never even heard of just a few months earlier. They were relaxing, drinking tea, playing cards, probably telling stories. And a few days earlier, one of those 45 climbers, a Russian named Alexey Koran, a certified veteran who knew this mountain better than almost anyone, he pulled another team aside and told them not to camp here, the exact spot where all of these climbers were camped. And he said that this spot has a history of avalanches, and so with this warning, the team decided to pitch their tents a few hundred yards short of the main site where everyone else was. Alexey, however, didn't take his own advice. He literally warned these other climbers not to set up camp here and then he did exactly that. And that's the thing that should stop you, honestly, it stopped me. This isn't a story about people who made an innocent mistake or didn't know better. It's a story about a man who knew better than almost anyone, even warned other people, watched them listen to his warning and then did it anyways. And while all of this was going on, while Alexey was literally asleep in his tent, somewhere high up above him, on a ridge, 3,000 feet higher above him for that matter, a slope that's been quietly accumulating snow for years, well, it's just started to move. So everyone's laying there asleep in their tents and then within seconds, this wave of snow swallowed the camp hole, like, I don't know how else to say it, it swallowed the camp hole and then it settled. Things went quiet. The kind of silence that exists specifically because there was literally nothing left standing to make any noise. Or that is actually until after a few long seconds, a single cry for help rang along the mountain side. And we're actually going to come back to this exact moment because the avalanche is only part of the full insane story of who was actually making that noise, who was screaming under that snow, who was still breathing, and even who was about to spend the worst night of their life just feet away from people that they loved buried alive. And even if you're someone who watches a lot of these like mountaineering disaster videos, there's a good chance that you haven't heard this story before, but after I tell it to you, I guarantee that you are never going to forget what happened on Lennon Peak. So Lennon Peak sits in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia, straddling the border between Tejika Stan and Kyrgyzstan, and this mountain range is often called the roof of the world because of the giant flat plateaus that sit over 23,000 feet in the sky. Lennon Peak, which is the second tallest peak in the range, goes by a different name today, and I'm going to butcher this, but it's Ibn Sina, I think, but back in the day, it was named after Vladimir Lennon. And so we're going to stick with that name for this video, not only because I can actually pronounce it, but also since it's what it was called in 1990, the year that Lennon Peak made all kinds of headlines for all of the wrong reasons. Among Soviet climbers, Lennon Peak had one specific reputation. Of the 5-7,000 meter peaks across Soviet Russia, it was the easiest 7,000 meter peak to summit. I mean, Lennon Peak was the mountain that experienced alpenists used as like a warm-up before more technical routes. There were no sections of truly like vertical ice, no serious rock pitches, just a long, slow walk to altitude spread over about two weeks. Now in the summer of 1990, Lennon Peak was unusually crowded for two specific reasons. First, Mikhail Gorbachev's reforms had just cracked open Soviet borders, letting Western climbers onto these peaks for the first time in most of their lives, frankly. And second, this thing called commercial guided mountaineering. You know, the same business model that would later turn Mount Everest into a seasonal traffic jam. So, that was just getting off the ground and Lennon Peak, you know, the warm-up 7,000er. Well, it was one of the first beneficiaries. And the result was that in July 1990, Lennon Peak's base camp was alive more than it had been in decades, right? I mean, if you were at base camp, you would be hearing many different languages being spoken all around you. A 15-person Soviet expedition from Czechoslovakia, studying altitude sickness. A brand new British guided company called Out There Trekking on the very first expedition they had ever run. Climbers from Switzerland, Germany, Spain, Italy, Israel, all of these different teams looking up at the roof of the world eager to stand on it. The international community was embracing Russia and vice versa for the first time in decades. And truly this historic moment in global diplomacy let alone mountaineering. But little did these climbers know they were walking into a season that would make even more history and once again, for all the wrong reasons. So there's three groups of people that you need to know before we get to the night of July 13th. Came from a small Slovakian town called Slavnska, La Jupcha, nailed it. Three childhood friends had grown up doing exactly what kids in that part of the world do. Cross country skiing in the winter, ski jumping when they were feeling a bit brave. And eventually, as they got older, real technical climbing and ski mountaineering. Their names were Miroslav Miro Brosman and his two best friends, Vlad and Brano. They'd met at school and quickly became inseparable, no matter what adventures lay ahead of them. Right. In the spring of 1990, the trio had just notched their first peaks outside of their home range, climbing in the Austrian Alps for the very first time. And then not long after they got home, their local mountaineering club approached them with an offer that must have felt, especially for three guys from a small town, like winning the lottery they didn't even know they'd entered. A spot on a 15 person medical mountaineering expedition headed to Lennon Peak, where doctors would study how low blood CO2 levels affect the onset of altitude sickness. When given this offer, the men said yes immediately, because I mean, of course they did, right? They were 21, 22 years old, and someone was offering them a free trip to the roof of the world. Only in like human history up to that point had ever turned that offer down out of an abundance of caution. Remember, this is supposed to be an easier mountain. And so on the morning of July 13th, those three friends climbed up from base camp, stopping along the way to help a struggling Spanish climber who was fighting fatigue escorting him the final stretch before settling into their own tent for the evening. And then once they did, they did what climbers at altitude do to kind of pass the hours, right? Then some tea, then some pudding, and then of course more tea. They had some biscuits. They put on nearly every layer of clothing that they packed, and then they crawled into their sleeping bags to play cards and kind of just talk through tomorrow's route to the summit. Tomorrow is going to be the day. This is the kind of like cozy, mundane, completely unremarkable evening that becomes truly eerie once you know what happened next. Now, the second person that you need to know is actually the person I introduced earlier in the video, Alexi Koran, 35 years old, a Russian climber who'd earned the Soviet master of sport classification, which is basically the equivalent of like a national mountaineering champion, right? Alexi was a Lenin peak regular, a fixture of the climbing scene there, the kind of guy that other climbers recognized on site. In July of 1990, he was part of a 19 person team from the Lenin grad mountaineering club, and for them, Lenin peak wasn't even the real objective. It was a practice, a tune up before something far more ambitious that they had planned later that year. Joy O.U., which is the sixth highest mountain on the planet. Lenin peak was exactly the easy warm-up that they were looking for. Now Alexi was known to be kind of a diplomat of the mountain. He was always offering advice to other climbing teams, calling on wisdom that he'd built up over decades to help those who may have been climbing Russian peaks for the first time. Actually, a few days before Alexi pulled aside a different group of climbers, the British lead out there trekking team, and he warned them that the specific spot they were considering for their camp had a documented history of avalanches. to be clear, this was just like a casual observation [BLANK_AUDIO] He wasn't like a stern warning, like do not camp here, I think you get what I'm saying. And yet despite Alexi's casual demeanor, the British lead team took it as an actual warning. And so they decided to camp a few hundred yards short of the main camp instead out on their own separate snow shelf. Alexi did not extend himself the same courtesy. On the afternoon of July 13th, he climbed all the way up to the camp itself, you know, the exact bull-shaped basin that he'd warned the other climbers about, and then he set up his tent and crawled into it for the night. And I want you to think about this. It's a strange, very human thing to do, you know, identifying a danger for someone else while somehow failing to apply it to your own decisions. But hold onto that thought for a few minutes because it's about to matter a lot more than you might realize. The third group that you need to know is that exact same six-person British lead expedition out there trekking. And even though they were first-timers on Lennon Peak, their leader was a very respected English climber named Mark Miller traveling alongside expedition doctor Mike Cross. And among this group was also a 27-year-old Argentine American climber named Miguel Helft. Miguel had fallen into mountaineering after getting bored with a tech job in Silicon Valley. And now he was soaking in every detail of this once in a lifetime summit attempt in Soviet Russia. That's crazy, right? He was paying attention to Alexei Korn's advice, watching the mastery of the mountains. For him, all of this was brand new and extremely exciting. On July 13th, this six-person British lead team was grinding up from camp one towards camp two, slowed by deep snow and just the general misery of trying to breathe and exercise strenuously above 15,000 feet in altitude. By late afternoon, they could actually see camp two in the distance. There was roughly 20 tents, 45 climbers kind of milling around a camp that was known as the frying pan to locals due to how flat its terrain was. Under normal conditions, the remaining traverse would have taken maybe a half hour, but it turns out that these were not normal conditions. The out there trekking team was exhausted and the snow was fighting them with pretty much every single step, and so Mark Miller looked at his entire group and made an executive decision. We're going to stop here, a few hundred meters short of the main camp, and we're going to pitch our tents right here for the night. And again, remember, Alexi had said something about the avalanche risk a little bit further up. I mean, probably nothing to worry about, but hey, one more reason to justify their decision. Around sunset that evening, the mood was lively in camp two. Once again, many different languages were being spoken. Climbers from all around the world were sharing tea, sharing jokes, sharing stories. Miro and his best friends Vlad and Brano ate and drank and just relaxed. Miro couldn't believe the adventure that they were all on together. And he too wanted to soak up every moment that he had up on the mountain meeting all these people in, of course, with his two best friends. As the stars came out over the mountain, all 45 climbers quickly retreated to their tents for warmth. I mean, Russia is called already, which means an icy slope over three miles above sea level is basically a freezer box around 9 PM. Most of the climbers were getting ready for bed, you know, they were, they were climbing into their sleeping bags, but they were mostly still awake. But if you're thinking that being awake still might have helped to save them from what was coming, you'll have to guess again, because it turns out the source of the disaster that was about to start was over 150 miles away. An earthquake in northern Afghanistan registered an entirely unremarkable magnitude 6.4 at a depth of over 100 miles. So deep underground that no one on Lenin peak even felt the ground move. I mean, this was, this was hardly newsworthy for anyone, including the climbers at first. But in very short time, this, you know, mundane, regular earthquake, whatever you want to call it, it was about to become the defining event of their lives. And I say that because this earthquake deep underground, far, far away, well, it had just dislodged a Sirac of ice, roughly the size of a small apartment building somewhere far above all of the climbers. And one thing I want to make clear is that the odds of this happening were extremely slim. The events of July 13th were, were pretty much just a case of bad luck. And also, if you're keeping track, this was a Friday the 13th. At first, everyone just heard like a faint rumble. A climber poked his head out of his tent, saw nothing and then went back to his cards, went back to getting ready for better, whatever. But then 30 seconds later, his friend started screaming that it's coming for them. You see above Camp 2, above the frying pan, 3,000 feet of accumulated snow had broken free of the mountain all at once, and from a thousand feet below, Miguel, health was watching it happen in real time. Hearing it grow from this, this faint rumble into something that literally rattled his bones. At the camp itself, the screaming started before anyone could even process what was happening. Climbers burst out of their tents and started running in every direction. And inside one of those tents, Miro heard Bruno shout and then scrambled out of his sleeping bag and barely made it to his feet. A few dozens away, Alexi didn't even get like a head start at all, like these other guys. One moment he was literally asleep and the next, his tent was shredded around him and an invisible force. The size of a building was dragging him face down across the mountain at speed, a speed way faster than any human body is built to survive by the way. The avalanche hit camp and then all at once, it was over. The snow settled. The roar stopped and what had been 20 tents and 45 people just a few seconds ago was now a smooth, featureless slope, scoured, clean, no trail, no gear, no footprints, no sound at all, literally nothing. But of course, it wasn't literally nothing because somewhere underneath all that snow, people were dying in real time. Some of them were even still conscious to go back to what I said at the very beginning of this video. Hell, some of them could even hear each other. I mean, think about how brutal that is. This had all the makings of a mass casualty event, right? If the original impact didn't kill you, which is basically like being hit by a freight train, by the way, you were either going to die of a lack of oxygen from all the snow on top you or if that didn't work, hypothermia. Your chances of surviving a complete burial in an avalanche are basically dependent on time, right? You have about 15 minutes for a 90% chance of survival, but then after 35 minutes, survival rates dropped to roughly 30%. You get past 90 minutes and survival is rare unless you get really lucky and you get like a large air pocket that provides a continuous oxygen. And it just so turns out that that is exactly what happened to Alexi. I mean, a 1 in a million chance, right? The mechanics of it are almost impossible to picture if you've never been caught in an avalanche, which if you can't tell, I certainly haven't. The avalanche hit Alexi with the force of a vehicle collision and then basically just took his body wherever it wanted it to go. Frashing against all the snow did nothing. You can't swim out or kick out from an avalanche and of course panicking like that only burns the one thing that might save you, which is air. So somewhere inside of all that chaos while he's being swept down the mountain, Alexi's master of sport training kicked in. He crawled into a tight ball and cupped his bare hands over his mouth to carve out a small pocket of breathable air and then he started counting his rotations, because I mean, at this point counting is like the only thing left in his control. He counted one roll, then two, then three, and it kept going. He counted seven total tumbles before being thrown clear off the lip of a Sirac landing hard and soft snow on the other side. And yet despite all of that, somehow, he wasn't buried. The avalanche took him a few hundred yards down the slope of Lennon Peak. It tore his clothes straight off of him, stripping him down to like his thermal underwear, his socks, and then like a fleece jacket by his own best estimate. The whole thing lasted around 20 seconds, 20 seconds, think about this, 20 seconds between being asleep in a tent and then lying broken and basically naked below what was essentially a mountainside grave. Alexi didn't yet know whether he was going to actually survive the next 20 minutes, let alone the entire night. He was bruised everywhere. He didn't have his radio, he didn't have a working flashlight that he could find. He didn't have any clue yet, whether anyone else on the mountain was even still alive. He started to move though. He knew that he couldn't survive a trek down the mountain alone without any gear at that time of night and so he searched through the wreckage, desperate for anything that might keep him alive. until morning. And the first thing that he found told him exactly how bad this disaster really was. He found a pair of human legs sticking straight up out of snow that had already begun hardening into something that was close to concrete. A lot closer to concrete than snow it felt like. And this is the part of avalanche physics that shows like how truly terrifying they are. The debris doesn't stay soft and powdery like you might think. Within minutes it sets up like wet cement locking around anything and any one trapped inside of it. Alexi had no choice but to keep searching for gear but he couldn't find anything except for an emergency blanket and a foam sleeping pad. Well actually that is until he found something else entirely different. You might know where I'm going with this. He found a moving body like a moving one. A short distance away. He heard something that didn't belong in the silence. He heard a voice shouting for help in broken accented Russian. This was the voice of Miro Brosman pinned in hardened snow up to the hip unable to see out of one eye. His torso completely bare where the avalanche had simply ripped the clothing right off of him in air that was already dropping well below freezing. Alexi tore out the snow with his bare hands until he finally broke Miro free but freeing him from the snow didn't mean that either of them was actually safe. Obviously I mean they were too badly injured, half dressed men alone on a debris field that had just buried everyone around them with night coming on fast and almost no gear or clothing to survive it with. Whether they were going to see mourning was not at that moment, something that either one of them could have answered honestly. And I want you to picture it like this. Two men who'd never met that night, huddled that altitude in total darkness, wrapped in a single emergency blanket, surrounded on every side by the buried hardened bodies of 43 other climbers, including somewhere under all of that ice, Miro's two best friends since childhood, Vlad and Brano. Alexi tried shouting for help at first using the standard Russian mountaineering distress call six shouts per minutes, the universal signal that you were in trouble and needed rescue. But after doing this for 20 minutes, you know, 20 minutes of screaming in total silence with nobody and nothing answering you back, he eventually stopped. I mean, it really seemed like there was no one left to even hear him. And so the two men continued pressing together for warmth and they talked when they had the energy, they slept in fragments and then awoke and just repeated that cycle all night. Miro, who'd learned just enough Russian in school to communicate like, you know, barely, well he kept circling the same unanswerable question, which was, had the avalanche taken the entire camp or only a part of it, was there any chance at all that Vlad and Brano had somehow made it out alive? And look, he didn't know it yet with certainty, but somewhere underneath the exhaustion and the cold, he probably knew, like he probably knew his answer, right? In the meantime, roughly a thousand feet below camp to a four person rescue team had mobilized almost immediately led by Mark Miller and Mike Cross, who if you remember, were part of the out there trekking expedition that had listened to Alexi's warning about avalanches in the area and pitched their tents away from the frying pan. And they pushed up towards the debris field as fast as the terrain allowed. And when they got there, all they found was rock solid frozen over snow with zero. I'm telling you zero visible trace of where the camp had even stood. Again, it was pitch black by this point. So all they had to assist their search were just their their flashlights. And at one point, straining over the sound of speeding winds, they thought they heard the faint echoes of voices coming from somewhere inside the ice fall. And so they started listening harder. But the sound didn't repeat again. It was too dark and too dangerous to just blindly search through terrain, laced with hidden crevasses and buried corpses. And so this rescue team retreated back to their tents for the nights. Again, they weren't up there to rescue people. They were just, you know, in the area. And they planned to return at first light, hoping to find the source of that yelling they had once heard. But at dawn on July 14th, Mark Miller's rescue team returned to the sites and they found nothing. No trace of human presence anywhere. A thick fog hung over the mountain, which didn't help the search. Obviously it obscured their views. And so convinced that there was literally no one left to save, the rescue team packed up and started back down to camp one where the rest of their expedition had descended to. Miguel helped who would stuck his head out of the tent to see the avalanche pour down onto camp two was already breaking the devastating news to everyone at camp one as best as he could tell there were zero survivors. But as you might have realized by now, he was wrong, although of course he had no way to know it. Alexi and Miro had miraculously survived the night. And that was the good news. And it was also where the genuinely like unpredictable part of this story starts. The two men were still stranded with no rope, no proper boots even. Miro was barely even able to walk at all due to a pelvis injury. And with an entire Krovas riddled icefall standing between them and anyone who might be able to help getting down was far from guaranteed. In fact, I would even call it a gamble. Every single step was a tightrope walk between life and death. To get down, Alexi would scout a short distance ahead through the maze of ice blocks and hidden Krovas' then climb back to Miro, then half drag, half carry him forward on the foam sleeping pad, and then rinse and repeat. He would go scout again. And when more thick fog rolled in and made it impossible to tell whether the terrain ahead was like sloped up or down, Alexi threw snowballs into the mist and then listened for where they landed, which was like the only navigation tool he had left at this point. One wrong step on terrain like this, well, that could end things instantly for either one of them. By mid afternoon, Miro had basically nothing left. He told Alexi that he couldn't continue. And like, what's Alexi supposed to do in this situation? I mean, he can try to encourage him to keep going, but I mean, it's Miro's call at the end of the day. And so Alexi wrapped him in the emergency blanket and then left him on that foam sleeping pad in the most sheltered spot he could find in the area. And then he pushed down a loan to go find help knowing that there was no guarantee that he'd make it back in time or even at all to save Miro. And with that, I want you to try sitting in Miro's perspective for a second here. He's now alone, very badly hurt and stranded on a mountain that had just killed 43 people, including his two best friends. And he has zero certainty that anyone would be coming to rescue him. By this point, he was now bracing for a second night on Lennon Peak, knowing that his body probably won't survive, or, you know, probably just as bad, maybe he will just barely survive and then certainly die the next day. But fortunately for Miro, Alexi was not about to give up, not on himself or on Miro, of course. Alexi descended for hours and as he rounded the edge of a Sirac, he spotted some movement, a climber that was actually heading up towards him. And then he saw another figure and then another, a mixed Soviet and Czechoslovak rescue party had finally organized and they were pushing up the mountain. So Alexi told them about Miro and he asked them to push higher to go get him while he continued down the mountain in desperate need of some rescue himself. Alexi made it back to camp one just after midnight, thinking the entire way about nothing more complicated than just a glass of lemonade that he would reward himself with for making it through this absolute nightmare. And incredibly, beyond one massive, deeply painful bruise across his back, he walked away with no broken bones and no frostbite at all. But Miro, on the other hand, well, he was not doing nearly as well. By the time that the rescue team reached him, he was in need of like some serious medical attention and so they dragged him to some flatter ground, pitched emergency tents and then started treatment that lasted through the night. And then at first light, they loaded him onto a metal rescue sled for a very long ride down against all odds. Alexi and Miro survived July 13th, 1990 on Lennon Peak. But once again, 43, think about that, 43 climbers. I mean, it's crazy to even say it out loud. 43 climbers did not survive, which to my knowledge at least makes this the deadliest single day on a mountain in human history. And you might think that surviving the single deadliest day in the history of mountaineering might be the universe's way of politely suggesting you take up a new hobby, but that is not what happened. Miro went home, he recovered and he kept climbing. Though he did deliver shift towards rock climbing and competitive ski mountaineering and consciously chose to stop returning to high altitude peaks, and Alexi for his part went ahead with his planned show OU Expedition just a few months later. Years later, he was asked whether the avalanche had ever made him consider quitting, and his answer came back almost before the question was even finished. He said, "No, it was not my mistake." Mark Miller, the guide whose tired legs decision had saved his entire team's lives, kept guiding to, but only for two more years, tragedy would end up striking him, and all of the souls aboard a PIA Airbus flying outside Kathmandu when they're playing crashed in 1992. But folks, here's the detail that should probably haunt you more than anything else in this story of the 43 climbers killed that night. Only one single body was recovered in the immediate aftermath. And I've scoured the internet to try to find the identity of that person, but I just couldn't find it. All we know is that the hardened debris from the avalanche didn't melt away. It became part of the mountain itself for almost 17 years. For 17 years, the families of these victims had no grave, no body, no final image except a campsite erased under frozen avalanche debris. But then, in 2007, Lenin Peak decided to change its mind. With rising temperatures, more melt has come off the mountain, and fragments of that lost camp started to resurface far below where the avalanche had actually struck. I'm talking shredded tent fabric, cooking pots, portable stoves, even intact passports. And of course, once they started finding these things, recovery expeditions began, and there was even some new hope that maybe the mountain would return the bodies of the lives that it had taken. Alexei himself felt like a personal obligation to take part in the search, and so over the following years, he joined five separate recovery trips back up the mountain. And yet, still, no identifiable bodies have been found besides just one. They've found bones, they have found mangled body parts, but really nothing beyond that. No closure for the family is just fragments of memory. A memorial plaque now stands at base camp of Lenin Peak engraved with all 43 names of the climbers who perished, and whatever partial remains have surfaced over the years now rest in a burial site nearby. Camp 2 itself has since been relocated roughly 300 yards away from the frying pan to a spot that's now generally considered safer from avalanches. But hey, you never know. Speaking of that, Alexei himself isn't entirely convinced by that designation of safer. In recent years, he's pointed out that the new camp location actually sits inside the boundary of the original 1990 avalanche. And so while it is a low probability that lightning strikes twice, or I guess avalanche strikes twice, I do think it's fair to say that Lenin Peak is no longer considered the easiest or safest mountain in Russia. And so here's the actual lesson buried inside the Lenin Peak disaster part in my pun there. It's a lesson that chills me to my bones because after making tons of videos about mountaineering disasters, almost always, there was like a mistake that people made that led to them dying. But in this case, as far as I can tell, that didn't really happen. I mean, sure, maybe they should have set up in a different spot. There was a little bit of known avalanche risk, obviously, but I don't think that they were being reckless here. No one was being complacent. The real lesson is honestly a very uncomfortable one. Sometimes the mountain genuinely does not care how experienced you are, how many warning signs you've correctly identified in the past, or how cozy and mundane your evening routine felt just an hour before everything changed. Sometimes a magnitude 6.4 earthquake originating 150 miles away is enough to dislodge a single block of ice that will go on to erase 43 human beings in under 30 seconds. Mountaineering experts actually have a clinical term for this. It's called a low probability high consequence event. And I have a slightly less cynical one. I call it nature reminding everyone once again that mountains like Lenin Peak were never on your side to begin with and the mountain never agreed to any of the rules that you assumed that you were playing by. It never agreed to be called a warm-up. Now to this day, Lenin Peak is still climbed by hundreds of people every single season and every one of these climbers has to walk right past that memorial plaque I told you about documenting the single most deadly day in recorded mountaineering history. They then have to walk by the debris field where camp 2 had once stood where 43 people were trapped, buried alive, and for the most part are forever entombed. May all of these victims rest in peace. And I would really appreciate it if you guys could show some love for them in the comments. I always appreciate it when you do that. I have the best audience.