[Music] I'm Brett. And I'm Alice. And we are The Prosecutors. [Music] Today on The Prosecutors, when nine hikers were found dead under mysterious circumstances in the Euro Mountains, it began a mystery that's never been solved. What happened at the Yadlov Pass? [Music] Hello everybody and welcome to this episode of The Prosecutors. I'm Brett and I'm joined as always with my mesmerizing co-host, Alice. Mesmerizing, thank you. Is that kind of a play on like maybe how mesmerizing it is in the Yadlov Pass for these hikers? I think it may be. Well done, a little foreshadowing. Exactly, that's a shout out to Linda, he suggested mesmerizing. Thank you Linda. Alice, I love you. That's so eager to praise you. I think it's just like you saying words at all, any words. Well, any words, but the more complicated the better I think. People like to hear me trip up over the words. So, good thing we're talking about a case set in Russia with a lot of Russian words. This should be fun. But anyway, so we are talking about the Yadlov Pass incident today and who knows for how long on this podcast? Because this is without question my favorite mystery of all time. I love this. I love this. I love it. I love it. Did you know that Brett loves this case? I love it. Really? So Brett would talk to me about this case well before this podcast was a thing. Just waxing and waning poetry about this case. And the first time I heard about it from him, I was like, what? How? Like, yeah, this is insane. This is an insane story. What possibly could have happened? It blew my mind. Like, if there ever was a case about aliens, this was it. That's true. We will be spending some time on aliens at some point as we discuss this case. And it is, it's look, this one is amazing for so many reasons. It combines so many of the things that people love about true crime. It is a mystery that stood the test of time. There are just inexplicable things happened in this case. And people made decisions that are difficult to comprehend. There are, there's sort of unreliable narrators in this case. The evidence is tricky and not all complete. You have the Soviet Union sort of looming over everything. And the spirit of cover up and possible conspiracy. This case is just, it's amazing. Those of you guys who don't know this case, which a lot of people love this case as much as I do. But there will be people out there who haven't heard this. We've seen that in every single case we've done. No matter how well covered you think the case is, we always get people who say, I had never heard about that and I was so interested to hear about it. And thanks for covering it. And I hope you guys are going to say that about this case. And we're going to spend, we're going to spend some time on this case. I don't know how many episodes Alice has been tasked with keeping me on track so that we aren't doing this for the rest of 2021. But I think this is one that we are going to be talking about for a while. So I think we just dive on in and we'll have lots to say. I think you're going to retire after this case. The victory lap. This is your victory concert tour. Don't worry, I'm not actually sorry. This is the last case we're doing. This is it. This is the end of the podcast. This is it. But after this one's over, we're going to be done. So I'm going to give you a little synopsis of the case before we dive into it. As I said in the beginning, this is the story of nine hikers who vanish in the rural mountains in the Soviet Union at that time. They're all found dead after they vanish, disappear. There's a search put out for them. And they're all found dead under very mysterious circumstances. This was a group of people who had gone on this hiking expedition. They had camped on the side of a mountain. And their tent is found, but bizarrely, it's found cut open from the inside. The people who were found, like I said, they're nine of them. Initially, probably five of them are found. The other four are found much later on after the spring thaw reveals their bodies. Their bodies are all found in various stages of dress. Despite the sub-zero temperatures, we're talking about people who are outside and incredibly cold weather wearing only socks, for instance. Their bodies are found in different places. Some of them have injuries. Some of the injuries are quite severe. And the question remains, why did they leave their tent? And how did they die? As I said, we're going to spend a lot of time on this case. And you can find a lot of coverage of this case. I'm going to recommend to you some books, four books. I think if you read them all, the all four of these books, you have a pretty comprehensive view of what happened. Each one of these books presents a different scenario. I mean, they present all the scenarios, but they all come down in a different place. One of them is Death of Nine, The Deatloft Pass, Mystery, by Lawton Anderson. There's another book called Don't Go There by Savannah Orr, which is probably my favorite because it's written by a Russian about this case. And I think it has a lot of really interesting insights. Another book, which is somewhat controversial in the Theatloft Pass community, Dead Mountain by Donnie Etcher. He probably has the most unique and possibly controversial explanation for what happened and it's not aliens, so that should tell you something. And Journey to Theatloft Pass by Keith McCluskey, which is also a great book. And there is a wealth of information about this case at deatloftpass.com, lots of original documents, autopsies, photos, all sorts of stuff. Great, you can lose yourself on that site. And those of you who love this case should do that if you haven't done it before. So one thing we're going to do that's different this time than what we normally do. Normally, we would just tell you the story, and then at the end, we would talk about theories and we would sort of come to a conclusion about what we think happened. But today, with this case, we're going to do something different because we want you to think about a theory as we discuss the case. And it's the most mainstream theory. And we're going to share that with you. This is the sort of Occam's razor theory. This is the theory that a lot of people believe is responsible for this. And now, like I said, we want you to have this in the back of your mind as we're discussing the case. And you can decide whether or not this theory holds water. And that's the avalanche theory. The avalanche theory is a modern theory. At the time this happened, the people involved in the search did not believe an avalanche was possible. But today, it's the go-to. The Deatlove Pass mystery is solved every six months or so. There's a new article in the press about how it's solved. And it's some different person saying that it was an avalanche and basically telling the same thing. And the article is like, this is amazing. It's the first time anybody has ever solved this case. And it's always the exact same story. Recently, in fact, just a few weeks ago, there was an article in the journal Nature, reporting to show how an avalanche could have been responsible for both the hikers leaving their tent. And for the injuries they suffered, this article had the distinction of having some scientific heft behind it. The article theorized that the hikers, when they put their tent up, they dug down into the snow to sort of place their tent on solid level footing. And doing that broke up the surface level of the snow. And combined with accumulation of snow higher up on the slope due to high winds that we know were in place at the time, this could have caused essentially a slab of snow to slide down the mountain and on to the tent. The article theorizes that this could have been responsible for some of the injuries. And that the hikers being terrified by this sudden avalanche could have fled from their tent in response. So that's one variant of the theory. But generally speaking, however you think the avalanche started, it essentially goes that the hikers either experienced or believed they were experiencing an avalanche. Increasing storms had slowed them down during their hike and had forced them to camp on the side of a mountain, something that was unusual and somewhat dangerous. Moreover in their rush they pitched the tent with the flaps facing towards the top of the mountain. At some point during the night,
something happened, an avalanche, that made them believe an avalanche was coming. So it's possible there wasn't even an avalanche. They just believed an avalanche was coming. They were terrified in their haste, they cut through the tent, and they sort of rushed off into the night. They made their way down the slope. Believing they were heading towards a catch of supplies and clothings that clothing that they had left at the bottom of the mountain the night before, but when they reached the forest they realized they had gone the wrong way. They tried to build a fire, but realized that would not save them. Two of them actually died there at the side of the fire. Three of them tried to make it back to the tent, never made it, and died. The remaining four gathered what clothes they could and attempted to make a shelter. At some point they fell into a ravine and the snow fell on top of them crushing them. So that is the avalanche theory. And that's the theory we want you to keep in the back of your mind as we discuss this case. And at the end of this, at the end of this however many episodes long we discuss this, we will come back to the avalanche theory and we'll talk about whether or not the evidence supports it and if not what the evidence might support better. So let's back it up and for those of you who don't know this story let's start from the beginning because what Brett just laid out it seems logical but when you hear more about the conditions of how these hikers were found and what led to this particular hike it is just a confusing story and a lot more mysterious than many stories I've seen. So in late January of 1959 a group of eight men and two women left their school the Ural Polytechnical Institute in Yucatarenburg for a 14 day ski expedition through the Ural Mountains. And I think it's important from the very beginning to lay out who these people are, where they were from and what they were doing. First the Ural Polytechnical Institute, it may not sound like much but in the Soviet Union it was perhaps the premier institute of learning. So think of Harvard and Yale but with fewer pesky humanities and more focus on technology and engineering it is the premier institution in the Soviet Union. Its graduates could expect to have good jobs and hold important positions in the Communist Party. Boris Yeltsin was an alumnus and when you look at the backgrounds of the members of what would come to be the Diatlov group you can see that excellence in action. The group are often translated from the Russian into tourists but they were much more than just tourists. They were actually experienced outdoorsmen and women. In Russia at the time the ability to conduct one of these expeditions was a source of great pride and having an expert ranking was highly sought after and that's what this expedition was about. This was not some easy hike on a mountain. This was an intense planned out mountaineering experience. Right and I think that's really important to remember that because when you call them tourists and when you think of them as college students you may think they were foolishly bumbling about in the mountains and in fact that is not who these people were. So let's talk about them. The leader of the group was Igor Diatlov. We will refer to him as Diatlov for now. There are lots of people and lots of names and so we'll let you know what we're going to call them. He was a 23 year old fifth year student in radio engineering. Diatlov was known actually as a wizard with radios and in fact had developed a few newer better versions of the standard type of radio that was given to every student. That was actually something that was not permitted under Soviet rules but like so many of the things in the Soviet Union that rule was sort of enforced in the breach and overlooked. Diatlov was also known as an expert guide in this type of mountaineering expedition. This year's trek was to be his crowning achievement. The path he had mapped out was rated as a category three hike and that was important because it was the most difficult category and if he completed this expedition which would be his tenth expedition into the mountains it would earn him the qualification of master which as Alice said was very salt after at the time. As we said it wasn't just Diatlov. He was actually out with nine other people and we'll talk about them all and joining him were several other students at UPI including Yuri Kravana-Schenko and then we'll refer to him as Yuri going forward. He was 23. He had graduated actually from UPI in 1957 so two years before with a degree in construction and hydraulics. Now Yuri is an interesting guy. He worked at a place called Celebenzk 40 which is actually a secret nuclear facility that produced plutonium for the Soviet atomic weapons program. Celebenzk was located in the closed city of Kestem and was shrouded in secrecy. It did not appear on any map and you could not visit that city without special clearance. Such was the security there that UPI actually had to ask permission from the facility in order for Kravana-Schenko to even go with his friends on this expedition. Kravana-Schenko experienced while he was there a disaster that was secret for many decades and on par with what happened at Chernobyl that became known as the Kestem incident or accident. Yuri was involved in the cleanup of that accident and for the work he had actually been promoted to a supervisor position a job that he was due to start in late February. He was given 30 days off work before starting that position and he was going to use that to visit his friends and family and to go on this expedition. He was a very experienced hiker and he had actually already completed numerous category 3 expeditions. Rustem-Sleboten will call him Rustem. He was 23 years old and he was a 1958 graduate from UPI in engineering technology. He worked with Yuri at the Kestem facility also known as Enterprise P.O. Box 10 and like Yuri, Rustem played the mandolin on trips and also like Yuri he was no stranger to category 3 hikes. But unlike Yuri, he had not been trusted to take part in the cleanup at Kestem. Another hiker was Nikolay, Toboe, Brignol when we're going to call him Toboe. Toboe was 23 years old, he graduated from UPI in 1958 in civil engineering. At the time of his death he was working in the construction department of Yucataranburg. Toboe had an interesting family background. His father was French and during the Stalinist era was accused of being a counter-revolutionary. His father was sentenced to 10 years of hard labor and like most people in that situation died at a camp when Toboe was only 9 years old. Now Toboe, like many of these other hikers, was an experienced hiker. Then there's Yuri Doroshenko and we'll call him Yuri Doroshenko since there's another Yuri as well. He was 21 years old and a fourth year student in UPI's Radio Engineering program. Yuri Doroshenko was known as a reliable and experienced hiker. He'd once chased a bear away from a camp with nothing more than a hammer. That's bold, Brett. Yeah, at least Russians, man. Man, I mean, I went hiking in Alaska and basically trembled in every corner with my bear spray out. So I wouldn't have chased the bear with anything. And now Yuri had been in a relationship with another member of the team, Zina Komagorova. But they had broken up and Zina was dating Diatlov at the time of this expedition. Another hiker was Zanada Komagorova who we just talked about and she goes by Zina, which is what we'll call her. She was 22 years old and a fifth year student at UPI who was also in Radio Engineering. She was tough and brave as well as quite beautiful. In a previous hike, she'd been bitten by a venomous viper in the woods and had to be carried out. So that didn't scare her away from hiking. Here she is coming on this particular expedition where there are only two women. And I hope that we're not done discussing these people, but I hope it's already obvious that these are like Alice of San. I mean, we're a couple millennials. We can't put ourselves in these people's shoes. And when you're thinking about this case and this mystery, I really think it's a lot of times we try and put ourselves in people's shoes because that's one way to look at evidence and look at situations and determine whether or not something makes sense is to use your sort of common experience as people and determine whether or not the story you're hearing makes sense. Hard to do that here. I mean, these are very different people from us. They are young people, but they are tough people. They're [BLANK_AUDIO]
experienced people, they are people with very important positions. These aren't just kids. You know, this is 1950s Soviet Union. These people have grown up, grown up quickly and grown up tough. And you see that already and you'll continue to see it as we talk about these folks. The next person we'll mention is Ludmilia Dubinia. Dubinina, she is called Luda by her friends and we will call her that as well. She was the youngest member of the group at 20. She was an engineering and economics student in a devote communist. Unlike most of the time she had never been on a category of three hike. Most of them had been on a category of three hike before, but this would be her first. No one doubted her ability to do this though. Like Zina, she had proven herself to be quite tough in 1957. She'd actually been shot in the leg by a hunter and had to be carried down a mountain during that hike. As I said, she was an avid communist in a vocal supporter of the party. The next person we'll discuss is Alexander Kolivatov, call him Alexander. He was 24. He was a fourth year student in UPI at UPI. Now he's 24, but he's a fourth year student. There's a reason for that. He's in nuclear physics and he had actually already received a degree in metallurgy at the University of Moscow. Afterwards, he worked for the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, which sounds like basically the most innocuous government agency you could possibly work for. But in that sort of wonderful way that was the Soviet Union, the Ministry of Medium Machine Building, they built medium machines. And those were nuclear bombs and nuclear reactors. This was one of the most powerful and secretive organizations in the Soviet Union. The head of the organization, the time, was FM Slavsky, who was one of the most powerful men in the Soviet Union. If you've ever read anything or heard anything about Chernobyl, you know how involved Slavsky was in the construction of the sarcophagus that is sort of infamous as the building they put around that nuclear disaster to try and contain it. In any event, after working at this very powerful institute for a few years, Alexander had gone to UPI to upgrade his education from metallurgy to nuclear physics. And you can imagine the kind of work he would have been doing had he survived. I was just going to say, but these people like we've already harped on a few times. They're impressive. They're smart, but they are also trusted with sensitive jobs within the Soviet Union. There's so much so that they needed to get special permission to go on this hike. And I'm just impressed that not not only are they kind of at the top of their fields and these are, you know, scientific highly technical fields, but they're also exceedingly skilled physically to be able to do these sorts of hikes. Yeah, I think there's no question that had these people survive. They all would have been important leaders across the Soviet Union. They're incredibly impressive. On multiple levels, like you said, they're smart, they're tough, they're strong, they're experienced. We're going to keep hammering this into your head. These are not just some inexperienced kids up for a hike in the mountains and then things go wrong. These people knew what they were doing. And you can see that the next member of the group who is an outlier, but also maybe the one of the most interesting people in this group, Simon Zoloterov. And we'll call him Zoloterov. He is an outlier. He is 38, which is dramatically older than the rest of the group. And he had graduated from the Institute of Physical Education in Minsk in 1950, where he attended after serving in World War II. Now, it is difficult to describe what it was like to serve in the Soviet military during what was called the Great Patriotic War. According to some statistics, we found a Russian male born in 1921, which is when Zoloterov was born, who served in the war only 3% survived, which is, I mean, that's just a crazy. It's insane. It's like I said, it's impossible to even really conceptualize that. Like an entire generation gone. Absolutely. Yes. But he was one of the survivors and you can only imagine what that means about him. Now, he was not attending UPI. He was actually looking to teach there as an athletic and hiking instructor using his education that he had achieved in Minsk. The UPI administration actually reached out to Diatlov. Diatlov had to file that he was going on this trip. He had to file the map and the route he was taking in order to get permission because it's a Soviet Union. He got to get permission for everything. UPI knew about that. So they reached out to Diatlov and asked him to let Zoloterov join the group so that he could get experience on this category 3 hike and use that experience to be an instructor at the school. Now, Diatlov didn't love the idea of letting a stranger go on the expedition, but he also felt as though he really didn't have much of a choice. The last member of the expedition was Yuri Yudin. He was 21. He is the third Yuri we have. So we will just call him Yuri Yudin. He was a fourth year student at UPI and engineering. And he is the last member of the group and the one member of the group who survived. Yuri Yudin suffered from sciatica that would occasionally flare up and make participation in grilling hikes impossible. It was normally under control, but in the middle of this hike, he experienced one of these flare ups and had to abandon the hike. And this time it would save his life. So now you know the 10 people who set off on this hike, nine of whom would never make it back. So let's go to the timeline. On January 23rd, 1959, the group leaves UPI on a train headed for Serov, a town about 220 miles north of Yaketaranburg, which was known as Ferdlossk at the time. Several members of the group were keeping a diary. Zina wrote in hers, quote, "And here we are on the train. We sang all the songs we know, learned new ones, everyone is going to sleep at 3 a.m. I wonder what awaits us on this trip." The next day on January, so what you're hearing already is bonding of the group. All of them except for Zola Tarov know each other. They've been on hikes before, they're friends, they date each other. To me, it's a very anticipatory and exciting time on the train as they're headed to the beginning of this expedition. And all the diaries that were recovered are available on that website I mentioned, the Adelaub Pass. And you can read them. They've all been translated from the Russian. They're all very, they're worth reading because you really do get a sense of what Alice is saying. And they were going to try and impress upon you as we go along. This was a tight-knit group of people who were very excited to be going on this hike. And you see that even from this first entry from Zina. So the next day, January 24th, the group arrives at Sarov. Despite the cold, they were not allowed to stay in the train station. And while waiting on another train, Yuri Krovanishenko began to sing. He was promptly arrested for singing. And Luda wrote in her diary, "They immediately could took into the police station." The police man told him singing in public places is forbidden. This is the first public place where it's forbidden to sing. But Yuri was released with a warning at which point the group went to a local school to warm up and speak with the children about their expedition. Afterwards, the group returned to the train station where drunk man accused them of stealing his wallet in vodka. The police sided with the group and they were allowed to leave. Already a lot of adventure before they've even left the train station. Yes, and at some point we are going to return to these two incidents. There are people who place a lot of importance on these two incidents. And we will talk about that later. So if you're looking for that conversation, it will happen eventually. Now the next day, January 25th, the group arrives in Vise. There they said goodbye to another hiking group led by their friend Blinov. The groups were both headed to the Ural Mountains and their trucks were only separated by a few miles. The Blinov group's diary would become important during the investigation because essentially they're having parallel hikes. And one of the things you do on these hikes is you have to keep a group diary that records the hike. And that group diary at the conclusion would be turned in in order to get your certification. So you're sort of recording everything you did, noting that you're taking part in the hike. You didn't just go off in the woods and hang out for 10 days and come back and claim you'd hike. You actually have to record everything that happened. So the expectation is that what the Blinov group is writing in their diary is actually occurring. Right. And now the next day, you can see it's quite the trek to even get to the mountain before the expedition. On January 26th from Vijay, the group took a ride in an open truck in freezing cold for three hours before reaching a logging settlement called the 41st quarter. The logging members welcomed them with open arms. Here they were allowed to sing songs. They sang together. Rustam played his mandolin and they watched movies.
as diary the men were getting snippy, probably due to nicotine withdraws. It all agreed they weren't going to smoke on this trip, so that's always a bad idea if you like to smoke. But probably good for your lungs for the hike. Probably. Now January 27th the group left for an abandoned mining camp where Yuri Yudin wanted to collect rock samples. By this point his sciatica was already flaring up and it's here that he decided to leave the group and stay behind because the hike was going to be too much for his sciatica. And this was going to be the decision that saves his life. Yeah, Yuri was already holding the group up, he was already slowing the group down, he tried to push through, he did not want to abandon this hike. But by this point he realized, I think everybody realized he just wasn't going to be able to continue. So he took this opportunity to collect some rock samples, but this is basically going to be the end of his trip. Want to just note again, the group taking this open ride and freezing cold temperature for three hours. These people were used to cold weather, they knew how to survive in cold weather, but we're going to see later on, they're going to face some cold weather they can't ever come for some reason. So it's January 28th now, Yuri has collected his rock samples. He hugs his friends goodbye and heads back home. There's some great photographs of Yuri hugging his friends and there's, I think one reason that I find this case of fascinating is it's very easy to come to feel like you know these people. You look at the photos of their last few days together and you read their diaries and they seem just like such happy, young, youthful, excited, tight knit people. They seem like the kind of people that anybody would want to be friends with and that they're good friends and they love each other and they care about each other. And because it takes so long, as Alice said, for them to even get to the beginning of this hike, you really do get to know these people if you read through their diaries and look at their photographs. So at this point, Diatloff tells Yuri Uden that he thinks the expedition is going to take a few extra days and he expected to send a telegram on February 14th. I believe initially he thought he would be back by February 11th, but he's letting Yuri Uden know, hey, you're not going to get a telegraph from me on the 11th. It's going to be the 14th. Now Diatloff had made this decision that the trip would take longer. Apparently, as a result of talking to a local hunter named Ripple who knew the area well, Ripple's name will come up later. So this is the last time anyone would see the group alive. The nine remaining members follow the Laza River spinning the night on the banks. In the large tent, they had brought with them. They had one tent, a large tent, which they could all sleep in. They also had assembled a stove. They kept the tent warm. This stove, if I recall correctly, was actually an invention of Diatloffs. He had put it together and designed it. Essentially, there's a hole in the tent where the exhaust pipe goes out and you call it a stove, but it's really just something to warm the tent up. In fact, it was so warm that the group regularly argued about who would have to sleep closest to it. The person who slept closest to it essentially burned up the whole night. In fact, they're interesting diary entries and sort of humorous diary entries about people getting upset about being forced to sleep closest to the stove. So there were many diaries kept on this trip. We've already mentioned several of them. There was also an anonymous diary. We don't know who wrote it, but we will be mentioning interesting excerpts from it throughout. The unsigned diary mentions just in one very brief sentence, yet evocative sentence. Someone said it's not an episode until I say evocative. So there you go. It says, "Alexander tested his device then quit. It is unclear what this device is." I will mention though, just to remind you in case you've forgotten in the last 20 minutes, "Alexander is the person who has the degree in metallurgy, is getting the degree in nuclear physics and who worked at the Ministry of Medium Machine Building." You may notice we're sort of building in all these little details and all these little moments because at the end when we come back to this and we talk about the various theories people have, all this stuff becomes important. All this stuff sort of gives people a hook on which to hang some of their, what you might call, what one might call conspiracy theories. And it's so interesting because we do have all these diaries and all these snippets and obviously when they're being written, it's not, they weren't writing these diaries to be evidence. And so you have just wrote and ains sort of entries, but then you also have sentences that could be the clues to what happened. It's interesting that Alex Anders testing a device, it's interesting we don't know what it is. Remember, whatever this device is, he had to bring it with him on the trip, which means he has to carry it with him on a lengthy trip. We know it's not a radio, radios were actually specifically forbidden. The group could not bring that with them and if they had had a radio, that would actually void the category three clums. So it's pretty clear it's not that because the at-law never would have allowed that. So what exactly it is we don't know. So in January 29th, the group follows, continues to follow, the lobs of the, the laws of a river to the Aspia river. The weather at this time is negative 13 degrees Celsius. I don't know what it is in Fahrenheit, but I'm going to go with very, very cold. Very cold. On this day, Yuri Doroshinko actually turns 21 and the group encounters mancy markings for the first time. Now the mancy are an indigenous people who live in the area and they're going to come up a lot. On the next day, January 30th, the group continues along the river and they encounter more mancy markings. Now they want to keep with the river. It's the easiest thing for them to do, but it's very cold and their eye stams on and around the river that are making it very slow going. Remember, this is a ski hike. So essentially what they are doing right now is cross-country skiing. They are skiing across this terrain, heading towards the mountains that they are going to climb. Because they can't follow the river, they decide to follow the trail of a mancy hunter who apparently was riding a reindeer, which sounds awesome. Now this is the day, January 30th, when Zina actually writes her final diary entry and it consists of one word, "rimple." You may recall, we've mentioned "rimple" earlier. This is apparently the name of the local hunter that they had met back at one of the settlements, but it's not the hunter they are following. And it's the person who spoke to Deatlov in Vijay and told him, "This trip's going to take longer than you think it's going to take." We don't know why Zina wrote this word in her diary on this day, several days after they last saw "rimple" and it makes you wonder if perhaps "rimple" was following them. Something else unusual happens this day. Alexander, he of the device in the small or the medium machine building, they celebrate his birthday, which might not seem that unusual, except it's not his birthday. In fact, his birthday is not until November and it is unclear why Alexander told them that January 30th was his birthday. And I wonder if the device had something to do with it. Like when you were younger, maybe you would go out to eat with your friends and say it was your birthday, so you got a song and a dessert. I wonder if the device had something to do with it to make it celebratory, so he claimed it was his birthday, so they could have an excuse to use it. That's an interesting idea. Yeah, it's hard to say. It's hard to say. It's one of those mysteries that people often kind of ponder when it comes to Alexander about why he would do this. Maybe he was feeling left out because they had celebrated Yuri's birthday a few days before it's unclear. But also remember, they're all pretty close. So, when Alexander's birthday rolls around in November, they would have remembered they celebrated it here. And they expected all to still be friends and many of them still in school together, so it is a strange thing to claim. That's a good point. This is going to be sort of an uncomfortable situation for him in nine months, assuming they make it through the hike. So, in January 31st, the weather at this point begins to worsen. The wind is blowing cold and hard. The snow is swirling even though it's not falling from the sky. The wind is blowing the snow up from the ground and off of the trees. The atloth wrote the diary that day, the group diary. The temperature was between -18 and -24 degrees Celsius, which, like I said, very cold. The atloth described the group as moving almost gropingly at a pace of 1.5 kilometers per hour. The group decides to build a storage site to lighten their load for the ascent up into the mountains, so they've reached the mountains they're going to climb at this point, and this site called a "labours" will actually be found later. So the next day is February 1st. There are no diary entries on this day that is most likely due to it being a very busy and very hard day.
And it's likely they are building the labours during the morning. And it would later be determined the group did not begin the climb up the slope of the mountain they have reached at this point until around 3 p.m. They are at a mountain called Colotte cycle, which is translated by some people to be the mountain of the dead. That's a little dramatic. Usually translated more as dead mountain, which just means nothing grows there. In the same way that they dead see just means there's nothing in it. It doesn't actually mean anything really creepy and scary, but given what is going to happen, people choose to, you know, embellish that a little bit. So in any event, if they begin the climb up this mountain at 3 p.m. Now remember, we're in the year-old mountains. It's in February. The sun sets relatively early. There's no way they're going to be able to cross this mountain into the past between the mountains by the time the day is over and Yetlove is faced with a choice. And Brett, that is the first confusing thing. You know, he is very experienced. All nine of them are experienced hikers. They know that 3 p.m. is much too late to start. This is the first very confusing decision they make, which is in the face of such bad weather. And they know they're going slowly. They know they're moving so slowly that they build this labes so that they can hopefully move faster. And they start hiking at a time. They know it is impossible for them to make the headway they need with the daylight that will be left. So your Uddon has commented on this. He was asked what he thought about this decision to attempt to climb the mountain. He said a couple things. The first thing he said was it's possible, Yetlove actually saw this as an added challenge for the group to camp on the side of the mountain. This was something that Yetlove, and really anyone who was leading these kind of expeditions would often do. If they saw an opportunity for an added challenge, they might take that opportunity. The other thing he suggested was just even though it was late, Yetlove wanted to push forward and try and get as far as he could on this day. He obviously already thought he was going to be delayed. He'd already let Yuri know that. There's sort of this expectation if he's delayed too much. Maybe someone's not going to want to give him that third category qualifying hike that makes him a master. The other possibility that Yuri suggested, the Yuri Uddon suggested was just that Yetlove wasn't sure whether or not they could make it, but that the worsening weather slowed them down so much that they were sort of stuck on the mountain. He just didn't want to give up the altitude that they had gained because at that point, backtracking feels like such a loss. He decides rather than a backtrack back down to pitch the tent there. Obviously, this becomes a decision that likely, though depending on your theory, not necessarily, likely causes the group to lose their lives at some point. There are a lot of photos taken on the strip. We're going to mention later. There are a lot of different cameras that are part of the group. A lot of the pictures show people who are obviously cold, but seems like relatively nice weather, seems like they're having a pretty good time. The last photos are actually of the group digging out a space to put their tent and those photos show they're in the middle of a blizzard. I mean, it may not actually be a blizzard, but the wind is blowing. The snow is swirling. It does not look like a happy place to be. At some point, after those photos are taken and night falls, the group will flee from that tent into the night. Now, Diaat Lav was to send a telegram upon his return to Vise, which was expected to arrive sometime between February 12th and 14th. And when the telegram did not arrive, no one panicked. Delays were expected. It was an inexact science to estimate how long a hike would take. But by February 20th, UPI had sent rescue groups of volunteer students and teachers who would soon be joined by the military and security forces to search for the missing group. On February 26th, searchers reached the abandoned tent on Colotte-Sical. Macayle Sheravan, the student who found the tent, said the tent was half torn down and covered with snow. It was empty and all the groups belongings and shoes had been left behind. Now, a chain of eight or nine sets of footprints left by several people who were wearing socks. A single shoe or barefoot could be followed and led down towards the edge of nearby woods. But after about 500 meters, they were covered with snow. So remember, snow covered mountains, those last pictures, it was like a blizzard. Yet no one wore shoes when they left the tent. It looked like it was torn down from the inside. What's interesting about these footprints, if you see them, they're actually, they're the opposite of footprints. They actually stick out of the snow. So essentially, when these people were walking, the heat of their feet and the pressure, compacted the snow and melted it. The snow then re-froze and they kept going. And the wind blew the snow from around these footprints away. So when you see photos of this, it looks incredibly strange because you've got essentially these footprints sticking out of the snow. It's really interesting. But those were the footprints that they could follow for that very short distance. Right. And at the edge of the forest, the searches found a large cedar tree and a fire. There they found the first bodies. Very crevachenko and Yuri Doroshenko, both of them were shoeless and dressed only in their underwear. The branches on the trees were broken up to 15 feet high. It's possible the skiers were attempting to climb up the tree or were perhaps breaking the limbs for use elsewhere. But they were not good for firewood and searches reported an abundance of dry twigs and materials around the area for the fire. Now skin was found embedded in the bark, indicating the desperation with which they acted. The two bodies had liver mortise on the opposite sides on which they lay. One was on his back and the other was laying on his front. This was unusual because the liver mortise appeared on the opposite side of where they were lying. So where you would expect the liver mortise to be, it was on the other side of the body. That's because liver mortise forms on the side of the body that's pressed against the ground. So it appears that someone had actually turned them over sometime after they had died. There's a lot there. With the tree branches broken up 15 feet high, neither of these men are 15 feet tall. We know that. Why they were breaking these branches down, it was not for fire, but they were clearly grabbing at it in desperation. That's why skin is found embedded in the branches. It doesn't seem like they were using it for fire because what they needed for fire was actually right around them. Yes. We're going to be talking about that a lot. Now on February 27, the searchers found Igor Diatlov who was 300 meters from the cedar and Zina who was 630 meters from the cedar. It wasn't until six days later on March 5th that Rustam was found and he was 480 meters from the cedar between the cedar and the tent. The three seemed to have died and posed as suggesting that they were attempting to return to the tent. A medical examination found no injuries which might have led to their deaths and it's concluded that they died of hypothermia. Rustam had a severely cracked skull but given that he had frozen it's possible and even likely that a smaller crack had enlarged due to expansion of his skull. Rustam was found in what is known as a corpse bed. He'd fallen before he died and he never got up causing the snow to melt beneath him and then to re-freeze. He is the only person recorded to have been in a corpse bed leading some to believe that the others were either moved or literally died on their feet. More likely is that this was a shoddy investigation and other corpse beds just weren't documented based on the conditions of the environment at the time. I think a corpse bed is very likely in most of these situations. And the shoddiness of the investigation is something we're going to come back to again and again as well. Not unlike most cold cases one of the big problems with the deatlob pass incident is we just don't have a very good investigation. We don't have very good documentation of what happened and so a lot of the things that people think they know we don't really know. And I think this is the first one we've run into. It is often said that Rustam is the only one who died in a corpse bed and a lot of people think that's significant because they think it means that the other people didn't die when they were found essentially. And Brett, you know, this, they're finding the bodies at the end of February beginning of March. I can't imagine how difficult it would be to do an investigation.
when it's still very snowy conditions, very similar conditions to what these hikers were facing when they met their demise. And so while we say it is a shoddy investigation, but can you imagine having to write reports and take notes up there when it takes experts to even be hiking this area? And it had already gotten a little bureaucratic, which is not surprising, given this is Soviet Union. As we're going to talk about later, there was a lot of pressure from a lot of different sources for these bodies to be found. Really the Soviets weren't that interested in what happened. They just wanted to make sure that these people were all dead. Because if they weren't dead, they might be crossing the border into Finland or whatever the nuclear secrets at that point. So how they died wasn't necessarily the most important thing to a lot of the people who were looking into this. It was just finding the bodies themselves. So fast forward to May 5th. So that's a pretty good bit. We found five of the bodies by March 5th. Then we don't find anything for another couple months. On May 5th, the rest of the bodies will be found as the spring thaw begins. A mancy man found evidence of the body's some 200 feet farther into the forest in the cedar tree. So just to remind you, you have the tent up on the slope down the slope to the cedar tree. In between the tent and the cedar tree, we find these three bodies, essentially in a row at different distances appearing to be heading back towards the tent. And then at the cedar tree, you find two bodies around the fire. This, if you go 250 feet farther into the forest from the cedar tree away from the tent, you find these bodies. And look, up to this point, we don't know why they've left. We don't know why they were fleeing their tent, but it seems like they all froze to death. And that seems not that surprising when they find these bodies, everything really does change. They are in dramatically different shape. First, they're found in a ravine under about 15 feet of snow. Second, they are far better dressed than the rest of the people who were found earlier. And it actually appeared that they were, some of them were wearing the two urees clothes. So we mentioned that Yuri Kurvanoshinko and Yuri Doroshinko were not wearing much in the way of clothes. One of the reasons for that was they didn't take much with them from the tent. The other reason is it appears that after those two died of hypothermia, their clothes were taken by those survivors to try and improve their chances of surviving. It's also possible, though not likely given the amount of time it takes for liver mortis to develop that that is the reason the bodies were turned over. Unlike the others who had obviously died of hypothermia, these bodies showed extreme physical damage, which we will spend a lot of time going through as we move forward in this. Three actually had fatal injuries. The body of Tebo had major skull damage in both Luta and Zoloterov had major chest fractures. In fact, I believe Luta's heart was pierced by one of her own ribs. Notably, and unusually, the bodies had no external wounds. It was about the seriousness of their internal injuries. Luta, her body was in particularly bad shape. Her autopsy photos were available on that Diadloft pass website. And I would advise only the strongest stomach to take a look at those, but they're pretty bad. She was missing her tongue, which is something people often focus on. And she was also missing her eyes. Despite these wounds, the group had obviously been very proactive, possibly before they received those wounds. They had managed to dig out a den in the snow, covering it with branches, possibly the branches from the cedar tree in an effort to keep themselves warm. This was a very smart thing to do. It was their best chance at survival. Digging out that den probably would have provided them enough shelter to survive the night. Interestingly, though, the bodies weren't found in that shelter. Rather, they were actually found a few feet away in the deeper part of the ravine, with all the bodies seemingly in a pile. They were all very close to each other. Some of the hikers clothing, and this is another thing we're going to talk about a lot. Two sweaters and a pair of pants were found to be radio active. Also some of the clothes that had been taken from the two uri's bodies under the cedar tree were placed on the cedar branches, but apparently were not used. It's unclear why they were hung up on branches around, maybe they were left to dry, unclear, but they were not used. This obviously was investigated, and the investigators did reach a conclusion, though it was most unsatisfying, and has led to this mystery that continues to this day. But considering the absence of external injuries to the bodies or signs of a fight, as well as the abandonment of all the valuable kit, plus the conclusions of the medical examination for the causes of deaths, it has to be concluded that the cause of their deaths was calamity or overwhelming force. What is that overwhelming force? Well that's something we're going to try and determine as we continue our investigation into the de-at-law pass incident. I think that's an investigation that will be continued in our next episode. We've now basically finished with the timeline, at least the timeline of the finding of the bodies, a few other dates that may be interesting to you. And one that we'll come back to, as we said, these bodies are found around May 5th. Their autopsy is conducted seen thereafter. There is a funeral on May 12th. It is ordered that their clothes be tested for radiation. On May 27th, the radiation report is returned, showing radiation on these clothes. And what you know it, on May 28th, the case is closed. So that's where we're going to leave you with that little tidbit. We are going to continue this. I'm sure some of you already have questions, comments, things you want to discuss. If you want to reach us,
[email protected]. At proskeeterspod, for all your favorite social media sites, we're on Reddit, we're on Instagram, we're on Twitter, we're on Facebook, we're on Patreon. You can watch our videos on YouTube. You can visit our store and order a onesie for your baby. I always focus on the onesie because I really like it. You can join T-mail, get yourself short. Support the podcast and we are using the funds that we get from those purchases to support the co-case research institute and all the good work that they do there. Well, if you have anything else to add, is we begin this journey through the Deat Love Pass mystery? No, I mean, it just gets weirder and weirder, so I'm excited for the next episode. Yeah, we tried to peak your interest with this first episode. Maybe the facts, but also a little foreshadowing of all the weirdness that's going to come. That weirdness will begin in the next episode where we're going to talk about some of the very unusual aspects of this case and then eventually we're going to get into those theories and talk about whether or not the avalanche theory explains the things that we've already discussed and the things that we will discuss and try to figure out if we can determine something, anything that might explain this mystery. We will be back next week with all of that, but until then, I'm Brett. And I, Ballas. What is a dope coin? It's a, a, a, a, a, a, a, a crypto currency. It's, uh, it was, it started as a joke. It was mocking Bitcoin. And because we live in an insane world, it is now worth $10 billion. Wait, really? Like, actually? Absolutely. I mean, not actually. It's a, it's a, it's just, don't buy it. Did this, just get, did this just come out because of the whole short squeeze. Yeah, this is the latest, one of those things. And then Elon Musk got behind him. And those is how you say, "Dall." And then he's like, "Beats me." And yeah, you know, it's like Stolms. [Music] [Music] Snack. Snack is a snake.
What's a snake? I don't know any of the word you're saying. What's a snake? Snake. I've never heard these words before. Why have you get pawned? You said being all on your pawn. Nope. No idea what you're talking about. I'm confused, so Dogecoin is now a thing. It's not really a thing, but it's a thing. It's a thing in that, if I say this blank sheet of paper for $10, and you're like, "I agree with you, that's worth $10." So something else is like, "I think it's worth $11." And then it's all the sudden worth $11. And that's what it means. It just doesn't mean it's completely fake. And then you know. And it's Doge, so we've got that. So it needs to be the way to say it. Dogecoin. Dogecoin. Look who's an elite now. [BLANK_AUDIO]
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