Tuesday, April 2, 2019

Dead Mountain

Author: Charlie Caldwell

This was the last photo taken of the hikers before they died...
On a cold winter night February 1959 nine Russian ski-hikers would breathe their last breath on the face of Dead Mountain. The hikers were part of an elite outing group that began their trek through the Ural Mountains of Siberia. The hikers never made it to their checkpoint and also failed to reach out to anyone. Weeks went by and still no one heard from the group; therefore, a search team was put into motion and what they found would leave them speechless.

When the bodies were recovered by the  search team they were hundreds of yards away from the campsite. Some of the hikers were hardly wearing anything and others seemed to be wearing clothes they pulled off others. A few hikers had broken and bruised bones and one was missing their tongue. After they found the bodies the search team went to their tent to try and find clues. The tent appeared to be cut open from the inside almost as if the hikers were being driven out. 

Nobody knows what happened to cause the death of the hikers, but there are many theories. Many say they were driven out of the tent by an avalanche and they froze to death. How would that describe the missing tongue? Others call it a “compelling force” that caused the death of them. Some case files suggest controversial theories involving the hikers being secret agents and the KGB having to eliminate them. There were many gulag  prisons within miles from the tragedy and it was not unheard of prison escapes. If there was an escape, some of the prisoners could easily know how to kill. Could this be what drove the hikers out into the frosty wilderness?

The case of the Dyatlov Pass Incident is being reopened May 2019, but until it is solved no one will ever know what happened that mysterious frigid night on the face of Dead Mountain. The mystery of Dead Mountain will be hidden and secluded for the rest of time with no possible answer to who or what took the lives of the nine hikers.

Works Cited
Lemmino. “The Dyatlov Pass Case.” Youtube, 4 Aug. 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RigxxiilI.

Paul. “The Dyatlov Pass Accident.” Curious World. http://www.aquiziam.com/dyatlov_pass_1.html. Archived by Wayback Machine. Accessed on 20 Mar. 2019

Review. “Dead Mountain: The Untold Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident.” Publishers Weekly. vol. 260, no. 32, Aug. 2013, pp. 46-46. Academic Search Premier, http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=4141847c-4893-4f98-83e5-e9da23dced8b%40sessionmgr102.

“Cold Case.” Russian Life. vol. 62, no. 2, Mar. 2019, p. 6. Academic Search Premier, http://eds.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=7&sid=5e5fdeee-63d2-4fe0-8941-3c3633688a1e%40sessionmgr4009.

“Hikers Mistaken for Escaped Prisoners from Gulag Prison.” Dyatlov Pass. https://dyatlovpass.com/theories#criminals. Accessed 24 Mar. 2019.

Links for further research: 

Snopes. 
https://www.snopes.com/news/2017/12/28/dyatlov-pass-incident/. 
This site contains information relating to the hiking team and what they were trying to accomplish on their trek.

Dyatlov Pass. 
https://dyatlovpass.com/. 
This site holds everything one needs to know about the Dyatlov Pass Incident and all of the theories that are involved.

Youtube. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y8RigxxiilI. 
This is a video put on Youtube and it goes into depth detail about what the case files produced.

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