Join us as we welcome author Launton Anderson to discuss The Dyatlov Pass Incident.
In 1959, the frozen bodies of a nine-member ski-hiking expedition that had gone missing weeks weeks before in northern Urals of the Soviet Union were found near their campsite on a mountain called Kholat Syakhl (which, according to Russian sources, means “Dead Mountain” in the indigenous Mansi language).
Made up mostly of students and graduates from the Ural Polytechnic Institute a few hundred miles away in Yekaterinburg (then called Sverdlovsk), the team had set out on 27 January to reach another mountain about 7 miles away, Gora Otorten (which means “Don’t Go There” in Mansi). After being sidetracked by a snowstorm, they pitched a tent on the eastern slope of Kholat Syakhl on 2 February. That night they died. Apart from the fact that they froze to death, no one knows why.