Dyatlov pass incident

Sonic the Shaghog wrote: »

don't know why the KGB made it so hush hush back in the day if they didn't think there was anything odd to itn

Tends to be the default position with such secret police bodies wherever you find them. If in doubt keep it hush hush. Before you're sure keep it hush hush. After you're sure, definitely keep it hush hush because it's 20 years later and sure who would want to drag up the past, someone might get blamed, IE us.

KevRossi wrote: »

I thought the locals might have had something to do with it. BTW, they traditionally used snow shoes and between that and carrying little baggage, they would have left few tracks which would be harder to trace, if even possible.

Maybe Kev, but there would have likely been other signs and nothing was taken including very valuable stuff for the locals. Never mind that the group split up a couple of times. If they had been removed from the tent by force the group doing it would likely have kept them together and there likely would have been physical signs of coercion on their very well preserved bodies.

I think (1) can maybe be answered if the camp was even in a slight dip or hollow on the hill. I've camped in summer in the Alps with mates who were very experienced and they once choose a spot where if you stood up, you had a lot of wind on your face, once you hunkered down it was totally still.

True, though further down the slope in the trees would be stiller again, safer from avalanche as trees take a lot of the energy out of them and closer to where they'd already left a food cache.

Which is an odd detail and maybe suggests an earlier sighting of maybe a bear? Or wolves? In predator country you keep your food away from the camp, or up a tree in case you attract them. I don't think I've ever seen any reference to a possible animal factor? So maybe they see bears(though in winter the bears should have been hibernating?) or wolves, thought staying within the treeline is a bad idea, which might explain the siting of the tent and could also explain the siting of the food cache well away from same. If in the middle of the night they thought they heard an animal or animals nearby and it was that that panicked them and what the lad climbing the tree was looking for? Wolves howling from a few hundred metres away can sound bloody close by and wolf tracks are small, groups tend to walk in the prints of the animal ahead of them to cover their numbers and make moving easier and could well be missed after the few weeks that had passed, or were dismissed as not important, especially if they'd been within the treeline and not up the slope.

Now the argument against that is why weren't their bodies predated upon? Well one was, the woman missing her tongue and eyes. However if wolves had been tracking them out of curiosity, as they're very curious animals, they'd as likely feck off noticing humans coming down the slope towards them. They very rarely attack even single individuals.

(2), It looks like they didn't run down the hill, but it's possible they did and their tracks were misjudged. I do not believe it was the smoke in the tent thing. And if running from an avalanche, they would either all have run down the hill, or returned to get stuff once they realised it was not an avalanche.

Well the smoke thing has been discounted as the stove hadn't even been unpacked so I'm with you there. They all did move down the slope together initially anyway. Then two of them made their way back up the slope towards the tent, but succumbed to the cold before they got there. It was also the middle of the night so running would have been a bad plan. People running make very different and distinct tracks to people walking, especially on a slope. The tracks are deeper, move more snow, are led by the heel, further apart and on a downward slope more likely to be side on. I'd be shocked the rescuers and trackers would miss something so obvious.

But something frightened them enough to slash their only shelter from the inside and go outside so quickly they didn't put on, or even take clothes and other gear, but did have time to grab two torches and apparently some way of starting the fire they lit among the treeline, yet as you say it doesn't look like they ran down and they had at least one torch with them at that point and there are no sudden drops or cliffs in the area. Plus if they thought they heard or felt an avalanche you can't outrun something like that and certainly can't walk away from it and within a hundred metres they should have realised they weren't in the path of one and headed back, but they went for IIRC 500 yards down the slope. It is puzzling. Then again panic can make people do oddball things in the heat of the moment.

The other part is that at what looks to have been their first stop the hastily lit fire, it looks like one of them climbed a nearby tree as branches were broken. The explanation was that maybe one of them was trying to see the camp back up the slope(and may have fallen and fractured his skull). Which sounds fine, but it was the middle of the night, snow falling and the camp was 500 metres away. It would be hard enough to see in the daytime with any snow falling. That's another odd detail for me.

(3) is a mystery. It's possible that one of them fell and had an unlucky fall, but not all 3.

Well if they were hanging onto each other, holding hands in the dark kinda thing it's certainly possible for them to have all fallen into the same ditch. It's the drop of that ditch, ten feet in old money that doesn't add up as far as the injuries go. Injuries so severe that the pathologists reckoned couldn't have been caused by another human.

Potatoeman wrote: »

Could be a number of things at the same time, a love triangle, political dispute, accident/injury, predators and a mental break or two all at once and good luck trying to figure all that out.

True enough. The mental break angle might have legs P. Consider if one of them went nuts for whatever reason and it was they in their mania that ripped the tent from the inside to get out, walked away down the slope from the tent and the rest in a panic went after them to save them, but went too far too get safely back before they caught up to them. That could explain a few things like leaving weapons behind, but grabbing the torches and the haste in trying to retrieve the runaway. The footprints found wouldn't be able to show such an event as the time between a possible panicked runaway and the party following them would be too small to leave definitive traces of a time difference, certainly after many weeks.