02/13/2021
We have not gone away. We have changed names. Give this page a follow to see what is to come.
For 8 years I have been mired in the mystery of the Dyatlov Pass Incident. It’s no secret to those who know me. I have not redacted my research or closed the books and forbid the mountain like the Russian government. One thing is safe to say and that is that the thing rears its head every February around the anniversary of the unsolved tragedy taking the life of nine hikers on Mountain of the Dead in 1959. It comes as no surprise that when a snow enthusiast with the help of the animators of frozen “solve” the mystery, it is quickly brought to my attention as my phone pings and my friends await my response. So I owe it to you. My search continues and the curated experience I have titled “Unknown Compelling Force” is still in progress all these years later, and is closer to life than ever before.
Here is the short of the recent findings. Avalanche has historically been discounted as a cause of death for these four main reasons:
The slope is not great enough
About 9 hours passed between cutting into the mountain and their hasty departure
The injuries are not reflective of an avalanche
There was no sign of an avalanche when the search party arrived
The rebuttals come from current day research, investigation, and yes, animation with assistance from the Frozen team.
Ask your friendly avalanche expert and they will tell you the slope of a mountain needs to be at least 30% to cause an avalanche and Dead Mountain was merely in the 20s. That expert friend will probably also regale you with the four types of avalanches, one of which is a slab avalanche, which involves, as you may suspect, a hard slab of snow. According to this study, they are relying on the slab theory as well as the discovery of weak snow on a lower layer, which allowed for the slab to slide at the lesser slope. Also addressing the nine hour time gap, they suggest that the high winds from that evening blew in excess snow to the top layer over the course of nine hours, eventually resulting in the slab avalanche under the weight of the new snow atop the edge cut into the mountain for the hikers’ tent.
Most avalanche death is caused by asphyxiation, not crushed ribs and skulls as were suffered by several of the Dyatlov group. Here they refer to the skis placed beneath the hikers to create the tent bed making a solid surface that did the opposite of cushion the blow of the icy slab. On the other hand, all hikers cut and run, so the injuries are not considered fatal in this example. The story they tell is of the less injured carrying the broken to safety where most would die of hypothermia in Siberian winter. And when the search party came upon the site some 26 days later, all evidence of an avalanche had disappeared with time.
Nice try avalanche guy. But I will say, thank you for playing. I believe you are accurate in your research and now I can add avalanche to the list of confounding evidence. I especially appreciate the acknowledgement that these were nine friends fighting for their own lives while leaving none of the others behind. To their credit, the engineers and experts don’t claim to have solved the mystery, but only to have lent credence to the avalanche theory where it was previously discounted. We find ourselves with the same incomplete story we, or at least I, have grown accustomed to. While experts may be able to spin a yarn and plead their case regarding one theory, there are many other pieces of the puzzle still left on the table that don’t fit. How does radiation fit in? Why was Lyudmila missing her eyes and tongue? And perhaps the greatest question of them all, why would they cut and run from their tent into the certain death of below zero temperatures wearing only socks and underclothes?
If you want to know more, listen to my podcast on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. As they say, rate, review and subscribe.
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/an-unknown-compelling-force/id1080794603
