Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of iHeart Radio. Hey brain Stuff,
Speaker 1: Lauren Vogelbaum here. Today's episode contains some violent imagery, so
Speaker 1: if you're not up for that, go ahead and skip
Speaker 1: this one. Forget the unknowns surrounding Amelia Earhart's fate or
Speaker 1: who really shot JFK. One of the most enduring unsolved
Speaker 1: mysteries of the twentieth century is what happened to nine
Speaker 1: hikers found dead at the now named diet Love Pass
Speaker 1: in the Ural Mountains of Russia in nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: And although it happened decades ago, government officials in Russia
Speaker 1: are once again working on a preliminary investigation that can
Speaker 1: ultimately reopen the case in an effort to resolve its
Speaker 1: unanswered questions and give some peace to the families who
Speaker 1: never really understood how their loved ones died. The odd
Speaker 1: series of events started in the winter of nineteen fifty nine,
Speaker 1: when savvy outdoorsman and twenty three year old college student
Speaker 1: Igor diet Love assembled a group of ten people to
Speaker 1: go on a skiing and hiking journey through a north
Speaker 1: stretch of the Ural Mountains in what was then the
Speaker 1: Soviet Union. The adventure wasn't just a group of crazy
Speaker 1: college kids on a lark. They didn't pack booze or cigarettes.
Speaker 1: It wasn't a vacation. It was a mission. All of them,
Speaker 1: eight men and two women, were experienced outdoorsy types with
Speaker 1: Grade two hiker certifications including ski experience, and the one
Speaker 1: hundred and ninety mile that's three hundred and six kilometer
Speaker 1: journey would qualify them for Grade three status, the highest
Speaker 1: possible certification in the country at the time. On January
Speaker 1: they set out into the cold and snow. Almost immediately,
Speaker 1: one man felt physically unwell and turned back for home.
Speaker 1: He couldn't have known at the time that his ailments
Speaker 1: would save him from certain death. The nine others continued onward.
Speaker 1: On January thirty one, the group reached a critical way point,
Speaker 1: a valley that marked the approach to what would eventually
Speaker 1: come to be called Diet Love Pass. There they stashed
Speaker 1: extra gear and food that they need for their return trip.
Speaker 1: The following morning, they began their ascent, hoping to push
Speaker 1: over the pass and then make camp, but a fierce
Speaker 1: snow storm pushed them off their intended route and onto
Speaker 1: the slopes of a mountain which, in the language of
Speaker 1: the indigenous people who lived there means dead mountain. The
Speaker 1: altered route meant that the team had to choose a
Speaker 1: new campsite rather than retreating to a more protected area.
Speaker 1: They opted, for whatever reason, to camp on the mountains
Speaker 1: exposed slopes. Perhaps they simply didn't want to lose the
Speaker 1: ground they had gained. Maybe they were too cold and
Speaker 1: weary to fall back. In any case, they pitched their
Speaker 1: large shared tent, where they would soon be subjected to
Speaker 1: temperatures that nose dived to around negative forty degrees in
Speaker 1: both fahrenheit and celsius. Researchers know this much thanks to
Speaker 1: journals and film recovered from the camp, but much of
Speaker 1: what transpired during the next two days is hard to understand.
Speaker 1: The group failed to arrive at a rendezvous point at
Speaker 1: a predetermined time, so search and rescue teams, including army units,
Speaker 1: set out to find them. Three weeks later, on February
Speaker 1: ninety nine, the searchers finally located the rue and camp
Speaker 1: amid a string of truly weird circumstances. How weird, let
Speaker 1: us count the ways. The tent was half covered with snow,
Speaker 1: torn open from the inside, was no one around the
Speaker 1: group's belongings, including vital necessities like shoes, had been left behind.
Speaker 1: A line of footprints indicated that the nine people had
Speaker 1: walked away at normal speed, but some just wore one
Speaker 1: shoe or were totally barefoot. About a third of a
Speaker 1: mile that's about half a kilometer away, there was evidence
Speaker 1: of a campfire along with the shoelace and mostly naked
Speaker 1: remains of two group members. Within several hundred feet between
Speaker 1: the campfire and the tent, they located three more bodies,
Speaker 1: frozen in poses that made it seem as though they
Speaker 1: were attempting to return to the camp. It wasn't until
Speaker 1: May fourth of that year that the weather warmed enough
Speaker 1: for investigators to track down the other dead, whose remains
Speaker 1: were found a few dozen feet from the chaotic campfire.
Speaker 1: Their bodies lodged in a creek bed. Autopsies show that
Speaker 1: the first six hikers found died of hypothermia, but the
Speaker 1: three found in the ravine suffered a variety of injuries,
Speaker 1: including skull and chest fractures. One woman's eyes and tongue
Speaker 1: were missing. Yet there was no sign of struggle, which
Speaker 1: seemed to rule out foul play. Pictures recovered from cameras
Speaker 1: at the scene seemed to portray a group that started
Speaker 1: in high spirits but ended with dour and anxious faces,
Speaker 1: perhaps because they thought they were lost, or maybe there
Speaker 1: was some other danger afoot. One photo shows tree markings
Speaker 1: made by local Muncie people. Another shows an unidentified figure
Speaker 1: that some people believe could be an intruder or more outlandishly,
Speaker 1: a yetti. Officials first suspected that the Munsey might have
Speaker 1: been offended by the trespassers on their sacred land, causing
Speaker 1: them to lash out in violence against the hikers, but
Speaker 1: in the end, investigators concluded that no one else was
Speaker 1: on the mountain when the hikers died. By the end
Speaker 1: of May, the investigation was officially ended. The causes of
Speaker 1: death were listed as compelling natural force. Some documents were
Speaker 1: then classified, and the area was closed to public access
Speaker 1: for years following the instant. Given the circumstances, you can
Speaker 1: see how surviving family members might be unsatisfied with the
Speaker 1: government's vague conclusion. In the vacuum of an actual explanation,
Speaker 1: many wild theories took root. One postulates that there was
Speaker 1: an avalanche, extreme high winds, or a wild animal attack.
Speaker 1: Another tells of a possible lover's quarrel combined with a
Speaker 1: psychedelic drug obtained from locals, causing a wild sequence of events.
Speaker 1: Others think deep infrasound vibrations conjured by winds roaring over
Speaker 1: the mountain pass incited panic in the group, since some
Speaker 1: of the hiker's clothes were found to be radioactive. Perhaps
Speaker 1: they stumbled unwittingly onto a military weapons experiment, And of
Speaker 1: course there's a theory that aliens were involved. Locals later
Speaker 1: told officials that had spotted unidentified flying objects over the
Speaker 1: area the night of the deaths, though it was later
Speaker 1: revealed that the military was testing parachute mines in the
Speaker 1: region when the group was killed. Now more than sixty
Speaker 1: years later, the cases escalated from regional authorities to a
Speaker 1: federal branch of the country's Investigative Committee, which obtained all
Speaker 1: relevant documents regarding the deaths as part of the research process.
Speaker 1: To begin the fresh inquiry, officials whittled down their list
Speaker 1: of possible causes to just three of the most likely hypotheses,
Speaker 1: all of which centered on natural causes a hurricane, avalanche,
Speaker 1: or snow slab. The idea was that did revisit the
Speaker 1: area with those three possibilities in mind in hopes of
Speaker 1: untangling the course of events, but investigators were dealt a
Speaker 1: tough hand right from the start. None of the three
Speaker 1: possibilities seems to explain why the hikers slashed through their
Speaker 1: tent and fled without any clothes, or why there was
Speaker 1: no real evidence that an avalanche had taken place. In fact,
Speaker 1: in more than one hundred subsequent expeditions to the area,
Speaker 1: no one has ever reported avalanches in that area, or
Speaker 1: why the hiker's footprints were visible and not covered by snow,
Speaker 1: further deflating the avalanche theory. Plus, although the tent collapsed laterally,
Speaker 1: there was no evidence of horizontal force that would have
Speaker 1: indicated sliding snow and ice. All of the strange circumstances
Speaker 1: so puzzled Theodora Hadgitzka that she launched Diet Love Pass
Speaker 1: dot com as a comprehensive archive of many documents and
Speaker 1: images related to the case. Born in Bulgaria, she's one
Speaker 1: of the few people who's taken the time to translate
Speaker 1: the many Russian files into English and has created a
Speaker 1: comprehensive database of all the photos, evidence, and theories, making
Speaker 1: her an expert on the tragedy. In an email interview,
Speaker 1: Hajitska said the information that's publicly available, either by ineptitude
Speaker 1: or more ominously, by design, does not fully explain what
Speaker 1: happened to the hikers. She's also far from convinced that
Speaker 1: the government is trying to truly solve the case, rather
Speaker 1: than using half measures to pacify families still yearning for answers.
Speaker 1: After years of picking through the information, she has her
Speaker 1: suspicions about what transpired on that frozen mountain. Her take
Speaker 1: the hikers were murdered. Jetska thinks that something alarmed the
Speaker 1: group and they clambered out of the tent. Then her
Speaker 1: theory goes, armed people confronted them and there was a
Speaker 1: brief scuffle. She said the hikers were marched down to
Speaker 1: the tree line to die from exposure. They didn't know that.
Speaker 1: They thought the perpetrators were after their belongings, so they complied.
Speaker 1: She thinks that's certain that their victims would quickly perish
Speaker 1: in the life draining cold. The murderers wandered back to
Speaker 1: the tent. Her theory goes that the half naked group
Speaker 1: frantically and perhaps miraculously managed to start a campfire. Which
Speaker 1: alerted their foes, who rushed back down the hill to
Speaker 1: finish them off. By then, the three who were wearing
Speaker 1: more substantial clothing, had moved away from the fire in
Speaker 1: a bid to create a shallow snow down in which
Speaker 1: to survive the night. But soon they two were found
Speaker 1: killed and then dragged to the creek. A. Jitsica said,
Speaker 1: it still lacks the who and why, but this scenario
Speaker 1: explains the mysterious behavior of the hikers. It's a murder,
Speaker 1: so it doesn't have to make sense. Little can be
Speaker 1: safely deduced from the fact, but at least there's no
Speaker 1: doubt that somebody helped them die. She feels certain that
Speaker 1: the group was under attack in three separate instances, at
Speaker 1: the tent, then the tree line, and then at the
Speaker 1: snow den. She said the whole ordeal must have taken hours,
Speaker 1: even if something scared them at the tent fireball avalanche.
Speaker 1: YETI that something had to follow them to the cedar
Speaker 1: after they had time to make the fire. That's because
Speaker 1: building a fire does take time, which means that the
Speaker 1: hikers were under the impression that they would make it
Speaker 1: through the night. They also had time and energy to
Speaker 1: make the den she believes this hypothesis shows a pattern
Speaker 1: of assailants following the group and escalating the attack amid
Speaker 1: unbearably cold and perhaps blizzard like conditions where confusion and
Speaker 1: panic affected all parties. To date, Russian authorities have not
Speaker 1: released a statement regarding what's still considered a preliminary investigation,
Speaker 1: but they have assured the public that modern forensics and
Speaker 1: analysis will be used during this phase. Perhaps, with new insights,
Speaker 1: they'll finally rest real answers from the grips of an icy,
Speaker 1: cold tragedy that seems frozen in time. Or maybe, just
Speaker 1: maybe those who really know what happened on the slopes
Speaker 1: of Dead Mountain will do everything they can to further
Speaker 1: bury the truth in an avalanche of half truths and lies.
Speaker 1: Today's episode was certain by Nathan Chandler and produced by
Speaker 1: Tyler Clang. Brain Stuff is a production of iHeart Radio's
Speaker 1: How Stuff Works. For more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: other topics, visit our home planet, how stuff Works dot com,
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