The Dyatlov Pass is known for being the site of Russia’s most speculated hiking mystery.
Soviet Investigators / Creative Commons
Russian Dyatlov Pass incident has been speculated and scientifically analyzed for more than half a century, after a team of nine hikers perished wildly under mysterious conditions on the slopes of the Ural Mountains in 1959. The mystery made the area a popular tourist destination for experienced hikers, but it reportedly struck again.
According to Newsweek, a team of eight unregistered hikers allegedly went missing during a hike to the area. The tourists, who come from Moscow, would return from the slopes on Wednesday morning, but their current location is unknown.
A local source said: ‘They would leave at eight o’clock this morning. But they are not back yet and there is no contact with them. ‘
The group did not register with the Ministry of Emergencies in the Sverdlovsk region, which told Izvestia that they were only in contact with three registered groups on the mountain.
It is believed that the tourists visited the pass to pay homage to the original nine victims from the 1959 secret.
What happened on Dyatlov Pass in 1959?
In January 1959, a team of experienced Russian mountaineers trekked in the Ural Mountains, on a piece of slope known as Kholat Saykhl, or ‘Dead Mountain’. That is, until they perished under mysterious circumstances.
Personal diaries and films discovered at the site confirm that the team set up camp, but something caused the hikers to flee in the middle of the night, cut their way out of the tent and scratch over the mountain – barely dressed despite the temperature below zero and a thick layer of snow.
When a search and rescue team found them weeks later, scattered across the pass, they discovered that six of the hikers had died of hypothermia, but the remaining three hikers had died from extreme physical trauma. There were missing body parts – one’s walker’s eyes, the other’s tongue – and severe skeletal damage to some of the skulls and coffins.
Recent studies from the Snow Avalanche Simulation Laboratory at the École Polytechnique Fédérale in Lausanne, Switzerland, showed that the culprit was probably a short, striking avalanche that entangled the hikers between a hard snow and their own skis.