Most accidents are not the result of one single thing going wrong, but a chain of things going wrong that if even one of those things had not happened or had happened differently the chain would be broken and the tragedy would not have occurred. In fact, so common is this phenomenon that it actually has a name: comedy of errors. The word comedy is ironic, emphasizing the sheer ridiculousness of so many bad things inexplicably happening, one after the other that it would be hilarious, if it wasn’t so tragic. While we can say that whatever happened at the tent led to the death of the hikers, we cannot say that the hikers would have died if that was the only misfortune they faced that night. We simply do not know what other challenges they may have come across before their deaths, and the fact that three of their number sustained such horrible injuries, whereas the group that survived the night without the tent did not, already implies that the ordeal of the second group was nowhere near as severe as what the Dyatlov group went through. And personally I don’t believe the injuries sustained by Luda, Semyon, and Nicolai were the result of what happened at the tent.
Regardless, when dealing with cases like this where uncertainty reigns and conspiracy theories flourish like weeds in the vast no man’s land where we hope instead to find facts and concrete evidence, it’s only prudent to remember that as human beings we love patterns and we hate meaningless deaths. Nothing wrong with that, but we have to be aware of our own weaknesses, that we will all too often see patterns where none exist and create meaning as a defense against the vulnerability of our own mortality.