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<Book Spoiler Alert> The reason the hikers pitched their tent on the ridge?

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eurocentric:
SPOILER ALERT do not read this thread if you would prefer to read the new book first. Scroll down if you don't mind reading a potential spoiler.























Previously I thought the fear of encountering escapees or an angry deerhunter had driven them up there, but now there's a new and more understandable potential reason revealed in the book. Geologists busily conducting a magnetic anomaly survey using helicopters, and the use of explosives to clear any areas of interest for subsequent core-hole drilling in the search for uranium.

The two previous investigative reasons for pitching the tent on the ridge seemed illogical. Igor would not take his group up the pass at 3pm if hoping to crest the ridge and drop down the other side to camp in a forest there (and then he has to fall back due to high winds). It was sundown at 4:29pm and he would choose to do this in the morning. And you wouldn't attain/retain altitude on the Ural ridge en route to Otorten unless you went prepared with 2 day's worth of firewood, or you'd have to descend to get some. This significant amount of wood would then be referenced in the case files and used as evidence of their plan.

The book suggests the hikers died in the forest, and then 4 reenactors travelled up and down slope using a sled to carry the tent, contents, 18+ pairs of skis and poles, to stage the tent on the ridge, expanding the trench of what had been a labaz made there by the hikers into a tent trench, doing so under cover of darkness.

It seems inconceivable that the rescue team, including people who followed animal tracks for a livelihood, would be fooled by the directionality of 4 sets of bare-footed footprints heading up and down a mountain and assume they were the '8 or 9' sets of hiker prints all heading down slope. Or that reenactors, as they are called, would survive frostbite to their toes on any night through the duplication of the hikers 1 mile transit, and survive in subzero temperatures from the exhaustion of expanding a labaz trench into just inside of a 12x6 tent trench, and removing the original contents to take them back down slope. And after all, why wouldn't they deploy the geologists' helicopter for the task.

But now there is a more obvious explanation for why the hikers may have chosen to 'head for the hills' - they arrived at that pass mid afternoon, looking to find somewhere to pitch their tent, in a forest, it was still daylight, and all this activity and its dangers was there. They would also hesitate to search for adequate firewood with this going on. So, late in the day, unplanned and unprepared, they headed to higher ground, somewhere up safe, away from the danger zone, and also where they could be seen.

And having camped on the ridge and the wind picking up, stated in the book to be up to 35 metres-per-second (that's 78mph), and temperatures producing an arctic -63C wind chill, it seems obvious what happens thereafter, and they end up in the forest later that evening when the activity is safely over, minus their tent, tools and clothes.

Nigel Evans:
And reason for descending in their socks was?

eurocentric:
The inevitable effects of hypothermia of course, in a tent exposed up on a mountain ridge, with high winds picking up so that it must be dropped/becomes damaged, and out of that no stove is operational.

The self same reason the reenactors, if that is what happened, would walk away in their bare feet, because even in 1959 they would know how people can behave when subjected to extreme cold.

Nigel Evans:
So Semyon and Nicolai are outside having a stroll, six in the tent are in an advanced state of hypothermia except for Rustem who chooses to wear one boot but not the other.

eurocentric:
Why would Semyon and Tibo be having a stroll outside in a meterologically estimated 78mph winds and -63C wind chill?

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