Okay, where were we?
Kolevatov, Dubinina, Zolotaryov, and Thibeaux-Brignolle were ready to go. Granted some of their footwear was a bit odd, but they must have felt it was warm enough. Dubinina wasn’t wearing any shoes--perhaps her foot was too sore. She still had her sweater wrapped around our and she had three socks on her left foot. I wonder if maybe one of the men carried her down to the shelter because her foot was sore, but that's just a guess.
Anyway, they left the tent through the normal opening and stopped for a moment to look up at the sky. Zolotaryov took a picture of the other three looking up. This was the third-to-the-last picture on his camera roll.
They continued down the hill and across the clearing/ snow bridge and lit the campfire. This is when Zolotaryov took the second-to-last picture on his camera roll. It was the last picture taken of any of the group during their lives. When the fire was going well they went into the shelter and found the clothing Dubinina had left. It was dry now and they divided it up to cushion their seats.
Dubinina’s fur coat was also in the shelter. Either she'd been wearing it earlier or she'd worn it down then and taken it off as the shelter got warm. Thibeaux-Brignolle picked it up and put it on. I think this was probably less to do with staying warm and more a bit of clowning around. Perhaps he was pretending to be Dubinina, or using it as costuming for a bit of comic improv.
Whatever he was doing, he was still doing it when their luck ran out and the bottom dropped out of the world.
The bridge broke and their wooden floor fell through, dropping them fifty feet onto the ice and hard stones of the creek, running through a ravine that would have had hardly any snow accumulation. As they fell, their campfire fell with them, and this is how Dubinina’s left pants leg was burned and ripped and Kolevatov’s sleeve and his socks were scorched. With the snow bridge catching the snow all winter the foliage in the ravine must have been dry. Wherever one of these burning logs landed it started a fire. That's why there were scorch marks on random trees in the ravine. The fires wouldn't have burned long, though. The entire, huge snow bridge, it's structural integrity compromised, collapsed, extinguishing the blazes and burying the dying campers and their wooden floor under an entire season’s worth of snow.
The collapse had other effects as well. I suspect that it was at a level that covered the lower fifteen feet of the fire cedar and that it was the bridge collapse, rather than late-night, barefoot, tree-climbing hikers that broke the dry branches and scraped down the side of the tree facing the slope, leaving loose boughs scattered on the ground or dangling, tangled in lower branches. There was also a stand of young fir trees that were crushed. One of the searchers said they were shredded, their bark stripped away as if they'd been in an avalanche. In a sense they were, but the snow came from directly above rather than down a slope.
As the snow fell it compressed the air in the ravine. When the lower levels of snow shattered, this air exploded out, churning up the layers and bringing to the surface the firn snow one of the searchers noticed under the fire cedar, around and under the Yuris' bodies. There was another mention of firn snow in the records and it raises an intriguing possibility.
One of the searchers who first found the campsite said they had to widen the cuts on the tent to get in and see if anyone was inside because the support pole was snapped and blocking the entrance and there was 200mm of firn snow on top of it. We've all (me included) assumed that it was snow storms passing through the area after the hikers died that collapsed the tent. But perhaps it wasn't. Perhaps it was this avalanche of firn snow? And could the tent pole have struck Zinaida Kolmogorova when it broke, leaving the "baton-shaped" bruise on her lower back?
Whether it collapsed the tent or not, certainly it struck it. The other five hikers, still in various stages of getting dressed, must have been shocked and terrified. I don't know if they'd have heard their friends screaming. Sounds generally travel well in the country but the wind might have drowned them out. But the snow bridge collapse must have sounded like a bomb going off. Whether or not the tent fell on them, they'd have been frantic to get outside and assess the danger.
So Dyatlov used his pocket knife to slice open the tent (it was attached to one of his jackets with a carabiner-- that jacket was lying in the snow outside the cut open tent) and they all spilled out onto the slope. A quick glance up the slope would have shown that there was no danger there. The catastrophe had taken place down in the dark forest and here they made their only mistake.
Instead of waiting to finish getting dressed, they ran down to find out what had happened and to try to save their friends.
Of course there was nothing they could do. Rustem Slobodin must have slipped and fallen as they were running. Perhaps this was when he ran off the solid slope and into the churned-up mess of the newly-revealed ravine. There would have been a lot of debris in the snow; chunks of ice and bits of tree roots and branches. Perhaps that's how he got the bilateral skull fractures that so puzzled the medical examiner.
I don't know how much time they'd have spent stumbling around in the snow calling for their friends but their own peril must have quickly become apparent. They were out on the freezing mountain, poorly dressed and with no shelter. So they fell back on their training. They built a fire in the shelter of the cedar tree and worked together and took care of one another.
They did everything in their power to survive but it was just too cold.
By the time their campsite was found, decomposition and natural predation had added lurid touches to their bodies and storms that came through had blurred the scene. Most significantly, the snow bridge, in its collapse, had erased all obvious evidence of its existence. Without that it, what was left behind looked like madness.
But they weren't mad. They did nothing wrong or bizarre, or inexplicable. They were just a group of young people who went looking for adventure and found tragedy instead.
And that's what I think happened on Dyatlov Pass.
(If you'd like to read my book, it's available only as a Kindle ebook. It's included in your Kindle Unlimited subscription, if you do subscribe. If not, I'm going to do a 24-hour free book deal this weekend. You can check out the book here: )
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