Snow on tent revisited

[GlennM]

When rescuers found the tent, they photographed it.  In the photograph, I see the tent poles front and back with a burden of snow between them collapsing the tent in the middle. My intuition tells me that in that situation, the tent poles should be bent toward the middle ,but they are not. I can  imagine thay they could remain vertical by tearing a hole in the canvas and poke through. Neither of these things happened. This suggests two other possibilities. My first idea is since the tent was made from two, the crush of snow separated the center seam, allowing the poles to stay up, but dumping snow within the tent. But, the rescuers did not find the inside packed with snow. My alternate idea is that the slab distributed snow on the top, the front flap side and the rear stove pipe vent side evenly. Imagine a slab slide much wider than the levelling shelf the tent was built on. This seems reasonable because everything would be buried at the same time with,evenly distributed pressure.

As a closing thought, there are those who argue against the slab slide because of the shallow slope, but I am reminded that the hikers footprints did not lead to the forest completely unobscured.

[Falcon73]

One of the things that strikes me as strange is in the photos of the tent in any other location there are ropes bisecting at the middle and it looks like from diagrams this served two purposes:  1 to hold the stove and 2 to provide support against sag at the middle of the tent.  I don't see anywhere in the tent on the slope photos where these would have been attached.  This makes it more unlikely to me that it was originally placed there. (Although arguably not impossible they made this decision.) 
Also all the snow slab research has proven is it is not 100% impossible for that type of avalanche to have ocurred based on the slope. It doesn't prove it actually did happen and even if it did if it caused any injuries.  When I watch zhose researchers it feels like they are using this as a means to explain everything.   Even their theory relies on a time delay factor of several hours for the slab to let go.  For all they know if it did happen it could have been several days after the rest of the incident occurred.

[GlennM]

Falcon, you are certainly correct about the additional poles and lines to support the middle of the tent. We have to fault the rescuers for not reportimg whether or not the rigging was persent. I think it is a leap to go to conspiracy. Case in point, if conspirators moved the tent up from the forest after the hikers died, then where was Igor, Rustem and Zina going whennthey fell? Kind of putting the cart before the horse, I think. Personally, I don't advocate for conspiracy, but I do find the condition of thoss,standing tent poles curious. They should have been bent in, poked through or flattened altogether. The only thing that makes sense is a wide shallow slide that collapsed the tent in the middle and piled all around the tent. In this scenario, they all cut their way out of the tent made for the woods and waited to do repairs when the sun was up and the weather moderated. I think they misjudged the distance to the trees and the weather was not kind.