Teddy's tree

[GlennM]

I viewed Teddy's video for the 2023 DPI conference. We are fortunate to have such devoted leadership. In the video there is presentation of tree ring data and the tin milk can.The research and findings are important and appreciated.

 I recall in another post some mention was made of a couple of birches with tell tale cuts. But, these trees are not yet found. By all rights they should be on either side of Teddy's cedar if this cedar fell on the tent.

If a tree of this size fell on the tent, what would it take to remove the tent then press crushed gear back into shape, transport it uphill and reconstruct the camp accurately? Also, if the hikers put their skis umder the tent, some breakage would not be out of the question.

I hope the the committee will continue to support continued investigations both in the forest and on the slope.

[Missi]

I'm not sure, whether those cuts would still be visible by now. I mean, it's been over 60 years since. Trees grow and their bark is healing. And the hikers would not have wanted to seriously hurt the trees.

I think, if you have a few strong men and the right equipment, it is not that difficult to lift a tree a few inches and get stuff out from underneath it. Then look through the equipment, throw away damaged stuff, keep the undamaged. We're talking about a tree trunk hitting. There's only a defined area in with damage occurs.

[Manti]

Regarding skis... if the tent is set up in the forest, there is no reason to put the skis under it. They would have been next to the tent propped in the snow. So in this case the skis wouldn't be damaged, the stove would be flattened though.

[GlennM]

If the camp was made in the forest,  the past practice was to cook outside the tent. The stove was a heater, only. The complaint was that it got too hot for those closest to it at bedtime. Another variable is the internal divider in the tent.,While allowing for modesty, it also affects the heat distribution in the tent.

If the tent was pitched in the forest as Teddy concluded, then investigators should be able to locate and map the fire ring, the fallen tree and birches. There should also be litter, unless packing it out was common practice. If the hikers and Mansi gravitated to the area of the cedar, there should be a location where a makeshift wooden bench was built for the call of Nature.

I would expect no firepit on the slope of 1079. I would think enough firewood could be brought to make use of the tent stove. Given that the hikers were found in various states of undress, they were going to use some way of keeping warm.

If they camped in the woods and used the stove, the tent must be scorched when it got crushed. There would be fly ash everywhere and the hikers chothes and bodies would likely smell of soot. There is no good reason not to have heat in the tent.

[Manti]

Maybe this is why the tent was cut (from whichever side...). The stagers cut the part of the canvas burnt burnt by the stove...

[GlennM]

quote author=Manti link=topic=1376.msg21974#msg21974 date=1675589801]
If it was something waterbourne: Didn't the searchers drink from the same source? Yet there were no reports of them getting sick.

It might be that the contamination was temporary and cleared up by the time the search began but how likely is that? Another possibility that I have been considering lately is that we have the locations off... Maybe the cedar was in the next valley. And the searchers in fact camped in the Lozva valley, I made this rudimentary map to explain:



Perhaps.... the "cedar" was actually in the valley of the 3rd tributary of Lozva. And the searchers actually camped in the valley of the 4th tributary, that is more commonly believed to be where the cedar was. Why? Teddy found a pipe that was most likely used as the chimney of the searchers' tent... in valley 4 of Lozba, not the Auspiya valley.

So it might be that the Dyatlov group drank from the contaminated Auspiya, but the searchers drank from the clean Lozva?
If if was foodbourne: Wasn't the food found in their cache eaten by the searchers? Again no reports of any ill effect. But maybe only 1 tin was contaminated that the Dyatlovites took with them on their way to Otorten and the rest was fine?
[/quote]

[GlennM]

The discovery of what could be the stove pipe intrigues me. Why has this finding not gotten more attention? If it is to be believed, then the giant cedar is the wrong location altogether. In this case, the tent was crushed somewhere else and the hikers wandered back to where they were found. This would only make sense if they were trying to go back over the pass to regain their cache. That makes little sense because their skis would not be damaged. Why? They would not be laid under the tent. Therefore they could be used.

This stove pipe does not make things less cloudy...for me.

[Missi]

If the camp was made in the forest,  the past practice was to cook outside the tent. The stove was a heater, only. The complaint was that it got too hot for those closest to it at bedtime. Another variable is the internal divider in the tent.,While allowing for modesty, it also affects the heat distribution in the tent.

Which internal divider? I never heard mention of one.

If the tent was pitched in the forest as Teddy concluded, then investigators should be able to locate and map the fire ring, the fallen tree and birches. There should also be litter, unless packing it out was common practice. If the hikers and Mansi gravitated to the area of the cedar, there should be a location where a makeshift wooden bench was built for the call of Nature.

They should have been able to locate one. Maybe they didn't come across the actual place, which probably was one of the reasons for moving the bodies and the tent. (For the sake of the theory.) And maybe they did, in fact the fireplace by the cedar was found.
But why should there be litter? I'd expect people to not litter in the woods.
And I just can't see, why they should bother to build a bench. I've never heard of that practice.

I would expect no firepit on the slope of 1079. I would think enough firewood could be brought to make use of the tent stove. Given that the hikers were found in various states of undress, they were going to use some way of keeping warm.

Probably, yes.

If they camped in the woods and used the stove, the tent must be scorched when it got crushed. There would be fly ash everywhere and the hikers chothes and bodies would likely smell of soot. There is no good reason not to have heat in the tent.

I'm not familiar enough with the stove, to argue about that. I can imagine the accident happening without all those things you mention. But it's just imagination, no prove.

[Ziljoe]

From Zina's diary entry, on the 28/01/59 although written as 28/02/59.


"Lunch was an hour at 4 pm
After lunch we did just one more hike and stopped to rest.

I mended the tent. We lay down to sleep. Igor was rude the whole evening, I just couldn't recognize him. I had to sleep on the wood near the stove."( This is one of the diary entries that confused me.)
What was the nature of the rudeness? Was Zina made to sleep on the wood or did she move herself to get away from Igor's "rudeness".? Touching?


From the 28th of January

The suspended stove radiates heat and divides the tent in two sections. The further section is occupied by me and Zina. Nobody wants to sleep by the stove. We agree that Yurka Kri will sleep there. On the other side sleeps the person on duty (Aleksander Kolevatov). Yurka couldn't stand the heat and after laying down for 1-2 min, he got up and moved to the second section cursing and accusing us of treason. After that they still argued about something for a long time, but at the end all was quiet.
Lyuda Dubinina - this entry is not signed, but can't be anybody else but Dubinina.

Group diary:

30 January 1959
"
Diary is written in the cold on the go.
Today is a third cold night on the bank of Auspiya river. We are getting used to it. The stove does a great job. Some of us (Thibeaux and Krivonischenko) think we need to build steam heat in the tent. The curtains in the tent are quite justified. We get up at 8:30am.



I still can't visualise the layout of the tent. If the stove runs along the ridge of the tent. The stove box would be closest to the door. ( Makes sense). The pipe runs the length of the tent for radiating heat and out the end, opposite the the door. I believe the pipe was 3 meters in length before the vertical exit to out side. The stove box was about 400 mm if I remember correctly, so the length of stove box and pipe is about 3.5 meters.

Where the dividing curtain is hung is confusing. It would make sense for the stove box to be near the entrance, night Watchman adds wood and can get in and out. Wood stored at the entrance. This then raises the question of why Zina slept on the wood to get away from Igor's rudeness?. There may have been more than one divider curtain and I suspect this divider would give some modesty to the girls for changing etc.

I believe teddy's tree falling is how the burns came to be on Yuri.

[Manti]

From the 28th of January

The suspended stove radiates heat and divides the tent in two sections. The further section is occupied by me and Zina. Nobody wants to sleep by the stove. We agree that Yurka Kri will sleep there. On the other side sleeps the person on duty (Aleksander Kolevatov). Yurka couldn't stand the heat and after laying down for 1-2 min, he got up and moved to the second section cursing and accusing us of treason. After that they still argued about something for a long time, but at the end all was quiet.
Lyuda Dubinina - this entry is not signed, but can't be anybody else but Dubinina.

Very confusing. Almost to the point where it makes no sense. Because if the stove is unbearably hot, it must be in use, right? If it's in use, someone bust be tending to it, refilling the wood, making sure embers aren't falling out and into the tent, and so on. Based on this diary entry it seems like everyone goes to sleep and nobody tends to the stove. It's almost as if someone who never used a stove wrote it?

[GlennM]

With respect to the actual researchers, I submit that there is only peripheral evidence of a tent in the woods. That evidence consists of a fire pit at the cedar, a discarded milk tin, a mysterious piece of pipe, the location of a fallen tree in the vicinity of the cedar.

To counter this, we have the physical tent on 1079 with complete stove, descending footprints, ascending hikers corpses, most significantly Rustem.

There can be no doubt that the tent was pitched on 1079. There is room to believe a tree fell in the forest and injured the hikers. They need not be in a tent for this to have occurrred.

There can be no doubt that the equipment used by the hikers in the woods would have been denied them if they were harassed.

Because the hikers did not make for the cache upon entering the forest, we may argue the cache never existed. The acid test is to compare inventories from both locations. If it does not add up,then that is telling.

[Teddy]

I agree, what I have found proves absolutely nothing.
In my opinion there are two ways of approaching the problem of the strangeness of this case.
The first is to go look around the location of the incident. This is what people have been doing for many decades. People may call it empirical.
And the opposite of this is theoretical. Igor has never been on location, he only studied the documents and tried different scenarios. This is the theory, and I emphasize on the fact that it is only a theory, explaining all facts.
Then I go on location and start finding things that are complimenting his theory and this is without even trying. This is what I was trying to convey at the conference. This is just the beginning. I am far from saying that what I have proves anything so stop weighing my theory in this way. Of course I can't mount enough evidence to counteract the mountain of findings that the conspirators fed the investigation while it was in progress. But every crime leaves breadcrumbs. I have already discussed my next expedition. I am on a mission to find more, that's all. Don't attack me, I need your support, everyone that tries to stray from the trampled path of viewing this case is subjected to distrust and this is normal. So I read your post as: "Go find more, there should be more if your theory is sound."
Don't you worry, I am not done, I haven't started yet.

You think I don't have doubts? Of course I do. Doubts are healthy.
But GlennM you don't seem to have a single doubt yourself... This can't be constructive.

[Ziljoe]

We are behind you teddy!

I view it from neutral viewpoint that it was something natural and build from there( I think everyone has)  . However , I also flex  my thoughts with what you and others put forward.

Where your theory is strong is in all the statements and contradictions you and Igor found, also you put forward one of the strongest arguments for the injuries.

I remember your post when you said you were standing on the actual slope and thought something wasn't right . I'm thinking you were visualising in your mind all the various theories.

 When I was messing around with the translation of the diary from the 31 of January , I now read it differently.

"Thin birch grove replaces firs. The end of forest is getting closer. Wind is western, warm, piercing, with speed like the draft from airplanes at take-off. Firn, open spaces. .You don’t even have to think about the device of the lobaza. It's nearly 4. Have to start looking for a place to pitch the tent. We go south in the Auspiya valley. Seems this place has the deepest snow. "

In this part, it suggests that they knew they were leaving the forest. They mention the labaz/store at this point , at 4 o'clock. There is some merit that they intended to perhaps make a store in the snow? Why journey to the edge of the wood at 4pm and then decide to find a place to camp? My point being, maybe they had intended to put a store on the slope but the snow wasn't deep enough.The translation is slightly different to yours but it's interesting when you stand back a bit and look at the chronology of the diary entry. The thought of the labaz comes at late afternoon, before the thought of finding a camping location.

Maybe you are right!!!! 

[Manti]

There can be no doubt that the tent was pitched on 1079. There is room to believe a tree fell in the forest and injured the hikers. They need not be in a tent for this to have occurrred.

If they are not in the tent, they wouldn't be lying on the ground. And if they aren't lying on the ground, the tree wouldn't break their ribs in that pattern.

So if the injuries are from a falling tree, the tent had to be in the forest. And because it was found on the slope, someone had to stage the scene. And then it spirals from there.

If the injuries are not from a falling tree, what are the alternatives? Explosions are often suggested but blast injuries usually don't involve rib fracture:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK202251/


Basically you either need staging of the scene or otherwise you need 2 distinct events to have occurred, one making them  abandon the tent and another one causing upper body trauma to Lyuda and Semyon in very similar patterns. Neither are very likely in a remote forest in the winter, but taken together it's even less likely. So maybe there were 2 distinct events but the cause was the same. Then this "cause" needs to be able to move. Hence why I am partial to the moose theory, and I think it's the same logic that leads others to believe there was an attack by other people - or an internal fight.

[GlennM]

Manti, good reply. Being logical does not equate to being correct, though it should. That certain hikers sustained skeletal injuries is not disputed, nor is the possibility they could be impacted by a tree or a detonation. I claim that there is no requirement to be in a tent to be injured this way.

I also claim that since three hikers are found dead in the snow and oriented to the tent, not the forest, nor cache and further thay one of them had enough body heat to melt snow under his body, thus precluding post morten planting,then these pieces of physical and circumstantial evidence are sufficient to conclude in my mind that the abandoned tent was pitched on 1079.

Conversely,  there is no physical evidence of the tent being in the forest. It is a matter of being logical and convenient irregardless of being truthful. Of course truth is what we want.

Again, the bodies, the ice and the actual location of the tent are realities, alternate explanations are suppositions, good as they are.

[eurocentric]

Interesting discoveries. While I may not agree with the theory, I respect the sincerity that goes behind the belief in it, and the detective work involved.

It seems the tree's last growth ring was 1948, but it's suggested the tree could have remained standing for many years after it died until it eventually fell down, so hypothetically it could be the tree which killed and injured the hikers.

The tin can is more compelling as it is stamped 1958 for manufacture. But curious none of the rescuers saw it at the time, and how it didn't appear in any of the search photo's.

And how it came to be buried, found only by a metal detector. Burial of the can/it not being seen tends to suggest someone who either did not wish to litter the place (such as the Mansi burying it in fire ash if they sheltered there) or wanted to hide their actions (one or more of the rescuers).

Although I'm certain it would be Karelin's own actions and observations that nobody took anything, I don't completely buy the idea that none of the rescuers would ever take a tin of condensed milk, as they took all the cache contents, and there was some condensed milk found in the tent, not just the cache.

The photo below, where the rescuers pose for a souvenir picture, hoisting aloft a glove on a stick, does not communicate to me that they always treated everything with the respect it deserved, this taken at the cedar, where 2 young men had earlier been found dead.

https://dyatlovpass.com/resources/340/gallery/2S-33-1.jpg

[Ziljoe]

There is a picture of someone , a searcher with a can open. I'm not suggesting it's the same tin but given they were a search and rescue in the first instance, I see it reasonable that they would have food on them whilst searching. The dumping of tins, cans, and waste during hikes in the UK was a common thing in the 70s and 80s. I can't speak for the 50's or 60's but not many people thought about taking their rubbish home. To bury it was considered good. To chuck tins was common , still happens today unfortunately.