Theory from my new book

[LorettaRoss]

Hello everyone! My name is Loretta Ross and I'm an American mystery writer. A while back I decided to apply the same techniques I use to write mysteries to try to solve this one and I've come up with a theory that's decidedly different from any I've seen before. I'd like to share it with you now.

I'm going to assume that, if you're on this forum, you're very familiar with the case and the evidence. So I'm just going to reference evidence without explaining it too much. But if you have questions, by all means shout out and I'll go into more detail.

First, I'm aware that summers in cold locations and at high altitudes don't always melt off all the snow, so this could go back to the previous winter or earlier. But I think that by late autumn/ early winter of 1958 at the latest a snow bridge formed that covered and completely hid the ravine in the woods below Dyatlov Pass. I've always associated snow bridges with glaciers, but my research says they can form across any kind of break in the landscape and even at low elevations and in wooded locations. They just need three elements: heavy snowfall, high winds, and extreme cold temperatures. This region has all of that.

By the time Igor Dyatlov and his group came to the Pass on February 1,1959, the bridge was several meters thick, the bottom layers frozen hard into ice and firn snow. (Do you know what firn snow is? I had to look that up. It's snow left over from previous years that's begun to transition to glacier ice.) None of the hikers were familiar with the area and Dyatlov had tried to get a topographical map at the beginning of their trip but there hadn't been one available. Thus none of them had any reason to know that there should have been a ravine where they were only seeing what must have looked like a normal clearing in the trees.

They had gotten a late start that day and skied up another slope before doubling back. They must have been frustrated at their lack of progress and I suspect they were trying to make up for lost time by skiing up the frozen stream (the tributary of the Losva) that runs through the woods there. They got almost to the treeline when something stopped them.

I think that something was an accident. I think Lyudmila Dubinina’s right foot went through the ice into the river and she fell, breaking a ski, damaging one of her ski poles, and bruising her left thigh. The evidence for this is the broken ski found in the snow, the damaged ski pole that was in the tent, and the bruise on her left thigh that showed up in her autopsy.

In that environment this constituted an emergency. They got her to her feet and all of them moved off the river, away from the windy riverbank, and into the shelter of what must have seemed like an ordinary clearing. Some of them (probably Dyatlov and Zinaida Kolmogorova, maybe Semyon Zolotaryov)  took care of Dubinina, the others would have hurried to put up an emergency shelter and light a fire to warm it up.

Some level of frostbite was probably a given the minute the ice cracked, but to minimize the injury and ward off hypothermia they needed to get the wet fabric away from her skin. They stripped off her puttee (Dubinina favored the military-style leg wraps and had them in her backpack-- she was the only hiker who had any) and cut away the wet right leg of her snow pants, pulling off her boot and sock or socks as well. I suspect they grabbed a torn pair of trousers that was handy in the top of someone's backpack and used that as a makeshift towel.

Meanwhile the guys with the Finnish knives were gathering materials for a shelter. One of them cut the tops out of six fir trees and a birch. I suspect they thought they were cutting entire small trees. They'd not have known that in each case there was a lot more tree hiding under the snow. They assembled the tree tops into a wooden floor and padded it with cedar boughs. Larger branches cut from spruce or fir at the edge of the woods would have formed the shelter's top and sides. When it was ready, Lyuda went inside to warm up and change clothes. Her foot and leg were still hurting though, so she cut up an old sweater and wrapped that around them, probably as much for softness and padding as for warmth, and Igor Dyatlov got into their first-aid supplies and gave her a dose of Streptocide, an anti-inflammatory like ibuprofen (though I haven't been able to find out if it was also a painkiller). He put the rest of the package in his pocket and it was still there when they found his body.

She must have landed on the ice in such a way that her upper garments (two insulated sweaters and perhaps her fur coat) also got wet. She wouldn't have wanted to put wet clothes in her backpack. That would have gotten everything else wet. But she didn't need to. They were coming back through here on their way home. She could pick up her belongings then. So when she left the shelter she left behind a puttee, a pair of ski pants with the right leg cut off, the severed leg of those pants, two heavy sweaters, and a torn pair of trousers. Also, possibly, her fur coat. (There should have been at least one sock as well but I can't find any record of it being found.)

I think they also took advantage of the fire to make hot drinks. Someone lost a white metal spoon and one of them dropped a plastic knife sheath. When they moved on up the slope the guys wth the knives (Thibeaux-Brignolle, Kolevatov, and Krivonischenko) took them with them. This is why there were cut trees but no knives found on the bodies or in the snow.

By the time they were ready to move on Dyatlov had a decision to make. It was too late now to make it over the pass and set up camp below the treeline on the other side before sundown. They could stay where they were or go up and camp on the slope above the trees. But they intended to sleep cold that night and they were experienced enough to know that that would be much harder without the shelter of the trees.

I think the existence of this emergency shelter must have figured into his decision. They could try sleeping cold up on the pass and, if it proved to be too cold, they could retreat to their shelter and light a bonfire to warm up quickly. So they stocked it with firewood, laid a fire ready to light, and went up the hill to set up camp for the last time.

Sleeping cold would have meant sharing body heat. They'd have had to strip down to the bare minimum of clothing and sleep in a big puppy-pile under common covers. That meant that when, in the middle of the night, they decided that it was, in fact, too cold they'd have had to get dressed before going down the hill.

Nine people trying frantically to dress as quickly as possible in a confined space by flashlight must have been chaos. The ones on the outside would have had an easier time while the ones in the middle probably had to wait to even start until some of the others were out of the way. In any case, the first to be ready were Zolotaryov, Kolevatov, Dubinina, and Thibeaux-Brignolle. Zolotaryov took his camera and Kolevatov grabbed a box of matches (they were still in his pocket when his body was found) and they went ahead to light the fire and let the shelter start getting warm.

You guys, I have the rest of the story too but my phone is dying. I'm going to go charge up my battery and I will be back in an hour or so to finish this, step by step and with the evidence that I believe supports it all laid out.

[LorettaRoss]

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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[GlennM]

Welcome to the forum and thank you for your investigative efforts and book. As I read your synopsis, I think you are positing that after the team cached their excess burden, they overtopped the ridge on 1079 making for Ortoten, but were turned back.
The standard canon is that they did not use Dyatlov Pass, but actually crossed higher up on 1079. Therefore, the tent on 1079 represents their second attempt to push to get to Ortoten.

Again, the standard canon explains they wanted to keep to the high ground to make the trek as opposed to losing the elevation going a half mile below in the woods where the cedar is. If I understand your hypothesis, this is just what they did. There are no ravines at elevation 880 where the tent is of course.

You will find the forum interested in your model, but be prepared for scrutiny! There are a number of invested participants who hold tightly to their ideas. Conspiracy advocated are the most recalcitrant.

Welcome