Dyatlov Pass incident - Wikipedia - tfw you'll never freeze to death in middle-of-nowhere Siberia under mysterious circumstances surrounded by your Soviet bros and granolafoids

I ended up on this wikipedia page after reading a third party site page linked here by @Leo so they get some credit for this. I won't be linking the 3rd party site because the same page had unrelated NSFL WPD-tier graphic content and didn't contain any additional information beyond the wikipedia page and the guide page I'll link at the end.

1959: ten students and recent graduates of a Soviet polytechnic university decide to make a very long (200 mile) hike/ski trip through a section of the Ural mountains. All of the hikers were very experienced, the group leader (a radio engineering student that had been doing cold weather hiking for over a decade) especially so. The original group consisted of eight men and two women. They took a train and then a bus north to their departure point, the tiny village of Vizhai (population ~200). After spending the night and finalizing their loadouts, they began their trek further north on January 27th. The next day, one of the male hikers turned back due to an arthritis flare-up. Other than this, so far so good.

Everything mostly went as planned until the night of February 2nd, per diaries recovered in the aftermath. Visibility dropped due to a snowstorm and the group deviated slightly from their planned course. Not the end of the world. They set up camp that night on the side of the Kholat Syakhl mountain.

The group was expected to return to Vizhai on or within a few days of February 12th, and notify their university outdoors club of their successful return via telegram. This did not happen, and on February 20th once a minor delay began looking unlikely, the families of the hikers demanded a search and rescue operation. Initially the university club headed the search but after several days without success the police and military became involved, bringing search helicopters.

The campsite was found on February 26th, in a state that seriously confused the searchers. The tent had been torn open from the inside, and all of the hikers' gear including most of their shoes remained in the tent with no bodies inside or nearby. The first two bodies were found 1.5 kilometers away at the treeline, shoeless and in their underwear, followed by three more buried in snow between the first two and the ruptured tent. All five of these deceased were determined to have died of hypothermia.

The remaining bodies were not recovered until two months later on May 4th under 13 feet of snow, in a ravine 250 feet further into the woods from the first two bodies. Of these remaining four, only one had died of hypothermia, the rest had died of severe chest trauma, internal bleeding subsequent to chest trauma, and a skull fracture. Here's where it gets weirder: none of the trauma deaths had any soft tissue damage indicating a fall or a crush. Additionally, two of them were missing their eyeballs and other various tissues.

Nobody knows why they ripped their way out of the tent in such a hurry that they couldn't even put on their shoes. The most obvious explanation is an avalanche, but there was no indication an avalanche had occurred when the site was discovered. Alternative explanations range from infrasound tones generated by wind driving them all insane simultaneously, to ayylmaos , to military tests of parachute mines that exploded mid-air above their campsite ("orange floating spheres" had been reported in the areas around the site). Some of the clothes of the dead were found to be radiologically contaminated (ie radioactive), but apparently not all. The official public investigation ended almost immediately after this fact surfaced, so there is some speculation that radiological weapons were involved and the KGB shut the whole thing down.

There's also some shit about the oldest member of the group being a runaway Nazi or something that stole the identity he was using at the time of the trip after DNA testing revealed he was unrelated to the family he was supposedly a part of.

The nakedness of some of them is relatively easy to explain compared to the rest of the story: end-stage hypothermia causes the victim to feel hot, and undressing in similar situations has been documented.

I personally lean towards parachute mine tests as the most likely explanation: the sounds convinced the group that an avalanche was imminent, causing them to rapidly flee the tent. The subsequent hypothermia deaths were, well, hypothermia, and the trauma deaths would be explained by a blast shockwave of the parachute mines leaving no external signs of injury. The missing eyeballs are creepy but could've been eaten by scavenger animals, except that one of the missing eyeball bodies was found face-down under ice. Who knows?

https://ermakvagus.com/Europe/Russia/Cholat- Syachil/Kholat Syakhl.htm This site has more detailed info than wikipedia along with scans of documents and photos related to the incident (ESL warning).

If you really want to see the bodies, https://allthatsinteresting.com/dyatlov-pass-photos has some of the pictures and https://dyatlovpass.com/morgue has the rest, along with more info.

Atlas Obscura article https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/31-days-of-halloween-dyatlov-pass-incident