Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident (16 page)

The tent was covered with snow.

The entrance was partly open, with sheet curtains sticking out.

Urine traces were found where someone had been “taking a leak.”

When the tent was dug out, a tear in the tent on the slope-facing side close to the entrance was found, with a fur jacket sticking out of the hole.

The descent-facing side was torn to pieces.

A pair of bound skis was lying in front of the tent entrance.

Arrangement of things inside the tent are catalogued.

Many of these items had been observed by the men who had discovered the tent two days ago. There is one peculiarity, however, that no one had previously noticed: a series of rips in the canvas, at the back of the tent to the north. But then, in an already threadbare structure, a few rips don’t seem to hold tremendous significance. In fact, it is regarded as so insignificant that no one could later remember who made the discovery.

AT THE DAY
’
S END, MASLENNIKOV NOTES THAT NO OTHER
bodies were found. He also notes in a radiogram the items that Tempalov had taken from the site:

THE PROSECUTOR TOOK ALL OF THE GROUP’S DOCUMENTS EXCEPT FOR SKETCHES AND PERSONAL NOTEBOOKS, INCLUDING 3 COPIES OF THE ROUTE SCHEDULE. . . .

But, as it happened, it mattered little what Prosecutor Tempalov did that day. Once Tempalov returned to Ivdel, he wouldn’t get a chance even to initiate his case; and, within two days’ time, his services would no longer be required. In fact, after the first bodies had been found the day before, higher-ups in the regional prosecutor’s office were already arranging to have Tempalov replaced by a more powerful prosecutor. By March 1, they would settle on Lev Ivanov, a man who would come to personify the Dyatlov case for decades to come. Ivanov liked to tell people that his personal motto for success was “I am honest, not corrupt, and I sleep well.” By the end of the case, however, Ivanov would betray his motto on at least two of these counts.

Lev Ivanov, n.d.

14

2012

KUNTSEVICH
’
S BASEMENT APARTMENT HAD BECOME A
kind of war room for our trip preparations. Each morning after breakfast, I descended the cement stairs to spend some time with Yuri Yudin, and each day the living room grew smaller as it filled with gear for our trip. As our departure date drew near, Yudin gave me some disappointing news. Through our translator, he informed me that he wouldn’t be making the trip to the mountains, though he declined to give me a specific reason. I was disheartened that the Dyatlov group’s only survivor wouldn’t be at my side as we retraced his own footsteps over half a century later. I hadn’t expected Yudin to go all the way to Dyatlov Pass, but I had hoped he would join us for at least part of the expedition. His decision shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. If Yudin hadn’t been able to complete the trip in the winter of 1959 at the age of twenty-one, it seemed a stretch to expect him to attempt the same trip at seventy-four. (He had, however, returned to the area in the summer of 1963 to partake in a ceremony to honor his fallen friends.)

On the morning two days before we were to leave, I told Kuntsevich that I’d be in the war room and made my way downstairs. I opened the door to find a man in his mid-sixties, who was not Yudin, sitting on the couch. It took me several seconds before I could place him: It was my “attorney” from Moscow. After I got over my initial surprise, Vladimir Borzenkov and I greeted each
other with a sturdy handshake. He had clearly traveled a great distance to be here—if not by plane, then a sixteen-hour train ride from Moscow. By all appearances, this was not a casual visit.

Thirty minutes later, our translator, Olga Taranenko, arrived—the same young woman who had made her feelings about Stalin abundantly clear a few days before. Taranenko had been born and raised in Yekaterinburg, though she had never heard of the Dyatlov incident until this job. As her interest in the case grew, she asked to accompany us on the journey as our interpreter. But Kuntsevich had declined, saying he did not feel it would be safe to bring a young woman into the mountains.

Now that Borzenkov and I could at last communicate, the first thing I learned was that he would be accompanying Kuntsevich and me on our trip. Then, like an excited kid, Borzenkov proudly revealed his hiking gear piled behind a chair. He pulled out a multicolor, nylon snowsuit from his pack and held it up for my admiration. Patched together like a frenetic quilt—half Piet Mondrian, half Russian superhero—it was unlike any snowsuit I have seen. He pulled out the matching accessories—a hood, backpack and nylon gloves—and explained that he’d designed the suit himself, in conjunction with the Sports Federation of the USSR. Along with three similar jackets and two pairs of trousers, his suits had survived fifty ski trips and search and rescue expeditions, including sojourns to the Kola Peninsula, the Polar Urals and the Arctic. He then joked that all the nations of the world were represented in this suit, making him a walking United Nations.

I pointed to the baby-blue aviation patch on the suit’s left arm, which prompted Borzenkov to elaborate on his background and education. He was not an attorney at all. He was a third-generation Muscovite who had earned the patch from the Moscow State University of Aeronautics, formerly known as the Moscow Aviation Institute. There, he took three higher education degrees: one in aviation engineering, another in applied mathematics and a third—the
equivalent of a PhD—in safety-and-rescue equipment engineering for aviation and space systems. After earning his engineering degrees, Borzenkov had joined the 1982 scientific team behind the first official Soviet expedition to the summit of Mount Everest. In addition to designing climate-specific suits for the twenty-six-man team, he also created a special oxygen mask mechanism that, after its success on the Everest expedition, was used in the Soviet space program.

“Our mountaineers chose an extremely difficult and untrodden route at the southwest side of Everest,” he told me. “The expedition had two night ascents never made by anyone else. What was most rewarding for me and everyone involved in designing oxygen equipment for that expedition was that for the first time in Russian history, our mountaineers didn’t experience a single failure of oxygen masks.”

When I asked him how he had come to know so much about the Dyatlov expedition, he told me that in the late ’70s his experience as a hiking consultant led to a position as vice president of the Federation of Student Tourism for the fifteen Soviet republics. In his new position, he familiarized himself with hiking accidents and tragedies that had involved university students. “It was purely administrative and methodological work,” he explained. “I was personally responsible for safety issues and was often inspecting hiking regions frequented during student vacations. We kept watch there as a rescue team, equipped to provide first aid.”

His mood seemed to darken when I asked him about rescues he’d been involved in. His first search and rescue mission, he told me, had been in 1971 to the Kola Peninsula in northwest Russia. “Schoolchildren from Polyarnye Zori town were on a ski tour in the Khibiny Mountains, and one boy lagged behind. The group was large, and they hurried to catch a train. The leader only discovered the boy was missing on the train. The next day, a rescue team of three people, including me, went to look for the boy. We were
volunteers because there was no professional rescue agency yet. I had just returned from a ski trip and was in Kirovsk town. . . . The weather was very bad, with strong winds up to 95 miles per hour and frost around –20°C [–3°F]. We could not go through one pass on the route because it was a narrow cleft, and wind would simply blow us out from its entrance. The team moving to meet us from the other end of the route had the same problem. We searched through all nooks of the route assigned to us. Later, we found the boy, after the weather improved, right in that cleft where we couldn’t pass. Unfortunately, we could not help him. He had frozen on the first day. It was my first expedition, and it ended badly, so many details stayed in my memory for a long time, haunting me.”

It was in 1978, while Borzenkov was reviewing previous hiking accidents, that he came upon information about the incident at Dyatlov Pass. But it wasn’t until 1984, while attending a conference on aviation and space ergonomics, that he met some of the volunteers who had taken part in the search efforts. From then on, he could not shake the case from his mind.

As we spent more time together, it became clear that Borzenkov was not a Dyatlov case conspiracist, but rather was holding out for a scientific explanation. Kuntsevich, by contrast, was a man who relied on his gut instinct, even if his interpretations of the facts were sometimes tinged with hyperbole. The two men, however, had been friends since the ’60s, brethren of the last Soviet generation, and weren’t afraid to engage in a heated debate. Both were striving to finally solve the case and help the still-grieving families of the hikers find solace.

I KNEW NOTHING OF PACKING FOR A TRIP OF THIS
magnitude. At least, this was the conclusion I came to as my Russian friends schooled me in the ways of winter mountaineering.
First, Kuntsevich told me that I would need the following items on my person at all times: a pocketknife, two lighters and one box of matches. Preferably, the matches should be sewn into my clothes. I was then taught how to arrange my clothes in the order of usage—which, I realized, meant that I was supposed to schedule my daily wardrobe ahead of time. Once I had my clothing timeline sorted out, I was instructed to roll each article as compactly as possible to save space. Kuntsevich then loaded me up with my share of pots, pans and other odds and ends. Borzenkov informed me that the lighter items belonged at the bottom of the backpack, while the heavier items—completely counter to my intuition—were to be placed at the top near my head. I stopped myself from protesting, reminding myself that the man knew a little something about physics.