Russia's 'Dyatlov Pass' conspiracy theory may finally be solved 60 years later

"In the infamous 'Dyatlov Pass incident,' nine young hikers died under mysterious circumstances. Now, there's a scientific explanation.

The avalanche hypothesis is not new; two federal Russian investigations (completed in 2019 and 2020) also concluded that the hikers were most likely driven from their tents by a slab avalanche — that is, an avalanche that occurs when a slab of snow near the surface breaks away from a deeper layer of snow, and it slides downhill in blocky chunks. However, this hypothesis hasn't been widely accepted by the public, the new study noted, because neither investigation offered a scientific explanation for some of the incident's stranger details.

"The slab avalanche theory was criticized due to four main counterarguments," Gaume said.

First and foremost, there was no sign of an avalanche when rescuers arrived at the campsite 26 days after the hikers went missing. Second, the slope where the hikers built their camp had an incline of less the 30 degrees, which is typically considered the minimum angle for an avalanche to occur, Gaume said. Third, there's evidence that the hikers fled their tents in the middle of the night, meaning the avalanche was triggered hours after the highest risk event, when the hikers built their camp — a process that involved cutting into the face of the slope to create a flat surface below their tent and a sheer wall of snow next to it (a common practice at the time, the study authors wrote). Finally, some of the hikers had sustained head and chest injuries that avalanches usually don't cause, Gaume said.

In their paper, Gaume and study co-author Alexander Puzrin, a researcher at the Institute for Geotechnical Engineering in Zurich, Switzerland, set out to address each of these critiques. They studied records from the time of the Dyatlov incident to recreate the environmental conditions that the hikers most likely faced on the night of their deaths, and then used a digital avalanche model to test whether a slab avalanche could have plausibly occurred under those conditions.

The team's analysis showed that the avalanche hypothesis stands up to every counterargument."