Search and rescue in the Northern Urals February 1959, Dyatlov Pass

The winter session of the third year of the power engineering department ended. Someone was going on a winter hike, and I came to the institute to arrange a retake of the "tail" in the TOE. The famous professor at the institute, Yanko-Trenitsky (head of the department of theoretical foundations of electrical engineering) gave me a failing grade, fulfilling the promised threat for reading the bestseller of those years "Three Comrades" by Remarque at his lecture. In the hall there was an announcement about an urgent gathering of the hikers in the sports club of the institute. It turned out that the group of hikers - senior students, making a hike in the mountainous part of the northern Urals under the leadership of Igor Dyatlov, well-known in the hiking club, had already missed the deadline by several days. And this is already an emergency!

Not many hikers came and most were from the junior courses, since the session for senior students always started earlier than ours. The group was assembled relatively quickly. I was appointed as the leader. They distributed the duties: someone dealt with the equipment, someone with the food. I went to the Suvorov School for flare guns, they promised to help us with maps in Ivdel, where we were supposed to fly early in the morning on a special flight from the Aramil army airfield. For me, this was the first flight in my life, although at the military department they were supposed to make us airborne navigators.

In Ivdel, the organizational tasks went without any problems, but it was already too late to fly out on the Dyatlov group route, so only in the morning we loaded into the helicopter and flew to the area of ​​Mount Otorten, the northern point of the planned route.

An-2 aircraft at Aramil airfield for a rescue group

We were instructed both in Ivdel and when unloading from the helicopter about the undesirability of contact with random people: after all, this is the Ivdel-lag area and how many prisoners there are and how many of them are on the run, naturally, were not reported to us. It quickly became clear that the pilots had made a mistake with the landing site and that we would have to walk to Otorten for several days.

Leader of the first search and rescue group Boris Slobtsov

Misha Sharavin, ?, Boris Slobtsov and Slava Halizov discuss options for further searches for the Dyatlov group

The agreed search plan assumed regular radial deviations from the main direction in groups of two or three people with the goal of finding traces or camp sites of the Dyatlov group. The next day we began to come across ski tracks and some signs of stops and camps, which we not very confidently, but still attributed to the Dyatlov group, since there should not have been any other hikers in this area at that time. After the second overnight stay in the Auspiya River valley and the loss of traces of the unknown group, we decided to make radial ones.

Search in small groups of two or three people. Our path with Sharavin and the hunter Ivan lay to the pass in the Lozva River valley and further to the ridge, from which we hoped to see Mount Otorten with binoculars. At the pass, Sharavin, looking through binoculars at the eastern slope of the ridge, saw something in the snow that looked like a collapsed tent. We decided to climb there, but without Ivan. He said he wasn't feeling well and would wait for us at the pass (we realized he was just scared). As we approached the tent, the slope became steeper and the crust became denser, and we had to leave our skis and walk the last tens of meters without skis, but with poles. Finally, we came up against the tent, we stood there, silently, and didn't know what to do: the slope of the tent was torn in the center, there was snow inside, some things, skis were sticking out, an ice ax was stuck in the snow at the entrance, no people were visible, it was terrifying!

Rescuers at the tent abandoned by the Dyatlov group

I don't really want to continue the description myself. I'll just say that many subsequent days were spent in hard work, continuously building versions and assumptions about the causes of this still unsolved tragedy with a group of experienced, young and strong hikers from UPI. The range of versions for this and subsequent years was incredible - from alien to criminal. A correspondent from the Ural regional newspaper Rimma Pechurkina specially came to Moscow to see me and I gave her a rather lengthy interview, so in order not to repeat myself, I'd better cite a fragment of her newspaper article:

"Our fellow countryman, and now Muscovite Boris Slobtsov, a graduate of UPI, head of the department of ZAO STC RADAR of the Institute of Precision Instruments, which is part of the Russian Space Agency, also questioned the rocket-space version. And although we are considering only one version in this publication, I would like to give Boris Efimovich more space: after all, he was the first to find Dyatlov's tent, he lives quite far from us and none of the current authors of publications have yet reached this witness.

- Among the searchers, our group was the youngest - third year. I still cannot understand why I was appointed leader. Now I can say that many years later I became a more or less professional rescuer, I saved Germans in the mountains, they gave me an order of their rescue service for this. But then I was not even the most experienced in the group.

I remember that we were the first to arrive in Ivdel. Then we were dropped off in a helicopter in the mountains, but not to Mount Otorten, as planned, but further south. A radio operator and a hunter were with us. Local people, older than us. They assumed that nothing good would come of this epic. We, the young ones, were absolutely convinced that nothing terrible had happened. Well, someone broke a leg - they built a shelter, sat there, and waited for rescuers.

There were three of us that day: the local forester Ivan, me, and Misha Sharavin. We reached the pass and, without going down, We went along the slope. We went for the following reason.

While we were getting there, they told us a lot of things. The main story was about Otorten. I had already learned about the Dead Mountain from the press, but about Otorten, the locals said that there were deep holes there, that huge cornices grew on them in winter, and that once a whole group, along with the cornice, flew off the cliff. We didn't really believe it, but we decided to climb the ridge and look through binoculars in the direction of Mount Otorten. We walked diagonally from the pass to the northwest until we saw... There was a tent on the slope, the middle of it was caved in, but it was there. Imagine the state of nineteen-year-old boys (Ivan didn't go with us to the ridge, saying he was sick). It was scary to look into the tent. And yet we started to stir up the snow with ski poles - a lot of it had gotten in through the open entrance and the gap.

There was a jacket hanging at the entrance to the tent. It turned out to be Dyatlov's. In the pocket was a tin box from Montpensier fruit drops. And in it were money, tickets. We were pumped up: Ivellag, bandits, prisoners all around. And the money was there. So it wasn't that scary. We dug a deep trench in the snow near the tent and didn't find anyone. We were very happy.

We took a few things with us so that we wouldn't get into trouble with the guys for "fantasies". A box, a flask of alcohol, a camera, and something else. On our skis - and off we went.

I want to talk about the psychology of young people again. We sat down in the tent, poured out this alcohol. And drank to their health. Both local "cadres" offered to drink to the repose of the soul. So we almost beat their faces in. We were convinced that the guys were sitting somewhere. But a month had passed! We didn't have enough imagination for anything else. We reported the find by radio. We were told that all the groups would be transferred here. When after the radio we climbed through the pass to the others, Doroshenko and Krivonischenko had already been found. Now we confidently can say their names, but then Yuri Doroshenko was mistaken for Zolotoryov. I knew Yuri, but I didn't recognize him here, and even his own mother didn't recognize him right away. And they also wondered about the fifth corpse that was found - was it Slobodin or Kolevatov. They were completely unrecognizable, their skin was some strange color.

And then the grueling work began. We walked step by step through the entire territory with probes. Sometimes they brought mine detectors, sometimes service dogs.

(By the way, a dog found Zina Kolmogorova.) Muscovites from the Central Tourism Council - Baskin, Bardin, Shuleshko, experienced people immediately said that the search should be stopped until spring. But the authorities gave a strict order: search until they find. Because among the pathfinders with a sick imagination, a version was born: what if they went abroad without pants, without shoes. I did not come up with this now. It outraged us back then. Vadik Brusnitsyn and I were given the task: to find the damn storage shed, since it was mentioned in the diary. Of course, we found it a few days later with all the things and food left behind.

The winds on the pass are terrible. You won't believe it: you take a ski pole by the lanyard, and it's held almost horizontally. The snow, compacted by the wind, is terribly slippery. When we were carrying the bodies we found to the pass, to the helicopter, having adapted skis for this purpose, we fell several times, clinging to whatever we could to keep from sliding down. I grabbed the leg of one of the dead. If we assume that the weather was the same on the night of the tragedy, then in the dark, without shoes, you'll run wherever the wind takes you. The labaz was in the Auspiya Valley, and they ran to the Lozva Valley.

When all the search groups gathered in an army tent with a stove and thick sleeping bags, when the aces, the veterans of tourism - Maslennikov, Karelin, Akselrod - were sitting with us, there were many conversations and assumptions. But to be honest, I didn't notice anything unusual in the area that I could rely on. I just had the feeling that the guys were acting by touch. For example, there are two trees at a visible distance. One is more suitable for a fire, the other is smaller. Why create additional difficulties for yourself, break thicker branches?! It turns out that the person stumbled upon this particular tree, and missed the more convenient one. At some point, they lost their ability to see?

In general, it seems to me that it is not constructive to try to unravel this mystery by talking to those who worked at the "rescue station"; we need to go to other categories of people. Although, perhaps, with the help of eyewitness testimony, some versions can be discarded. I would discard the "space" one. I don't see any arguments in its favor.

That's how my Moscow interlocutors turned out to be in solidarity."

Periodically, the public again becomes interested in this still unsolved tragedy. And now (in 2006, when I began working on my memoirs), two respected mountaineers contacted me - Vladimir Borzenkov from Moscow and Evgeniy Buyanov from St. Petersburg. Both have already collected a large amount of material accumulated by different researchers over 47 years, and each has his own version of the tragedy of the Dyatlov group. Borzenkov believes that the reason for the hikers' emergency abandonment of the tent was infrasound, formed as a result of a wild wind superimposed on the corresponding profile of the Ural ridge, on the slope of which the tent was set up. Evgeniy Buyanov's version is a series of avalanches, one of which partially damaged the tent, seriously injured several participants and forced the others to urgently get out of the tent and take the victims away: there is a roar and a rumble all around and it is not known when the next avalanche will come down and cover everyone...

Another Petersburger (chief editor of the magazine EX--adventures, travels, extreme) Sergey Shibaev wrote: "The mystery of the death of the UPI hikers may remain in history on par with the mysteries of the "flying Dutchmen". True, there is still 2009 left, when access to the investigative files of the KGB and the prosecutor's office will be opened.