Expedition 2024 - Preparation

13-07-2024

Jul20

Today I drew the map in Google and reminded me of a Triskele: Celtic Symbol of Constant Motion, Eternity and Interconnectedness. The three points are (left) me crossing a foot the Estonian-Russian border, (top) Otorten, Dyatlov group's final destination, the mountain they allegedly did not reach, and (bottom) visiting Askinadzi in Sevastopol. He is closely watching my endeavors and advising what to look for.

Jul21

Just got this notification: Due to the closure of the Ivangorod vehicle border crossing point in Russia for the reconstruction period from February 1, 2024, Lux Express operates trips on the route Tallinn - St. Petersburg - Tallinn with a connection at the Narva - Ivangorod border. Passengers cross the border on foot.

Estonia-Russia border

People started telling me that I could miss my connecting train from St Petersburg to Yekaterinburg but I choose not to worry. I have to leave behind some of my emotional and physical baggage. These expeditions do to me what people try to achieve with shrinks and diets. I will be chasing trains and sunsets, chased by bears and mosquitos for a month. Why worry if I have no control over the outcome. You can not outrun bears and bad luck.

Jul22

Going Going Gone
Check-in from Istanbul Airport. I added on the map a pointer where I am, well, where I was when I last checked in.
I will spend the night in Tallinn, Estonia, before catching the bus to the border 4 am tomorrow.

Jul25

Although I am posting tourist photos from Yekaterinburg today we established the headquarters in my modest dwelling, key members of the group showed up and it turns out that the plans will have to change to what degree I will know by the end of the week. The person who was our guide to Otorten fell sick, very weirdly sick, almost like Yuri Yudin. Suddenly all his toenails turn black, he has a new ulcer he never knew he had, and complains of back pain. His lab results will come out on August 7. The rest of us voted to go. We remain 5, 2 women and 3 men. It will be very, very hard. But we decided to go. So far the mountain turned down one of us, and he was the strongest. I will introduce the rest of the hikers in the upcoming days. We have to rethink the whole plan now. We are in real trouble, we will consider the weather and have to buy more equipment.

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As I said yesterday, the people that start from Yekaterinburg met only to learn that we are left without our leader, Aleksander Fedotov, who was the only one that has ever been to Otorten without blowing himself up. The explosion is a reference to another member of our group, Shamil, which I am describing next. Fedotov is the only one who knew how to collect wood, start a fire, chase away a bear, he is a professional Ural guide. He helped build the camps on the Dyatlov Pass for Liam Le Guillou in 2018, the Swedish-Russian expedition (Richard Holmgren) and Expedition Unknown (Josh Gates) in 2019. I thought that going under his guidance I am carelessly luxuriously protected to pursue my work. I am intentionally choosing a video with him that was shot this time of the year, but winter and snow are his real elements. But we are going in the summer which presents its own peril, mosquitos, rain and bears. In this video Fedotov is building a bath by the river Ushma.

So Fedotov fell mysteriously ill. Doctors don't have an exact diagnosis, but he lost weight, back pain, his toenails turned black for no reason, they discover ulcers for starters, but there's also something else that they are trying to find. The symptoms don't match what they found so far.

This guy is very cool. The trouble with our expedition could easily be resolved by not going, or doing something easier, but his health is his livelihood, so please give it some prayers and positive thoughts for him to get well.

Two of the group relied on Fedotov for gear which they never even discussed with him. Good thing I was not among them, bad thing, I will have to share my tent with at least one person. We need to buy raincoats and rubber boots since the weather is going to be rough. Now that the leader is not going, let me introduce you the remaining hikers.

The next two are veterans. Shamil Sabirov is from Kazan, and Ayna is from Yekaterinburg as far as I know. This year will be Shamil's 10th summer expedition to the pass and Ayna's 9th. In 2021 their fate bonded with a very bad incident. On their way to Otorten a storm accosted them. For this precise unfortunate circumstances an organization of volunteers "Northern Ural" has secured military type emergency modules painted in red so they can be seen in bad weather. They spread from the Dyatlov Pass, through Otorten, to Manpupuner. Man-Pupu-ner in the Mansi language means "a small mountain of idols". The video ends with teh words "Once treacherous, this now is one of the safest routes in Ural". This is not the case if you are with Shamil though.

They take shelter in one of the modules that they find by some miracle. While the stove is warming the place Shamil starts to cook on a gas bottle which he puts on top of the stove. There is an imminent explosion. Shamil realizing moments before the disaster what's coming reaches to remove the bottle and as a result his hands an face burn. Ayna is left without eyebrows and some scorched hair. The module's door is blown outward. This year Yuri Kuntsevich didn't feel well and returned from the expedition on the first day, was admitted in a hospital, and died on August 11 from Covid complications. Here is an album from his last expedition. It was a sad year, this is the account on the trek of another expedition to the pass that same year "The Burning August of 2021" by Vladimir Selitskiy.

Tomorrow I will tell you how I and Shamil got separated, both got lost on their own, and I met mama bear with cubs.

During the expedition to the Dyatlov Pass 2023 I managed to get lost in the woods and meet face to face with a brown Russian bear and her three cubs. The bear had been chased by dogs in the deep forest and while I was dwelling as a real Mansi (Mansi means forest dweller), I experienced a close encounter of the third kind with the king of the Taiga. The Bear is considered the most powerful creature of the Ural mountains. A mama bear with cubs is not something you want to run into. I count my blessings.

We see bears on the Dyatlov Pass every year, the trick is not to get up close and alone. In July their cubs are 6-7 months old and the blueberries, their favorite food that covers the pass, have just ripened up. Imagine, these cubs have never tasted blueberries before in their lives. And here we come, tourists in ATVs, guns, rockets, fireworks, dogs, and all kinds of bear deterrents to claim the pass.

"Late in July or early in August, with the first ripening of huckleberries, blueberries and other berries, bears devote most of their attention to exploiting this high-energy food. In and around Banff National Park, grizzly bears have been documented eating more than 200,000 buffalo berries in a single day."

Behavior: Information on this subspecies is sparse. The bears build winter dens and typically will occupy these from October or November until late March, April or early May. Mating takes place between May and July and the cubs, usually two or three, are born in the den in January or February. They will remain with the mother for around two and a half years during which time she will not become pregnant again. Except for during mating and for mothers with cubs the bears are solitary.

Threats: Hunting, conflict with humans, mainly due to habitat loss (particularly due to the clear-cutting of forests), and, increasingly, poaching on a commercial scale to obtain gall bladders and other body parts for use in medicine.

We had two sick days on the southern side of the Dyatlov Pass, most of the men were with fever. When the group was ready to cross over I was eager to get to my precious cedar trees and decided to go ahead by myself. What could go wrong?

On July 23, 2023 I walked ahead of Shamil, same as the day before. The moment I stepped into the taiga forest I slowed down because I was into uncharted territory. Shamil went in front of me keeping his pace but I couldn't follow through the thick shrubbery. He presumed I was behind him. This is how I got lost. I started whistling with every breath out and screaming Shamil's name. He didn't hear me. Revelation number one: the forest absorbs sounds. I decided to include Shamil in my story because I didn't go there on my own, although going with Shamil doesn't make a strong case, and secondly to explain that for the first two hours I was trying to find Shamil, and not my way out. I was seeing bent grass and following the trail hoping to find him. It is possible that I was going in circles, I had a visual with the mountains at all times, so it is not like I was lost in terms of directions. I was trying to find my party, this is what was driving me in circles, following false traces, or were they?

On the trail I saw a pile of poop. Didn't raise an alarm since it was fresh but small, I thought it left by a deer. I took 5 more steps and had a déjà vu. In 2015 Ron, Carol and I hiked John Muir National Park. It is regarded as Bear country. We had to get the bear proof canisters and all the shebang. And we saw bears. I was not afraid because we were assured that we would see bears and told mostly what not to do. It had to do mainly with leaving food and smelly things in general laying around. On this trek we saw a steaming pile of bear scat. Then Ron said: "She is watching us right now."

She is watching me right now lit like a neon sign inside my brain. I was paralyzed with fear, didn't dare to even move my head but only lifted my gaze. And there she was, looking directly at me. Since the terrain was ridden with streams hidden in high vegetation I was watching my feet so I don't fall through and twist an ankle or something. If it wasn't for the poop I would have stopped very close, and come face to face. At this particular moment I was 20-30m (70-100 feet) from the bear. She was watching me attentively full frontal. The whistle went dead in my mouth. The only thought in my head was "This is how it ends." I don't remember unbuckling two belts but my backpack dropped and I started moving away to the right. Slowly. No idea why I dropped my backpack. This was a mistake. I don't want to say BIG mistake because it will sound like it had consequences, but this quickly became a big problem for me. I already knew that there are good chances to have to spend the night alone, or with the bear. If the former I would need my backpack. Another consideration was that if I survived we would turn into a "forest dweller" (this is what the word Mansi means) for the next days, searching for my backpack. We were already two days behind because the guys got sick, and chances were that I would never find it, with everything inside - passport, money, incremental borer for $2000 donated by Haglöf Sweden which I haven't even used yet. If nothing else, take this from My Bear Story - the true meaning of Mansi is "forest dweller". So I went back, didn't look around, picked up my backpack and started walking again. Silently. The first bird that flew out from the bushes caused me to scream so loud that I felt the crowns in my mouth vibrating in a different frequency. I just couldn't stop it.

Fear sometimes arranges the priorities in your brain. You either lose it or get it together. But you never know which way it will go. That day I forgot about Shamil and everyone and started thinking what should I do, relying only on myself. I remember the map from my own book (enclosed below). It was laid on a real photo from the area. And I started walking in a straight line, not minding streams and drops, only trying to get as south as possible. On the three photos after the page from the group's diary with Igor Dyatlov's entry I am showing what the forest looks like when NOT lost on your way to the Cedar. Now it's dubbed the "Drunken forest". What I was surrounded by were dark coniferous trees and bushes taller than me. Igor Dyatlov mentioned in his last note in the group's diary: "Thin birch grove replaces firs." This is what I was looking for.

My goal became to cross the last stream on this side of the mountain, get out of this unfamiliar neck of the woods, and find the "thin birch grove", sure sign that I am on the right path to where the bodies were found in May, 1959.

I believe that what saved me was that the cubs pooped first, and then the bear stopped, so when I followed their trail, because this is what led me to them, I was following trampled grass, the cubs were behind her. I was calling for help when Olga Taymen heard me. Women catch sounds with higher frequency than men, and I was screaming my head off. The contingency plan of my group was to climb on the ridge and wait to see the smoke from my fire but it didn't come to that. In retrospect, what I did right and wrong:

On our way back we shared a ride with Elena and Timur Bakaev returning from a night on Otorten. They said that in the module where they spent the night was a note warning about a bear with three cubs that was chased down in the forest by dogs.

This is definitely not the case on the Dyatlov Pass. I am enclosing photos of how a rabbit got snuffed in seconds and the owner of the dog explained that his dog is raised in the city and here is overwhelmed by smells, his instincts go haywire. The bear I met had three cubs, and was chased by dogs into the forest. Somehow I don't feel like being the victim here and feel more like a trespasser.

Russia Is A Real Bear Country!

The largest number of these animals in the world live here! And there’s not just one species, but three.

Russians joke that there’s a simple way to find out what kind of bear is chasing you: if you run, climb a tree and the bear climbs next to you, it’s a brown bear. If you run, climb a tree and a bear shakes it, it’s a black bear. If you run, but there are NO trees, it’s most likely a polar bear.

The weather forecast is moving the storm ahead to the time we will be on the Dyatlov Pass. Check the lightnings:

We bought the tickets for the train to Ivdel, can't wait for the weather to improve. Tomorrow we meet to make inventory of the gear and food supplies. Those of you who stopped by, please wish the clouds away.

5 days left

Not sure who is doing it but I love you. Let's dry up the 5th of August some more.

4 days left

Oh my! Look at August 5th! I was hoping for less rain but 0 mm??? Someone is listening.

3 days left

2 days left

Every year before the expedition I visit the Yekaterinburg witch for some esoteric tips, and Ural guide, geologist, and my Guardian angel Oleg Demyanenko. He will know at all times where I am. Or at least where I am supposed to be.

1 day left

Wonderful news, last moment addition to our group are Aleksey Vasyov and his dog Ural. Yes, his dog's name is the same as the mountain. His dog is fearless and chases after bears. Read more below.

The rain will continue to about the time we get off our "zabroska" which is the reinforced GAS-66 that will get to the head of our trail. And currently the road looks like this. We will need rubber boots. This is the case every year. This is the item you add to your inventory the moment you decide to go to the Dyatlov Pass.

The photo below is from 2022. This same pair of boots I forgot in Bistriy Gaz in 2023. Dmitriy Pushin said he already put them in the truck for me.

After going to the Dyatlov Pass with our expedition in 2022 Aleksey Vasyov and his dog Ural reached Manpupuner, 50 km (31 mi) from the Dyatlov Pass. Man-Pupu-ner in the Mansi language means "a small mountain of idols". The Mansi believed the hill on which the rocks now stand to be sacred ground. No one was allowed to go there. But one day, seven giants came from afar to destroy the Mansi people. They ascended the heights and were literally petrified by the gods.

Ural is a fearless dog who doesn't hesitate to chase after the bears and the video below shows his encounter with a bear in 2021. And there is another video with a bear and her cub that shows how to get the bear's attention banging a metal plate and spoon. The masters of the mountains don't want to mess with people. They are dangerous only if startled and if you get in their way. This is the general rule, but there are exceptions (* read below videos), so you have to always move in groups and make a lot of noise. We apologize for the shaky videos.