Dead Mountain

“I don't remember Sherlock Holmes ever mentioning what you are supposed to do when you've eliminated everything improbable, and nothing is left.”

I knew nothing about the Dyatlov Pass Incident before reading this book, hadn't even heard of it. The cover looked interesting and the premise sounded super creepy and mysterious though, so I was looking forward to seeing where this went. The short story is that I loved everything about this book, except the ending.

In 1959, nine Russian college students (experienced mountain climbers, all) decide to conquer Dead Mountain in the Urals as part of their mountain climbing experience necessary to advance their qualifications. They went missing, and when a rescue team finally located the bodies (because, let's face it, Russia, on a mountain, in winter, isn't the most hospitable of locations), nobody can figure out what happened. The bodies are in various states of disrobe, none have shoes on, one is missing a tongue, and they failed to stick together. Theories are advanced, everything from avalanches to animal attacks to secret government weapons to aliens, but nothing conclusive was ever determined. The Russian government quickly wrapped things up, and the final conclusion was “an unknown compelling force should be considered the cause of the hikers' deaths.” This is where the mystery remains to this day.

For the majority of the book, the author splits the chapters into one of three viewpoints. A diary was recovered from one of the hikers, and the author retells their story in the days and weeks leading up to their fate through these entries. The author also weaves in chapters with accounts of the recovery efforts amongst these journal entries, which provides context for how the scene was discovered and the investigation following. Finally, the author's viewpoint, where he visits Russia today, retraces the hikers' steps to the mountain and looks around a bit. Of the viewpoints, the authors' was the least interesting to me. His trip to Russia doesn't seem to have much impact on the overall conclusion the author comes to, and a lot of what he writes about has nothing to do with the Dyatlov Pass Incident itself. Still, I appreciated the lengths the author went to, and the viewpoint in present day Russia was interesting.

Where the book loses me is the ending. The author spends time in the very last bit of the book outlining the different theories and why they don't make sense given the facts as the author sees it. Which is fine, most of what he says here makes sense. But then he busts out with a theory that hasn't come up before about something that's barely been studied up to this point. He speaks to experts in this field who do have some compelling arguments for why it makes sense (and I'm willing to believe them given evidence), and basically leaves his theory there on the table with no more commentary as the book ends. I feel like this would be an easy thing to prove if someone were to go back to the mountain and do so, but the book ends without any compelling proof beyond “some experts say this might be true”.

All that said, the writeup of the actual incident was stellar. This was a really interesting read, and even though the ending kinda flopped for me, it remains an unsolved mystery for a reason, I guess.