The most famous and mysterious case of the death of tourists is considered to be the tragedy that occurred with the Dyatlov group in early February 1959.
The circumstances have not yet been clarified, and several dozen versions have been put forward. This story is known all over the world and has formed the basis of several feature films and documentaries. However, few people know that a similar and no less mysterious and tragic story happened thirty years later on one of the passes in Buryatia.
In August 1993, to Irkutsk from Kazakhstan by railway A group of seven tourists arrived to go to the Khamar-Daban ridge. Forecasters promised suitable weather for climbing, and the group set off for the mountains. It consisted of three boys, three girls and a 41-year-old leader, Lyudmila Korovina, who had the title of master of sports in hiking. The Khamar-Daban ridge does not shock you with its height.
The most high point– 2,396 meters. Arranged in ledges, with pointed peaks and ridges, the ridge is one of the oldest mountains on our planet. These Beautiful places visited annually by thousands of tourists. Valentina Utochenko The group moved from the village of Murino to one of the highest mountains in the range called Hanulu. Its height is 2371 meters.
Having walked about 70 kilometers in 5-6 days, the tourists stopped for a rest between the peaks of Golets Yagelny (2204m) and Tritrans (2310m). The weather forecasters, however, were wrong about the weather. It snowed and rained and the wind blew for several days in a row. At approximately 11 o'clock in the afternoon on August 5, when the tourists were about to leave the temporary parking lot, one of the guys became ill.
Further, according to the only survivor Valentina Utochenko, Sasha fell, blood began to flow from his ears, and foam came from his mouth. Lyudmila Ivanovna Korovina stayed with him, appointed Denis as a senior, told him to go down as low as possible, but not to enter the forest, then the guys Vika, Tanya, Timur began to fall and roll on the ground - symptoms were like those of a suffocating person, Denis said - quickly take the most necessary things out of the backpacks and ran downstairs, bent over the backpack, pulled out the sleeping bag, raised his head. Denis fell and tore his clothes, tried to drag him by the hand with him, but he broke free and ran away. She ran downstairs without letting go of her sleeping bag. I spent the night under a boulder, covering my head with a sleeping bag, it was scary, trees were falling along the edge of the forest from the hurricane, in the morning the wind died down, more or less dawn rose to the scene of the tragedy, Lyudmila Ivanovna was still alive but practically could not move, she showed Valya in which direction to go out and passed out, Valya closed the guys’ eyes, collected her things, found a compass and went...
After some time, the girl came across an abandoned relay tower at an altitude of 2310 meters, where she spent another night completely alone. And in the morning, the tourist noticed pillars going down from the tower. Valentina realized that they should lead her to people, but the houses to which wires had once been laid turned out to be abandoned. But Valentina went out to the Snezhnaya River and moved downstream; on the sixth day after the tragedy, she was accidentally seen and picked up by a water tour group. They had already sailed past, but decided to return; it seemed suspicious that the tourist did not respond to their greetings.
Out of shock, the girl did not speak for several days. It’s interesting that Lyudmila Korovina’s daughter and another tour group were walking along a neighboring route and agreed to meet her mother at their intersection. But when Lyudmila’s group did not arrive at the collection point, Korovina Jr. thought that they were simply late due to bad weather and continued on their way, at the end of which they went home, not suspecting that their mother was no longer alive.
For some unknown reason, the search was delayed; the bodies of the tourists were found only when about a month had passed since the death of the guys and their leader!!! The picture was terrible, rescuers recall. The helicopter landed, and everyone on board witnessed a terrible sight: “The bodies were already swollen, everyone’s eye sockets were completely eaten away.
Almost all of the dead were dressed in thin tights, while three were barefoot. The leader was lying on top of Alexandra... “What was happening on the plateau? Why, freezing, did the hikers take off their shoes? Why did the woman lie on the dead guy? Why didn't anyone use sleeping bags? All these questions remain unanswered. An autopsy was performed in Ulan-Ude, which showed that all six died from hypothermia, and the investigation agreed that the tragedy was caused by mistakes and incompetence of the group leader. But the facts say otherwise!
In August, it was 24 years since the mysterious death in the mountains of the Irkutsk region of six tourists from Petropavlovsk - Victoria, Denis, Alexander, Timur, Tatyana and their experienced leader Lyudmila Ivanovna Korovina. According to Sputnik, the tragedy occurred in the Khamar-Daban mountains - the oldest massif on the planet, encircling Lake Baikal from the south. Only one participant in the campaign remained alive then - 18-year-old Valentina Utochenko, who was unable to shed light on the mystery of the death of her comrades.
... There are legends around these places, the degree of mysticism of which is off the charts. What is reliable is that it was here that a large pulp and paper mill smoked for almost half a century, which closed after a series of gloomy forecasts from environmentalists that stretched over decades. Here, according to the weather station, up to 800 earthquakes are recorded per year. Around the fires here they tell legends about people walking through the local forests. Bigfoot. In television programs from the category incredible facts talking about aliens landing somewhere nearby. It seems that the more conversations there are, the less chance there is to figure out how much of it is true and how much is fiction.
The story about the death of a group of Petropavlovsk tourists who conquered local peaks in August 1993 is absolutely true. People who knew them closely are still uncomfortable with the memories of this tragedy. A couple of years later, a hundred meters from the ill-fated place, friends of the victims will erect a memorial obelisk with the names of those who did not return from the mountains. Well, the reason for their mysterious death is still being clarified...
Greetings from Dyatlov
In conversations about this story, analogies with another, more famous case the death of tourists in the mountains - the Dyatlov group.
This happened 34 years earlier - in 1959, on the Ural slopes, at an altitude that was not too sky-high (a little over a thousand meters), but the site was classified as of increased complexity. The number of the group of "Dyatlovites" was 10 people, only one remained alive (due to illness, he was forced to interrupt the ascent and return back).
Then only three and a half weeks later the bodies of skiers began to be found in the snow, with injuries to internal and external organs. Many did not have outerwear. The tent was cut open from the inside and personal belongings were left abandoned. It seemed that the tourists were very frightened and left the tent in a hurry. Official version death is a natural force that people were unable to overcome. Death occurred due to massive frostbite.
However, over the decades, this story has become overgrown with many legends, mysteries, versions - where the elements were to blame, and the human factor, and the anthropogenic factor, and even foreign spies and mysterious aliens from outer space. A book was written about this case, a film was made and a number of television shows were made.
The tragedy that happened on August 5, 1993 does not receive such increased attention, even in the homeland of the victims - in Petropavlovsk - few people have heard about it, although there are no less mystics in this story.
We were a real family...
...Then the so-called “Turiada” took place in the country - mass hikes in the forests and mountains. The group of Lyudmila Korovina, the 41-year-old helmsman of the Petropavlovsk tourist club "Azimut", which operated at the pedagogical school, also took part in them. In the early 90s in Petropavlovsk there were several groups of people who were interested in and engaged in tourism. But the brightest leader was and remains Lyudmila Ivanovna Korovina.
Head of the Azimut tourist club Lyudmila Korovina / Photo: ru.sputniknews.kz
One of her students at that time was Evgeniy Olkhovsky, a researcher of those events, through whose efforts this story was not forgotten. He recalls how being in the club turned them into real people - young and idle hooligans.
She knew how to unite everyone and make a team. She believed in people, she believed in people. Could force a person to become who he really is. Under her mentorship, each of us was able to maximize our abilities and grow in all areas of life. How many people, thanks to her, became excellent teachers, athletes, created families, learned to play the guitar, draw, became stronger, bolder, more correct! We were all like adopted children to her, she was worried about everyone, she sent guys and received them from the army,” recalls Evgeniy.
Lyudmila Ivanovna was an international master of sports in hiking. The geography of the hikes expanded every year - Western Tien Shan, Western Sayan, Northern Urals, Subpolar Urals, Mountain Shoria, Karakum, Altai. Not for the first time, in August 1993 I went to Khamar-Daban...
In August 1993, Evgeniy was also supposed to go on a hike with a group to Khamar-Daban. There was a route of the third category of difficulty ahead. But the circumstances turned out differently: “For the campaign,” he recalls, “I prepared thoroughly then - I wanted to get a discharge. But a month and a half before departure, I found out that I would have to go to the construction brigade. When I was already there, they “buried” me too, they called my mother constantly. Maybe fate. But I rather think that if I had been there, everything would have turned out differently..."
Deadly halt
So, at the beginning of August 1993, a group of seven people (quite experienced tourists aged from 17 to 20-something years old), under the leadership of Lyudmila Korovina, went to the mountains from their starting point - the village of Murino. By the way, at the same time another group of our tourists was traveling along a different route in the same area, which included Lyudmila Ivanovna’s 17-year-old daughter. Even before the trip, mother and daughter agreed to meet at a designated place at the intersection of two routes in the mountains.
5-6 days after the start, Korovina’s group managed to cover a significant part of their journey - about 70 km. On August 4, the group makes a halt at the top of 2300 m. Their last rest... It is noted that this place is a completely bare part of the mountains, it is even compared to Martian landscapes - there is practically no vegetation and almost no living creatures are found, only stones, grass and wind. The group spent the night at this place. The weather stubbornly hampered the group of travelers day and night. Contrary to quite optimistic forecasts, a Mongolian cyclone then came to the Irkutsk region - since August 3, it rained and snowed here around the clock.
Why did a group of tourists stop at such an open, windy place? From this moment on, history begins to become overgrown with legends and speculation. On the one hand, the group could descend 400 m lower, to the forest zone - for this it was necessary to overcome 4 km of pure distance. In such conditions, one could already dream of a saving fire. There was, according to local rescuers, another option - to climb to the top, where a special platform was located. There was firewood and a place to rest. The walk to this point was only 30 minutes.
According to Vladimir Zharov, a well-known journalist and traveler in Buryatia, the reason could be the inaccuracy of the map, which was not uncommon at that time. The spread between the data on the map and what was in reality was 100 meters. In the mountains this is not as short a distance as it might seem. Finally, it is worth considering the fact that the tourists were so tired and frozen that they decided to stop for a while.
By the way, this place already had a bad reputation - here on August 3, 1914, the famous explorer A.P. Detischev died in a snowstorm...
What I wanted to forget
What happened the next day, August 5, became known to local rescuers only after almost two weeks - according to the only surviving girl. Her stories subsequently were not replete with a lot of details. One day, Valentina briefly and clearly remarked: “Do you think I want to remember this nightmare? I had to leave, change my whole life. I don’t want to remember this.”
If we collect the memories of different people who happened to hear the girl’s story about what happened, we get the following picture.
...On the night of August 4-5, the weather was bad - a thunderstorm thundered, a hurricane was raging below with such force that it knocked down trees... In the morning, at 11 o'clock, Alexander, the oldest and strongest of the guys, began to feel ill. He fell. There was blood coming from my nose, mouth and ears. It is worth noting here that the group leader raised the guy since childhood and therefore practically considered him her son. She decides to stay with him, and gives instructions to the other guys to try to go lower to the edge of the forest area. I appointed Denis as senior. But after a while, two girls fall at once. They begin to roll around, tear their clothes, and grab their throats. Following them, Timur fell with similar symptoms. Valentina was left alone with Denis. He suggests grabbing the most necessary things from the backpacks and running downstairs. Valentina bent over her backpack to pull out her sleeping bag. When the girl raised her head, Denis was already lying on the ground. Grabbing her sleeping bag, Valentina ran downstairs. She spent the night under a stone, on the edge of the forest area. Trees fell nearby like matchsticks. The next morning the girl rose back - Lyudmila Ivanovna was still alive, but on her last legs. She showed how and where to go out."
Here is how the events that happened are described from the words of the surviving girl in the report on search and rescue and transportation work: “It is difficult to explain what happened in the mountains - real madness was happening in front of V.U., who maintained her composure (Valentina Utochenko - ed.) ". Denis began to hide behind the stones and run away, Tatyana hit her head on the stones, Victoria and Timur probably went crazy. Lyudmila Ivanovna died of a heart attack."
Estimated place of death of tourists / Photo: ru.sputniknews.kz
Survivor
Having collected food and taken a map from the leader’s things, on August 6 Valentina went in search of salvation. The search lasted for three days.
The girl went down to the Anigta River, where she spent the night of August 7. The next day, she came across an abandoned relay tower at an altitude of 2,310 meters, where she spent another night completely alone. The next morning, noticing the pillars going down, the tourist, in the hope that they would lead her to people, set off on the road. However, the houses to which the wires were laid turned out to be abandoned.
But soon the girl went out to the Snezhnaya River and went downstream. Here she had to spend the night again in order to continue the search for people the next day. Having walked 7-8 kilometers, exhausted, she stopped and stretched out her sleeping bag on the bushes near the water. This is how lost tourists indicate their presence. At this time, a group of tourists from Kyiv were rafting along the river, and they picked up the girl. Even in this case, Valentina was extremely lucky - they say that people rarely visit those places...
At first, the girl did not talk to the tourists who saved her - she was in severe shock and exhausted. As a result, either as she returned “to life,” or because of the reluctance (or prohibition) of rescuers to search for the dead tourists... they were found only on August 26.
The truth that no one will tell...
The picture upon arrival at the scene of the tragedy was depressing: mummified bodies, grimaces of horror on their faces... Almost all of the dead were dressed in thin tights, while three were barefoot. The leader was lying on top of Alexandra.
What happened on the plateau? Why, freezing, did the hikers take off their shoes? Why did the woman lie on the dead guy? Why didn't anyone use sleeping bags? All these questions remain unanswered.
The dead were buried only a month later - our delegates spent more than two weeks seeking the right to take the deceased to their native land...
...The bodies were taken out by helicopter. The head of the Poisk search team, lawyer Nikolai Fedorov, who was in the rescue expedition group at that time, recalls that when information about the tragedy arrived, he and his colleagues were sent by plane to the scene of the incident.
We were all gathered and in a team of six people were sent to the scene of the incident. The task was to find the bodies of the dead. When we arrived, the bodies were already prepared. One feature that was told to us by those who removed the dead from the mountain is that the bodies lay in pairs, and at a decent distance from each other (40-50 meters), said Nikolai Fedorov. — The autopsy of the bodies was carried out in Ulan-Ude. According to experts, everyone died from hypothermia...
There are many versions of the circumstances that led to what happened. And the fact that many Russian sources seem to deliberately allow some inaccuracies or discrepancies in the testimony suggests that someone wanted to “hush up” the story.
Thus, in the notes of traveler Leonid Izmailov, Korovina’s group seems to be almost a group of teenage schoolchildren with a pioneer leader, while the difficulty category of the route is indicated as higher. And the death was allegedly caused by unpredictable weather and the leader’s lack of professionalism. However, the average age of the hike participants, even without taking into account the “counselor,” was 20 years old. Each of them already had a certain number of solid forays under their belts, and careful monitoring of their physical condition and nutrition was provided for. Strict taboo regarding alcohol. All this eliminates the possibility of blaming it on frivolity or physical unpreparedness.
They add color and drama to Valentina’s stories in the description of the mass psychosis that happened. The time of death of Lyudmila Korovina is vaguely interpreted - was she still alive on the morning of August 6? According to Valentina, it was. According to some Irkutsk sources, it seems that it no longer exists. There is an opinion that the rescuers knew about the death already on August 10-12, and began the search a week later - some say that bad weather allegedly interfered, some say that financial issues were being resolved... Or maybe the rescuers were waiting for it to end the effect of certain toxic substances?
Finally, why did the control and rescue service release groups when entering their routes if it was known that a major hurricane was approaching? The forensic medical examination of the dead is subject to doubts and criticism (and what kind of examination can there be after three weeks of the bodies being in the open air). However, none of the “mere mortals”, apparently, saw the details of the investigation. However, now, after so many years, it seems that it is much easier to confuse and create more fog than to put all the dots in place.
It is obvious that, based on the symptoms described, hypothermia was only a contributing factor, and not the root cause of the deaths of tourists.
Evgeny Olkhovsky does not believe in the hypothermia version. According to him, such a professional as Lyudmila Ivanovna strictly monitored this so that the guys were provided with food and did not freeze.
Korovina’s people didn’t freeze at minus 50, but here on you..... I would rather believe in aliens, but for Korovina’s people to freeze, I went on a dozen hikes with her, and I know what I’m talking about... Possibly ozone poisoning occurred . There was a strong thunderstorm front, maybe the guys got into a high concentration of ozone, so the body couldn’t stand it,” Evgeniy shares his version.
It is known that ozone poisoning causes massive pulmonary edema and rupture of blood vessels. How were Valentina and Lyudmila Ivanovna lucky to stay alive under such conditions (until the next morning)? According to the researcher, the characteristics of the body are in the first case, its training is in the second.
Those who passed through those places (only 1000 m below) write that they were caught in the same rain as the deceased group, and after that rain, all the woolen clothes of the tourists simply fell apart in their hands, and everyone began to have severe allergies...
Moreover, there are even suggestions that several more groups actually died in those days. Alexey Livinsky, one of the local rescuers who participated in the search for the dead, denies this version. True, according to him, it is reliably known that at the same time a guy was found nearby who died with similar symptoms - blood from the ears, and clouding of mind with foam at the mouth...
Livinsky claims that when their group of rescuers found themselves near the scene of the incident, no significant logging was noticed. And according to Valentina, the hurricane dropped trees like matches. And again the question arises - why did the rescuers delay their search for so long, since the talk about bad weather is exaggerated? Also, according to Livinsky, the corpses of tourists were not eaten by living creatures at all, and in general a rare animal appears on that “Martian plateau.” And, accordingly, the examination was carried out more than complete and reliable. As for the main environmental disaster of the region - the Baikal Pulp and Paper Mill, it was inactive in those years.
At the group's campsites, to put it mildly, we were discouraged by the group's diet. For dinner and breakfast, we consumed one can of canned meat 338 g and one can of fish 250 g. I don’t know what the side dish was and how much, but there was clearly too little protein in the diet for seven healthy, tired people. The overnight sites were on a ridge much higher than the forest zone, and the group probably had problems with cooking and drying clothes, notes rescuer Livinsky. - And then the pathologist conducting the examination in Ulan-Ude openly said that there was a complete absence of glucose in the tissues of the dead, in the liver and elsewhere. Those syndromes that were observed in the group are fully consistent with hypothermia plus complete exhaustion of the body.
There was another version of what happened, which was voiced in Petropavlovsk: supposedly the cause of death was... banal poisoning with Chinese stew. However, the group had no signs of poisoning, and pathologists did not find any toxic substances in the tissues.
If people eat something that can lead to poisoning, then each body will react in its own way. Poisoning cannot affect everyone equally. Then you have to eat something so poisoned that everyone dies, especially within half an hour. It is also unclear about hypothermia; the air temperature could not drop sharply to 5 or 10 degrees below zero. Our guess is that there was an anticyclone and there was a strong wind. Magnetic vibrations began, huge air currents began to move, which created infrasound, and it could affect the psyche. Individual rocks under a strong wind can become an infrasonic generator of enormous power, which causes a person to feel a state of panic and unaccountable horror. According to the girl who survived, her friends behaved restlessly, their speech was confused, notes Nikolai Fedorov, a member of the search group.
It is most often mentioned that tourists could develop vegetative-vascular dystonia (VSD). This is almost directly indicated by the fact that they tried to undress - in the case of attacks of VSD, it may seem that the clothes are suffocating. However, it was too late to cope with the symptoms - as a result, numerous hemorrhages.
A tragedy could also happen for man-made reasons, given the large number of closed areas on Lake Baikal. And the rescuers got out to help, having already waited for the emissions to dissipate...
In general, versions, secrets, riddles and - there are many more questions than answers...
By the way, the Azimut club did not last long after the tragedy - 3-4 years, its old-timers say that a worthy replacement for Lyudmila Ivanovna was never found...
Looking through tourist routes, I came across an article about how six tourists died a strange death. The only girl who did not fall into madness survived.In August 1993, a group of tourists from Kazakhstan: three girls, three boys and their 41-year-old leader Lyudmila Korovina, a master of sports in hiking, set off along a route of the fourth category of difficulty through Khamar-Daban.
They moved from the village of Murino along the Langutai River, through the Langutai Gate pass, along the Barun-Yunkatsuk River, then climbed to the very high mountain Khamar-Dabana Hanulu (2371 m), walked along the ridge and found ourselves on the watershed plateau of the Anigta and Baiga rivers. Having covered this significant part of the journey (about 70 kilometers) in about 5-6 days, the group stopped for a rest. The place where tourists camped is located between the peaks of Golets Yagelny (2204 m) and Tritrans (2310 m).
This is what the last one looks like:
This is a completely bare part of the mountains - there are only stones, grass and wind. It is not clear why the leader decided to stop there and not go down to the trees, where there is less wind and there is an opportunity to make a fire.
On August 3, 1993, a cyclone came to the region, and such an amount of rain fell that in Irkutsk the entire Karl Marx Street was knee-deep in water. The pouring rain did not stop for about a day. From August 3 to 5, it was snowing and raining in the mountains, and the group moved without rest. Apparently, when the tourists no longer had any strength left, it was decided to take a break. Tourists were freezing in a wet tent and clothes, unable to warm themselves by the fire.
In the morning, Lyudmila Korovina saw that snow had fallen, and immediately understood what this meant for the tired and frozen group. She immediately gave instructions to immediately turn around and go down to the edge of the forest. They began to collect things and rolled up tents. And then the tragedy happened. On the morning of August 5, they were getting ready to set off, when suddenly, at about 11 o’clock, in front of everyone, 24-year-old Alexander Krysin began to foam at the mouth, blood poured from his ears, and he immediately died suddenly.
Korovina gave the only correct command - all tourists must immediately go down to the forest. But she herself remained next to the body of the dead guy. The group began an organized descent to the forest, but then for some reason they returned back. What they saw horrified them - the group leader died.
The panic began. According to Valentina Utochenko, “Denis began to hide behind the stones and run away, Tatyana hit her head on the stones, Victoria and Timur probably went crazy. Lyudmila Ivanovna died of a heart attack.”
Valentina tried to somehow reason with the remaining four, but it was all in vain - they broke free and ran away when she tried to take them away from this place into the forest. She even tried to drag someone by the hand with her, but he broke free and ran away.
When she realized that all attempts to save her freezing, distraught friends would not be successful, she took her sleeping bag, a piece of polyethylene and went down several kilometers down the slope, where she spent the next night, and in the morning she returned to the parking lot. By this time, everyone remaining on the mountain was dead. The strangest thing is that all night, even before the first death, the guys were wet and frozen, but did not even try to warm up. Each of them had a sleeping bag and plastic wrap, but this remained untouched - everything was dry and in their backpacks.
Having climbed the mountain in the morning and seeing a terrible picture, the girl was not at a loss - she found a route map in the leader’s things, collected food and went down to the Anigta River, where she spent the night of August 7, and in the morning she continued moving again.
After some time, she came across an abandoned relay tower at an altitude of 2310 meters, where she spent another night completely alone. And in the morning, the tourist noticed pillars going down from the tower. Valentina realized that they should lead her to people, but the houses to which wires had once been laid turned out to be abandoned. But the tourist went out to the Snezhnaya River and moved downstream. Here the girl again had to spend the night, and the next day continue the search for people. After walking another 7-8 kilometers, exhausted Valya stopped. She stretched out her sleeping bag on the bushes near the water - this is how lost tourists indicate their presence. It was here that she was noticed by a group of tourists from Kyiv, who took Valya with them.
On August 26, rescuers from a helicopter discovered the dead group from Kazakhstan. “The picture was terrible: the bodies were already swollen, everyone’s eye sockets were completely eaten away. Almost all of the dead were dressed in thin tights, while three were barefoot. The leader was lying on top of Alexandra...”
The question of what really happened to a group of tourists on the Mountain of the Dead still haunts many people. Books are written about what happened at the Dyatlov Pass, films are made, and speculation is made on forums. Much less material is devoted to the tragedy that, under similar circumstances, claimed the lives of six people in Transbaikalia 24 years ago, but this does not prevent us from drawing parallels between mystical stories that chill us to the point of trembling.
In 1993, only one girl returned from a trip to Transbaikalia, on which seven people went
Don’t be confused by the fact that many Internet users search for “Kazakh” in search engines: the fact is that young people from Kazakhstan went on a hike through the most picturesque places of Buryatia. Perhaps this is the first and perhaps the last reliable fact in this scary story. The second - only to one girl from tourist group managed to survive. Everything else is a bizarre puzzle of scraps of memories of rescuers, meager phrases dropped by the one who survived and did not go crazy, and hypotheses put forward by researchers and caring Internet users.
We do not undertake to judge which of the versions - from the testing of biological weapons to banal hypothermia and the appearance of the Yeti - is correct; we invite you to do it yourself, carefully studying the details of the tragedy.
Lyudmila Ivanovna Korovina, who led the group, was an international master of sports in hiking
Stones, grass and wind
In August 1993, tourists from Petropavlovsk-Kazakhsky died in the area of Relayator Peak - of the seven members of the group, only 18-year-old Valentina survived. There is no doubt that anything can happen in the mountains, but the mysterious circumstances of their death do not allow us to call it an accident.
From September to June there is snow on the Khamar-Daban ridge; no one will be surprised by the message that snow falls on the passes and plateaus in the summer, and snowstorms occur in August.
Lyudmila Korovina's group was clearly unlucky with the weather - a strong cyclone turned the hike into a real test, it became sharply cold, and it snowed and rained for several days. The tourists stopped for a rest on a rocky peak; they did not go down to the edge of the forest from a completely bare part of the mountains, where there were only stones and grass, because a hurricane wind began, and “trees were broken like matches.”
“The strangest thing is that all night, even before the first death, the guys were wet and frozen, but did not even try to warm up,” said Leonid Izmailov, former deputy head of the Trans-Baikal regional search and rescue service. - Each of them had a sleeping bag and plastic wrap, but this remained untouched - everything was dry and lay in their backpacks. Why the manager did not take any measures is inexplicable. How inexplicable is the general panic that set in after the first death.”
By the way, many researchers are confident that the location of the bodies of those killed in the Dyatlov Pass is due to the same mental state.
If you read archival materials published after the tragedy in the local press, you may get the impression that the death of the hike participants was the fault of the group leader. However, those who were personally acquainted with Lyudmila Ivanovna and went on hikes with her (including high level difficulties), and the same survivor.
“Our instructor was of a very high rank, and everything that happened was not her fault,” Valentina will still say in a very short interview (if literally two phrases can be called such), despite a completely understandable reluctance to communicate with the press.
On the morning of August 5, one of the guys - the tallest, strongest and strongest - became ill. Sasha started foaming at the mouth and bleeding from his ears. According to Valya, he died suddenly. After that, something unimaginable began to happen on the slope.
Chaos reigned all around - the young people flatly refused to follow the orders of Lyudmila Ivanovna, who appointed an elder and ordered everyone to move towards the forest. “Denis began to hide behind the rocks and run away, Tatyana hit her head on the rocks, Victoria and Timur probably went crazy. Lyudmila Ivanovna died of a heart attack,” such data is recorded in the report on search and rescue and transportation operations from the words of the surviving girl (and we still ask the question, how could the cause of death be determined by a non-professional, and even in an environment of mass psychosis?).
Everyone, except the group leader and Valya, had the same symptoms - the tourists rolled on the ground, tore their clothes and grabbed their throats. In horror, she grabbed her sleeping bag and went downstairs alone...
Agree, the details are reminiscent of the story of the “Dyatlovites” who tried to escape from something terrible, naked in the cold!
This tower helped Valentina find her way around
Closed the eyes of all the dead
“After just one day, Valya wandered through the forest, then climbed to the Retranslator, and from there along a clearing she went down to Snezhnaya, where she spent the night in an abandoned winter hut or barracks (this is near the mouth of the Bairi). Then she was picked up by water workers,” Alexey Livinsky, a rescuer who personally took part in the search for the missing, wrote on the tourist forum.
The girl “was in a terrible state, and the people of Kiev (website’s note: the same water workers who noticed her on the river on August 8 and then helped her get home) poured her half a mug of vodka. She had never drank in such doses before, but it helped. Valya came to her senses, talked about Tritrans, told how the guys from the group bit and threw boots. She said that on the morning of the next day after the tragedy she rose from the forest area to the place where the group died, she closed the eyes of all the dead and took a map and food from Korovina’s backpack,” Alexey continued his story.
“The mass psychosis that happened to the group after the death of the first person can be explained by overwork, unpreparedness for such a turn of events, and hypothermia. But it is impossible to fully understand what happened. After all, at the same time there were people in the mountains who, like Korovina’s group, did not expect snowfall, but they all survived,” Izmailov admitted.
“Do you think I want to remember this nightmare? I had to leave and change my whole life. I don’t want to remember this,” says Valentina.
The birds don't sing here
Livinsky recalls what the scene of the emergency looked like: “We saw the group from a helicopter. The clothes and backpacks were bright. The group lay on a clear slope 200-250 meters (in a straight line, not vertically) below the main ridge, towards the Snezhnaya River basin. There were also 200-300 meters left to the forest border.”
“I don’t remember that there, at the site of the group’s death, any birds were singing or flying, not even crows. This place is well ventilated. The bodies were partially mummified, and there was not even a corpse smell,” he continues his terrible story, noting that all the guys had blue-violet faces. “The bodies are already swollen, everyone’s eye sockets are completely eaten away. Almost all of the dead were dressed in thin tights, while three were barefoot. The manager was lying on top of Alexander...” - Izmailov’s words are quoted in the press. An autopsy carried out in Ulan-Ude showed that all six died from hypothermia.
“She knew how to unite everyone and make a team. She believed in people, she believed in people. She could force a person to become who he really is,” says Evgeny Olkhovsky about Lyudmila Korovina
Eyewitness accounts
Journalists managed to find Alexander Kvitnitsky, a tourist from Kyiv, who was part of the group that found Valentina on the Snezhnaya River. “It turned out that we were the first to whom Valya told about the death of her friends,” the website baikal-info.ru quotes him as saying. “She said that they had a wonderful leader and that they were in a hurry to complete the route as quickly as possible, so they were very tired. When bad weather came, they were all very cold, but they did not go down from the ridge to wait out the bad weather, but walked all the time. This makes us even more tired.”
“Valya, a strong village girl who was used to physical exertion, turned out to be the most resilient of all. She was just as unbearably cold as the others, she also became numb as she walked, but thoughts of her family saved her. The girl thought what would happen to her mother if she did not return home. Taking a sleeping bag and polyethylene, Valya went down to the forest. There she waited out the bad weather, and when she returned, she saw that everyone was dead. Later I reached the river and decided to wash my hair. She reasoned like this: if you are going to die, then you need to look good before you die. By that time the weather had settled - the sun was scorching. We noticed her on the river. Valya had a cold - we gave her antibiotics and other medications,” said Alexander.
Snezhnaya River
We have no doubt that Valya really was a strong girl, another thing is that the rest of the participants in the hike, according to those who walked more than one route with them, were experienced tourists, not the first time they went to the mountains, and were clearly not inferior her level of training.
So what could have happened? In addition to hypotheses that the group saw something that it should not have seen - yeti, for example, assumptions about the testing of new weapons, which in the dashing nineties would have surprised few people, and guesses about the sudden onset of VSD (vegetative-vascular dystonia), there are and other versions.
Infrasound- this hypothesis is voiced by Nikolai Fedorov, a member of the search group: “Our assumption is that there was an anticyclone and there was a strong wind. Magnetic vibrations began, huge air currents began to move, which created infrasound, and it could affect the psyche. Individual rocks under a strong wind can become an infrasonic generator of enormous power, which causes a person to feel a state of panic and unaccountable horror. According to the girl who survived, her friends behaved restlessly and their speech was confused.”
At the end of the summer of 1993, tourists from relatively distant Kazakhstan arrived in Buryatia. There were 7 of them: 3 guys, 3 girls and their leader Lyudmila Korovina. Let us immediately note that all the young people, despite their age, were already quite experienced travelers. And Korovina herself, who was 2 times older than her charges, had by that time already earned the title of Master of Sports in Hiking.
The travelers headed to the previously mentioned peak-lord of Khan-Ul. The weather was not favorable for the hike: it was snowing and the wind was blowing. But the group members did not want to give up. Along the way, they tripled the parking lot between the peaks of Golets Yagelny and Tritrans. And then something inexplicable happened. One of the young people became ill. He started bleeding from his ears and foaming at the mouth. He fell and began to roll in the snow. The rest of the tourists followed the example of the unfortunate man. They ran back and forth, threw off their clothes, grabbed the throat, bit, and said something incomprehensible. Some hit their heads on rocks.
