What really happened to the 9 hikers found dead in the Ural Mountains? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about an unsolved mystery involving a group of hikers that may have been visited by Bigfoot.
What really happened to the 9 hikers found dead in the Ural Mountains? Today, Ben shares a campfire story about an unsolved mystery involving a group of hikers that may have been visited by Bigfoot.
* Share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
Camp Adventure: A Kids Summer Camp Podcast
S2 E06 The Mystery of the Dead Mountains
[INTRODUCTION]
[bugle plays a welcome]
Louis: Welcome to Camp Adventure.
The camp in your bedroom or living room, the camp that's in the bus or in the car.
Camp Adventure is for everyone, no matter who you are.
This week's theme is “The Mystery of The Dead Mountain”.
My name is Counselor Louis and I am so excited to be here at camp with you. So it's evening time here at camp, and that means we have a campfire going, but that also means it's time for a story. So to pass it off to the great storyteller here at camp, we have Camp Counselor Ben.
[WELCOME]
Ben: Campers, it is time for our evening check-in.
Come on, gather around. Get around this crackling campfire. If it's a little bit chilly where you're at, which it could be, uh, get a nice cozy blanket. Wraparound that. Snuggle in. Maybe gather your friends or brothers and sisters.
It's story time. You know that already you don't even need me to tell you, do you?
All right. Well, we're going to do stories tonight about Sasquatch. Ever hear about the Sasquatch, the mysterious Bigfoot?
You know, there's lots of different legends and stories about folks who have been out hiking or camping in the woods or something like that and they saw a tall furry brown creature running or walking mysteriously through the woods. I don't know, maybe you've seen Bigfoot before? It could be. I'm not totally sure if that's the case. I'd love to hear that story.
Well, we're going to talk about Bigfoot today. We're gonna read from the book Strange, But True, which is written by Kathryn Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright. Okay?
And the story we'll read is called “The Mystery of Dead Mountain”, which is about the Bigfoot. You ready? All right, here we go. Get ready for stories.
[STORYTIME]
Ben: “The Mystery of Dead Mountain” by Kathryn Hulick.
A single tent sits on a snow swept mountain slope, almost invisible in the dark and silent winter night. Inside nine young hikers rest, protected from the frigid weather outside.
It is February 1st, 1959, deep in the Ural Mountains. The hikers are university students in the Soviet union, now the country of Russia. Their trip into the Ural mountains is supposed to take 16 days or longer, in the dead of winter, in one of the most remote and forbidden landscapes in the world. However, all of them are experienced hikers. They feel excited and ready for the challenge. They're going on an adventure!
Zinaida or “Zina” Kolmogorova, one of the hikers, wrote the day before they departed, “I wonder what awaits us in this hike? Will anything new happen?”
Suddenly, something disturbs the peace. The hikers slice through the wall of the tent from the inside. They leap out into the darkness in such a hurry to escape that most of them do not have put on jackets or shoes. On February 26th, the search and rescue mission finds the hikers tent abandoned, and damaged.
The next day, the searchers discover footprints leading away from the tent down toward the edge of the nearby woods. The same day, they find the first bodies. But it will take months of searching through deep snow to find the remains of all nine people. Oh. Investigators are mystified. Two of the hikers started a fire and broken branches on a nearby tree indicate that they did try to climb it. Their bodies are found clothed only in their underwear and socks. Five of the hikers died from exposure to the cold, but they suffered from their injuries as well, including burns. For died of broken ribs, fractured skulls, and other serious injuries that indicate a sudden crushing impact.
The lead investigator, Lev Ivanov, under pressure from the government to close the case, determined that “an unknown compelling force” led to the deaths.
That is not a very satisfying explanation. In the decades, since those deaths, many people have continued to try and solve the mystery of what happened. It has become known as the Dyatlov Pass Incident, after Igor Dyatlov, the leader of the group. Some have traveled to the mountain where the hikers died. Author Keith McCloskey is one of them. He said the strangest thing about the place was an eerie quiet, other than occasional strong gusts of wind, “It was just still completely still. You didn't hear any animals or birds or anything. Just absolute silence.” The mountain's name is Kholat Syakhl, which means “Dead Mountain” in the language of the native people. What could have terrified the young hikers enough to force them out of the safety of their tent and into the bitter cold of this remote place?
Matthew: Oh my word.
Should we stop here?
This is way, way creepier than the past stories.
Ben? Dead Mountain? An eerie quiet? And… and those bodies?
Whooo. I am not sure I can go on with this one.
Please tell me it was a bear. Because I don’t think my imagination can handle anything worse than that.
Ben: Some sort of natural disaster would be the simplest and most likely explanation. At first, the search team blamed high winds, which were common in the area, but if the wind was strong enough to blow away people, the tent should have blown away, too? Some people have wondered if the stove inside the tent started a fire, this would have explained the burns found on two of the hikers. However, the hikers never actually assembled the stove that night and experts think that the burns most likely happened when the two hikers passed out over the fire that they had built under the tree.
What about an avalanche? Those are common in the Ural Mountains, and they could certainly have caused broken ribs and fractured skulls.
However, the slope where the tent stood was not very steep, meaning that an avalanche on that particular slope was extremely unlikely. Plus the tent was found still standing, not buried in the snow.
Investigators have not found a clear natural reason for the deaths.
Maybe an animal disturbed the hikers that night and they tried to get away.
The Ural Mountains are home to large, dangerous predators, including wolves, Wolverines, and brown bears. However, this group of experienced hikers would have known that if an animal threatens, the worst thing you can do is leave the safety of your tent. But what if it was an animal that the hikers weren't familiar with? Something that they found so scary they didn't even think straight? When the bodies were recovered, their personal belongings were, too, including their cameras. And on one hiker's camera, the last image shows a dark figure that resembles a large beast. The group also put together a newspaper the same night that they'd died. In it, they wrote, “According to recent reports, Yeti lives in the Northern Urals.”
In 1952, a zoologist named Bernard Heuvelmans came up with a theory that the yeti evolved from the Gigantopithecus, a giant ape that once lived in Southern China. It stood 10 feet tall, resembled an orangutan and likely walked on all fours. But 100,000 years ago, it went extinct. Some people have seized on Heuvelmans’ idea and argued that descendants of this giant ape spread out all across Asia–including Russia, where the hikers were found–and also into North America. In North America, the theory goes, the creature became known as the Sasquatch or the Bigfoot.
The earliest recorded Bigfoot encounter happened in 1811 when Explorer David Thompson came across a set of massive footprints in the snow in Alberta province, Canada. Over the years, many others have collected casts of gigantic prints or hair or droppings. People have also reported sightings. In 1924, a group of gold prospectors in Washington state shot a hairy ape-like creature in the woods. Fred Beck later described it as “seven feet tall with blackish-brown hair”. Late that night, as the men slept in their cabin, the creatures came back for revenge. They threw rocks and “pushed against the walls of the cabin as if trying to push the cabin over”, Beck said out of the terrifying ordeal. The sightings continue to this day. For example, Dustin Teudhope says that he encountered a Bigfoot while he was hunting in Florida in 2009.
“On two feet, it resembles a werewolf”, he says.
These are only a few out of hundreds of reported Bigfoot and yeti encounters. These monsters certainly seemed scary enough to have terrified a group of hikers. In 2014, a Discovery Channel documentary argued that a yeti was responsible for the Dyatlov Pass deaths. Why? The injuries on the hikers were so severe that it seemed only a creature with superhuman strength could have caused them. Plus the two hikers who tried to climb a tree could have been attempting to escape from something.
Louis: Wow, this story is so thrilling, but also a little creepy. So if you're like me and you need a second to kind of bring all your thoughts together, here's your chance.
Let's take a quick break and we'll be right back.
[BREAK]
Louis: And we are back. Hello there!
So, I saved you a spot by the campfire. So let's hear the rest of the story.
Counselor Ben, back to you.
[STORYTIME CONTINUED]
Ben: If it was not a yeti or a natural disaster, what did cause the hikers to run out of their tent into the freezing cold all those years ago? Some wonder if a bad fight or argument broke out, and some of the group either ran away or stormed off. Then the others may have tried and failed to rescue them. Another intriguing theory blames infrasound. Some militaries around the world have experimented with infrasound weapons, since the sounds may make people feel anxious or sad, afraid, or even terrified. But the sounds can also occur naturally when high winds blow around an obstacle of a certain size or shape, the wind swirls into a series of tiny tornadoes that roar with real sounds, as well as infrasound at the top of the mountain near where the hikers pitched their tent was the perfect shape for this effect, according to the experts. Perhaps these sounds drove the hikers from their tent in a panic, and they could not find their way back in the dark. They may have stumbled and fallen fatally, injuring them. Could this be the real reason that they died?
The truth is that we may never know. However, there is always a chance that new evidence might be discovered. Both in the Dyatlov Pass case and in the search for Bigfoot or Sasquatch and other mythical monsters. As believers like to say, the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. In other words, just because we haven't found Bigfoot yet does not mean we never will. But we need proof. Every mystery has an explanation. Getting to the bottom of it is what science is all about.
The end.
Thanks everyone.
Louis: Well, what an amazing story!
I told you, counselor Ben has some of the best stories and today he did not fail to give us that.
So just like every other week, it has been super duper, fantastic spending time with you. And I want to kick it over to Camp Counselor Matthew so he can say a few words.
[CLOSING CREDITS]
Matthew: Thank you, Louis! And thank you Ben for sharing that story with us. As the campfire’s dying down, I’ve just got a few reminders and bits of information to share.
A reminder to all campers to share your camp adventures on social media using #AKCAsummer or write to us at listen@akidsco.com. We love, love, love hearing from you.
Camp Adventure is written by Ben Tertin with help from the A Kids Podcast About team.
Permission to use excerpts from Strange But True, written by Kathryn Hulick and illustrated by Gordy Wright, was granted by the publisher Frances Lincoln Children’s Books, an imprint of The Quarto Group.
The show is edited and produced by Matthew Winner.
Audio production is by Chad Michael Snavely and the team at Sound On Studios. Our executive producer is Jelani Memory. And this show was brought to you by A Kids Podcast About.
Follow the show on Apple Podcasts or wherever podcasts are found and check out other podcasts made for kids just like you by visiting akidsco.com. While you’re there, be sure to check out Ben’s book, A Kids Book About Adventure.
See you back at camp next week for another adventure!