The party was mostly students from the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Sverdlovsk, on a Category III ski route from Ivdel toward Mount Otorten. Semyon Zolotaryov, 37, was the older man who had joined them. They left the last inhabited point, the 2nd Northern settlement, as nine. Yudin had already turned back sick. On 1 February they were due to make for Otorten. The weather was bad. That evening they camped on the open northeast slope of Kholat Syakhl, the Mansi name often given in Russian as Dead Mountain, instead of dropping into the forest. The tent sat at an angle on the slope.

They were supposed to wire Vizhai by 12 February. When the telegram did not come, a search went out around 20 February: students, Mansi hunters, soldiers, and aircraft. On 26 February the tent was found about a kilometer and a half above the tree line, still holding diaries, money, and most of the gear. The leeward side, where their heads had been, was cut from the inside in two places, wide enough to crawl out. Tracks of people on foot, some in socks or barefoot, led downhill. There were no tracks of anyone else, and no sign of a fight in the snow.

At the forest edge, about 1,500 meters from the tent, searchers found the remains of a fire and the bodies of Yuri Doroshenko and Yuri Krivonischenko in their underwear. About 300 meters back up the slope toward the tent was Igor Dyatlov, then Rustem Slobodin, then Zinaida Kolmogorova, spaced as if they had been trying to climb back. The autopsies give cold as the cause of death for Dyatlov, Doroshenko, Krivonischenko, and Kolmogorova. Slobodin also had a crack in the skull. Ivanov wrote that he still died of freezing. Pieces of the cedar pair’s clothing, cut rather than torn, were later found with the four who were still missing.

Those four were found on 4 May, after the snow search resumed, about 75 meters from the fire, in a ravine toward a tributary of the Lozva. Ivanov’s resolution puts them under roughly four to four and a half meters of snow. They were lying in water and were decomposed. The autopsy on 9 May, by V. A. Vozrozhdenny, with Ivanov present, splits them. Aleksandr Kolevatov died of cold and had no injury to match the others. Lyudmila Dubinina had bilateral breaks of several ribs and massive bleeding into the right ventricle of the heart and the chest. The examiner wrote that this was a blow of great force in life, then a fall, a throw, or a crush, and that it killed her. Zolotaryov died of multiple fractures of the right ribs with bleeding into the chest, again from a heavy impact, a squeeze, or a throw, in the cold. Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle died of a major skull fracture. Dubinina was missing her tongue, and soft tissue of the face and eyes was gone. Zolotaryov’s skin had the look of a body that had lain in water. The examiner treated that loss as decay after death, not as a wound from the night they left the tent.

Tests found radioactive dust on some of the ravine clothing, especially Dubinina’s and Zolotaryov’s. Ivanov did not list it as a cause of death. The file also notes that other groups in the area reported fireballs in the sky that winter. It does not connect a weapon, a mine, or a blast site to these bodies. Valuables were still in the tent. On 28 May 1959 Ivanov closed the case. His line was that the hikers died because of an overwhelming natural force they could not overcome.