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A review by jhbandcats
Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar
adventurous
challenging
dark
informative
mysterious
sad
medium-paced
4.5
This book tells of the hiking trip gone wrong in the Ural Mountains of the USSR in 1959, the unknowable end of the nine college friends, and the multiple theories that have been put forth over the years. The book alternates sections discussing what happened at the time of the tragedy with descriptions of how the American author began his research and what he discovered during his trips to Russia.
Some reviews complain that the author shouldn’t be a part of the book but I found the contemporary sections as fascinating as the ones on what originally happened. He tells about the people he interviewed, the papers he studied, the photos he pored over - and then he tells about his trips to the Urals to see if he can experience the hike the way the friends did fifty years earlier, albeit with Gore-Tex, Polartec, and snowmobiles.
The book ends with the many theories being examined and then tossed out. Then the author proposes an unusual idea about infrasound caused by high winds and the possibility that it disoriented and frightened the hikers enough where they ran out of their tent in -25 degree weather where they froze. I am not sure I’m sold on the infrasound theory but it’s certainly compelling, especially when he recreates what *might* have happened on that last night of their lives.
Some reviews complain that the author shouldn’t be a part of the book but I found the contemporary sections as fascinating as the ones on what originally happened. He tells about the people he interviewed, the papers he studied, the photos he pored over - and then he tells about his trips to the Urals to see if he can experience the hike the way the friends did fifty years earlier, albeit with Gore-Tex, Polartec, and snowmobiles.
The book ends with the many theories being examined and then tossed out. Then the author proposes an unusual idea about infrasound caused by high winds and the possibility that it disoriented and frightened the hikers enough where they ran out of their tent in -25 degree weather where they froze. I am not sure I’m sold on the infrasound theory but it’s certainly compelling, especially when he recreates what *might* have happened on that last night of their lives.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death and Injury/Injury detail