Free Dead Mountain: The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident by Donnie Eichar Page B

dangers. But if his intention was to spook me, he had succeeded. I reluctantly wrapped up my talk with Yudin for the day, and we made a plan to resume the following morning.
    That night after dinner, I slipped out of the apartment in search of a beer to soothe my growing agitation. I found a bar within ten minutes, tucked below street level in the subbasement of a concrete building. The three beers I ended up drinking there were a bad idea, and by the time I left the cigarette-choked bar and was walking home, a strange paranoia overtook me. Kuntsevich had found out earlier in the day that the car hired to pick me up at the airport a few days prior had been deliberately banged up after dropping me off. Kuntsevich theorized that the FSB, the modern equivalent ofthe KGB, had damaged the hired car as a warning for me to stop looking into the case. I had found Kuntsevich’s Cold War–level of paranoia amusing, endearing even, but as I walked home that night, it seemed that everyone I passed on the street was looking at me a beat too long. What if Kuntsevich was right, and I wasn’t welcome here? I hurried back to the apartment, touched to find that Olga had stayed up past her bedtime to make sure I returned safely.



9
    JANUARY 25, 1959
    WHEN THE TEN HIKERS ARRIVED IN IVDEL, IT WAS STILL dark, and a half-day’s wait lay ahead of them for their next means of transportation. For those traveling from Sverdlovsk, a ski-hiking excursion into the Urals meant several days of assorted travel in order to get anywhere near the point where they would begin using their skis. And because the railway deviated east from Ivdel, the group would have to take a bus to continue north to Vizhay. There, at their last civilized outpost, they would have a chance to send out any final dispatches before slipping off the radar.
    Once again, Yuri Blinov and his group were shadowing Igor and his friends. Blinov, who would later become a devoted member of the search team, wrote in his diary of this period, “Together we went through all the transitions between trains, buses and trucks in Serov, Ivdel and Vizhay. In other words, on our way we still communicated like members of the same hiking team.” After spending the night at the Ivdel train station—a far more obliging terminal, as it turned out, than its counterpart in Serov—the hikers caught a tram to Ivdel proper. Situated at the junction of the Ivdel and Lozva rivers, the town existed first as a gold-mining settlement, and later as the location of the Ivdellag—a Soviet prison camp built in 1937.
    Unknown to most Westerners until the 1963 English-language publication of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich —and, later, The Gulag Archipelago —Stalin’s ramped-upsecret prison system had only been rumored to exist at this time. In fact, the Gulag system predated Hitler’s concentration camps and would go on to function for many decades after the liberation of Buchenwald and Auschwitz. It wasn’t until 1989 that Gorbachev finally began to reform the Soviet prison system.
    But on their brief stay in the town, the young hikers would see none of the Soviet dissidents exiled to this region; they were focused entirely on readying themselves for their own temporary exile into the Russian wild. At the moment, this meant waiting at the Ivdel bus station. For the men, this would have been an ideal moment to break out the cigarettes and let their lungs fill with the heat of burning tobacco. But, as Zina liked to remind them, they had made a pact not to smoke, and no one had brought any cigarettes. So as they stood in the cold, the only smoke issuing from their mouths was their breath hitting the air.
    At last, a small GAZ-651 rolled up. GAZ was a Soviet make of buses and trucks that had been mass-produced since the end of World War II. This particular bus most likely doubled as a transporter to shuttle local workers to and from the camps, but today it was a tourist bus.