In 1993, seven hikers set out into a southern
Siberian mountain range to hike and explore the beautiful wilderness.
Unfortunately, somewhere deep in those mountains, something so horrifying and confusing
would happen to them, that it’s still a mystery to this day.
This is their story, and as always, viewer discretion is advised.
Lyudmila Korovina was known as a master of survival craft, and at 41 years old, she’d spent decades teaching mountaineering
to young students in Kazakhstan.
She was known to push people to their limits
and sometimes beyond, to mold them into the best hikers they could be.
But despite her reputation of being tough, her past students said she was as good a mentor
as you can get, and many of them claimed to owe their lives
to the skills she taught them.
In 1993, an event known as the Turiada
tourism festival was taking place, and people representing tourism and mountain sports
from all over Russia and the surrounding countries, gathered to camp,
participate in competitions, and explore the Khamar-Daban mountains.
During this festival, Lyudmila wanted to take a group
of her favorite students to do something special and a little more
challenging than usual.
The Khamar-Daban mountains are a small chain that
form part of Russia’s South Siberian Mountains, and they sit near the border with Mongolia
near the city of Irkutsk.
They stretch 350 kilometers from east to west, and are thought to be the oldest mountain range
in the world.
They’re at the highest by any measure, and peak at
just under 2,400 meters or 8,000 feet, but they’re still challenging and beautiful, and with
a railroad that provides easy access, they’re a popular destination for both
tourists and mountaineers.
In the summer, they can get quite humid,
and temperatures hang around 60 to 65 degrees Fahrenheit or 15 to 18 Celsius.
It also often rains heavily as thunderstorms
roll in from the Mongolian Plateau, but again, despite the dampness, they’re considered
a safe destination to go hiking, and an ideal spot for young hikers to explore the wilderness.
The route the group had planned though
wasn’t one for the average tourist.
Generally, trekking has three or four levels
of difficulty, depending on where you are.
Russia used a four-grade system at the time, starting with easy for beginners,
moving up to moderate where you walk up small hills for up to four hours
or so per day, onto strenuous where you spend much of the day
climbing higher peaks, and then very strenuous or challenging,
which sometimes uses no trail at all, and hikers will often travel along high ridges
and over mountains from dawn to dusk.
And how a route is graded comes down
not only to how high you go and how long you’ll be walking, but also
how many skills you’ll need, like knowing how to rock-climb
or navigate in the wilderness.
They’re also graded on how physically and mentally fit
you have to be to complete the route, and the route Lyudmila and the group
had chosen was a grade-four, which is the highest difficulty.
Knowing this would be the most difficult trek
they’d ever done, they spent months leading up to it,
preparing and training, and over the course of that time, Lyudmila’s
tough love shaped them into both competent mountaineers and close friends.
Finally, on August 2nd, the full group met up
to catch the train to Irkutsk.
In addition to Lyudmila, there was Valentina
who generally went by the name Valya.
Valya was 17 and had been walking the hills all her life, and was known for being calm and collected
in tough situations.
Joining them was also 23-year-old Sacha.
He and Lyudmila were close, and she had known him
since he was just a kid, and often described him as being like a son to her.
Sacha was also exceptionally fit and very experienced
at this sort of challenging hike.
He would act as almost a second coach
next to Lyudmila.
There was also a 19-year-old Denis, who was sort of
an accidental member of the group.
He only got his place in the trip
when someone else dropped out because their parents wouldn’t let them go.
He was so excited to be part of the group that
all he left was a short note for his parents that he was going to the mountains, and he would
be back soon before leaving the house.
Then there was also a 24-year-old Tatyana
who loved walking the mountains but had never attempted anything beyond a
moderate grade-two.
This was a chance for her to prove
what she was made of, and after all the training they’d done, she felt like
she was ready to handle anything.
Next was Timur who was the youngest in the
group at just 15.
He was essentially born to trek though, and grew up in the mountains and hiking with his parents basically as soon as he was old enough to walk.
And then, finally, there was 16-year-old Viktoriya.
She wasn’t a natural mountaineer, but desperately
wanted to be a part of the trip.
At first, the others weren’t happy about this
because she’d had a temper tantrum on a winter hike earlier that year after getting tired.
She wouldn’t have even been there at all if her mother hadn’t called Lyudmila and begged her
to take her along.
But later, during training, she worked hard and regained the trust and friendship
of the rest of the group.
After meeting up, they started their journey by train
from their home in Kazakhstan to Irkutsk.
From there, they went to Murino, which is a town at the foot of the range,
and the perfect spot to set off from.
On the way they, were joined by a couple
of guys from Moscow, heading to the area to relax and fish
by the Snezhnaya River.
Then after arriving in Murino, the plan
was to walk until August 5th and eventually meet up with another group
led by Lyudmila’s daughter, Natalia.
Both groups checked the weather forecast,
and things were looking good with above average temperatures and just a little rain
forecasted over the next four days.
The first two days went well, and the group took a
slightly more unusual route than most, but in doing so, cut off a bunch of time that helped them summit several of the
highest peaks ahead of schedule.
They walked around 70 kilometers
and crossed the Langutai gorge, then across high plateaus, over several rivers, and then up the highest in the Khamar-Daban range
known as Khanulu.
Then on the third day, a cyclone coming out from Mongolia
took the region by surprise, and caused a day of rain that left the center of her Irkutsk
flooding up to people’s knees.
That same rain fell hard in the mountains,
and at higher elevations, this turned to heavy snow, and the group was
walking along a high ridge when the skies opened up, and the snow
and rain came pouring down.
Initially, they decided to press on as far as they could, worried they might miss their rendezvous
with the other party.
But then as they trudged down the mountain,
soaking wet in the pouring rain and wind, realized it was too exhausting to continue.
So at about 4:00 PM, they decided that instead
of heading through the forest to the planned camping spot, they’d set up camp
in the open, and get some rest.
This really wasn’t a great spot to camp because
it was an exposed and windy patch between two mountains with just
some rocks and grass for shelter.
The ideal location under the tree line
was another four kilometers away, but that was just too far to drag themselves and
their drenched bags in the ice-cold rain.
They obviously couldn’t build a fire either, but that didn’t dampen the mood.
While the rain continued to come down, they did their best to enjoy the night,
huddling in the two driest tents while talking about what they’d achieved
on the hike so far.
For some reason, maybe because they didn’t want
to get them wet on the inside, they never got into their sleeping bags.
They didn’t even take them out of the plastic wrap, and instead just fell asleep, exhausted on the floor
of their tents on plastic ground sheets.
Unfortunately, that night wasn’t much better,
and sleep would be short-lived.
At 4:00 AM, the ropes to the tents snapped
and they had to go outside to fix them.
Not long after they’d done that, the wind tore
the stake holding the tents down.
Then, finally, after a wet and cold night, they woke up
to snow covering most of the area.
And as they got up and cooked breakfast, they found
that the snow had covered basically all the landmarks in the day before.
After breakfast, at around 11:30,
they set off toward the trees, hoping that tree cover would provide some shelter
and help them to get their bearings.
With any luck, they’d meet the other group ahead of time
as they planned the night before.
Unfortunately, this is where things took
an almost unbelievable turn.
According to Valya, just 10 meters into their
trek down the hill, Sacha just fell over.
They helped him to his feet, but he fell again,
and this time, he let out a piercing scream.
Lyudmila told the rest of the group to keep moving
while she returned to help, but in the meantime, inexplicably, Sacha was
foaming at the mouth, while blood started pouring from his eyes and ears.
After falling to the ground a second time,
he started violently convulsing, and then by the time Lyudmila could reach him,
he’d already stopped moving.
Upon seeing Sacha collapse,
she cried out for the others to get help as she began trying to revive him.
But basically, as soon as they started moving again,
Lyudmila also screamed out for help.
Valya quickly covered the others and then told them
to wait where they were, and then ran back to Lyudmila and Sacha.
In some accounts, Valya claims Lyudmila
died the same way as Sacha, but in others, she claims that she’d had a heart attack.
Either way, to Valya and the other’s shock, Lyudmila passed out and collapsed on top of Sacha.
Tatyana, Viktoriya, and Timur then climbed out
from underneath their covering and rushed back to them.
But almost immediately,
Tatyana started grasping for air too, and grabbing at her throat as if she was
trying to force her airway open.
Then, to everyone’s horror,
she ran to a nearby boulder and began hitting her head against it over and over until she finally went limp and slumped the ground.
Terrified and having just witnessed the horrific scene, Valya froze and dropped to the ground as well.
Denis, also horrified at what he was witnessing, crouched down and hid behind an outcropping of rocks while trying to get inside his sleeping bags, hoping it could protect him from whatever
was happening to the others.
Finally, Valya snapped out of it and composed herself and crawled over to Lyudmila,
and found that she wasn’t breathing.
Then she went back to Timur, who was
by then completely hysterical and lifted him onto his feet, and told him
to head for the trees.
Next, she took Viktoriya by the arm and began pushing
her out in front of her toward the forest.
But Viktoriya went into a frenzy and started
violently pulling away from Valya.
Eventually, she even bit Valya’s hand, which caused her to let go, and then ran off
toward the forest after Timur.
But unfortunately, they also didn’t manage to get far before they both began to cough up blood and started clawing at their throats just like Tatyana.
Valya then watched as they started
tearing off their clothes as if they were boiling up inside
before they both collapsed to the ground.
Denis, who up until then, hadn’t been overcome
by whatever was happening to the others, shouted to Valya to dump all the essentials
from her backpack.
He then took off for the woods
as she began emptying her bag, but almost as soon as he broke cover
from the boulder, he began to choke like the others,
bleeding from his face, and his body seizing as he fell to the ground.
Valya then looked around and saw that every single
one of her friends was on the ground and not moving, and her normal calm
turned into a massive adrenaline surge.
So she got up and sprinted and sprinted, and she kept running until she was
deep inside the woods.
Finally, she couldn’t run anymore,
and she was far enough inside the forest and away from the wind.
In the calm that follows panic, Valya tried to
compose herself again, but supposedly by then,
the storm had become so strong that trees were falling like matches around her.
She eventually spotted a crack in a cliffside and just wedged herself inside it
to hide until the storm died down.
While waiting, she thought about her family,
and she worried about what might happen to her mother
if she didn’t return home.
At the same time, she thought about everything
she’d just seen and tried to make sense of it.
It was like a literal nightmare
that she couldn’t wake up from.
A little while later, after the storm had calmed down a bit
and she had calmed down a little bit, she found what seemed like a safe spot
and set up camp.
She realized that thanks to Denis, she still had
her pack and some essentials, which thankfully included a tent, a plastic ground sheet,
and some clothing.
Finally, after setting everything up, she climbed
inside her sleeping bag, threw her tent over her for extra warmth, and then completely wiped out and fell into
a deep sleep.
The following day, she woke up cold and hungry,
and realized that a tent and a change of clothes weren’t enough
to keep her alive for long.
She had no choice but to go back the way she came
to see if she could find supplies in the bodies of the rest of the group,
which also meant potentially encountering whatever it was that had caused everything
from the day before.
When she reached them, she cautiously approached, and found that they were still where they had fallen.
Then after finding a map and some food
from their packs, she had an even worse realization.
She had no idea where she was.
She had a map now, but the snow cover
still made it impossible to spot landmarks.
Instead, the best she could do was
follow the tree line until she found something that she recognized
on the map.
So, off she went down toward the forest again.
Several hours later, after walking across
the mountain essentially all day, she spotted an abandoned electricity relay tower
in the distance.
With this new sign of civilization, she set off once again and eventually reached it
by nightfall.
It seemed like as good a spot as any
to set up camp, and as she did, she wondered if anyone had alerted search and rescue
after they missed their rendezvous.
It seemed inevitable that soon enough, search and rescue would be scouring
the area, looking for them.
Unfortunately, no help was coming.
When Lyudmila’s group didn’t show up
at the meeting point, Natalia and the other team weren’t worried.
She knew they were strong hikers,
that her mother was a master, and there’d be nothing to worry about.
She assumed the rain had just slowed them down,
and she’d see them all when they got home.
In the morning and in the light of day,
Valya noticed that the tower she’d slept under was just one
of a chain heading down the mountain.
She guessed that if she followed them down the hill, they’d lead to somewhere she could find help.
The route was difficult, and the forest overgrowth
slowed her progress, but she eventually reached the end
and found a small abandoned village that was once supplied by the electricity cable
she followed.
It was disappointing that no one was there, but then, just beyond the houses was a major river.
Since the tourism festival was taking place in the area, and part of that was kayaking, canoeing, and fishing, she thought she could use the river to find a route, or at least signal for help.
By then, it was late again, so Valya spent
another night at the waterside before heading down to the bank to see if
anyone would pass by.
The following day was a much warmer day, and the heat began to take its toll on her
already-exhausted body.
After walking for another several kilometers,
she remembered that in training, she’d been shown how to use a sleeping bag
to let rescue parties know where you are.
So she draped hers over a bush by the river and then rested and waited, hoping to be spotted.
Not far from where she was,
a kayaker named Alexander was taking a small group of fellow Ukrainians
down the Snezhnaya River.
It had been a relaxing day, and the thin curtain of snow
that lined the banks made the era even more picturesque than usual.
The tourism festival made it quite a busy river, with people paddling and fishing down the shore.
On his way up, they passed a couple of fishermen
from Moscow, and waved hello.
They waved back as was the custom,
as the group dipped their paddles into the clear waters, and continued on their way.
As they floated along, they spotted a sleeping bag
by the riverside as they reached a bend.
Stood next to it was the motionless,
expressionless Valya.
Assuming she was just another person
out fishing on the bank, they shouted a greeting at her but didn’t get a response.
Valya didn’t even move a muscle.
Right away, something wasn’t quite right about the girl, making them uneasy as they continued down the river.
And although they didn’t want to, soon enough,
they knew they had to turn back.
It is here that the story begins to break up a bit.
Some reports say that Valya was covered in blood and became inconsolable
when kayakers approached.
But according to the kayakers, there was no blood.
One of the kayakers also claims that she looked like she recently washed her hair and face in the river.
When they got to her and asked what happened,
she didn’t say a word, because she was too shocked and
traumatized to speak.
Instead, she buried her head into Alexander’s
chest and sobbed.
The kayakers then wrapped her in a blanket to
warm her up and dug out some antibiotics and other medicine to give her
in case she had an infection.
After she was bundled up, they all headed back
down the route together.
And before long, they bumped the same fishermen
they had met earlier, and Valya instantly recognized them.
They were the fishermen from Moscow
she’d met on the train.
Upon seeing her, they smiled and waved and asked
how the others were getting along.
This is probably when Valya broke down and talked,
although it’s not entirely clear.
In a garbled frenzy, she told them what had happened.
She told them about the screams and the blood.
She told them about the cold and the panic.
She told them how the two youngest had
run away, only to fall the ground, and how Tatyana smashed her head against the rock.
And obviously, after hearing this, her new friends
were horrified and confused.
None of what she said made sense.
They decided to look after her from then on
and helped her back out of the wilderness to let police know something had happened
to the rest of her party.
They even arranged for her train ticket back home
once it was all over.
It took a few days before Valya could tell the story
in a way that anyone could understand, but once it was clear that something
had happened to the others, the police commissioned a helicopter
to go and search for them.
The weather and other factors made it impossible
for them to get off the ground until August 21st – nearly two weeks
after the incident.
And as it happened, they weren’t the only people
missing in the region.
Two other hikers had been reported missing
on August 17th.
After five days of searching, they spotted the pair, who, like Valya, had found a good spot
to wait for rescue, and covered a bush with their sleeping bags
so they could be spotted.
Then, right after the helicopter took off
with the pair on board, they spotted the missing party,
and it wasn’t a pretty sight.
The bodies of the group were found on a small ledge, and some were huddled together,
while others were some distance away.
During those few weeks, the bodies
had begun to swell up, while insects, animals, and normal decomposition
had started to destroy what was left.
Many of the battle-hardened recovery team
threw up at the sight of them.
To make the scene even more horrific, everyone
in the group seemed to have removed most of their clothing, with most of them
wearing only thin tights.
Three of them were barefoot, apart from the
two youngsters who tore at their clothes, which Valya hadn’t mentioned in her story.
The bodies were eventually wrapped in plastic
and flown to a nearby city for autopsy.
And weirdly, the autopsy found that they
had all died from hypothermia, except for Lyudmila who had died of a heart attack.
They also had bruising in their lungs, suggesting
some issues with their breathing.
And even more strangely, they were all
on the brink of starving and were found to have critically-low protein levels.
So what caused these deaths is still a mystery.
There are a few ideas – some more likely than others –
but they all have problems.
One idea is that they accidentally witnessed a
military experiment and were murdered to keep them quiet, and then their deaths
were covered up by the authorities, which is why Valya’s story doesn’t match
what was found in the autopsy.
After all, they had strayed from the usual route, and who knows what was going on in the early years
of post-Soviet Russia.
This doesn’t explain how Valya survived, however.
On top of that, as far as we know, no one tried
to shut her up after she told her story.
After the incident, Valya studied at college
and left Kazakhstan for a new life.
And now with a family, she’s only once
spoken about the incident and swears she never will again.
She claims that she just doesn’t want
to relive the nightmare.
At the same time, she’s never retracted
her original story.
If she had been coerced into keeping quiet, why would she tell everyone a story that only
makes things more mysterious? Why not just say they froze to death because they weren’t
ready for such a big storm, and she was the lone survivor? And that’s another problem with the
“secret government operation” idea.
It’s a popular area where a lot of people go hiking, and it was even more popular at the time
because of the tourism festival.
It seems unlikely that a secret government project
would use that spot when the mountains just a few hundred miles away
are much more remote.
So if it wasn’t a government murder and coverup, could the government have killed them accidentally? Russia has been known to use nerve agents in the past, and even has a class of poisonous gases that fit
the symptoms that Valya described.
They were developed around 1993, and some reports claim they were tested
in the Khamar-Daban region.
This type of nerve agent was even famously used
to assassinate a Russian double agent and his daughter, in Salisbury, England in 2018.
And if it was this nerve agent, some people think
the rain might have had something to do with it.
These poisons can dissolve in the water
and hang around for long periods of time.
And if they were testing the poison in the mountains
in the weeks or months before the trip, the excess toxin could have been washed down
in the heavy rain.
At some point that morning, Sacha might have
accidentally stepped into a pool of that poison.
Then after stepping in it, when Lyudmila
rushed over to help him, she was poisoned as well, followed by Tatyana,
Viktoriya, and Timur.
And finally, Denis, by crouching on the ground, also became contaminated by poisoned groundwater.
This theory could also explain why the police
waited so long to begin their search.
They might have needed to make sure
the area was clear.
However, again, it doesn’t explain how
Valya survived.
She got to the first two victims before anyone else and touched the arm of someone
who could have been contaminated.
That should have been enough to kill her.
On top of all of that, it would’ve just been
the worst luck for those chemicals to have seeped into the ground just at the right time
and in the right amount, to contaminate a single hiker
who then killed everyone else, all while never infecting anyone else
anytime that year.
So another theory is that if they were poisoned, it didn’t necessarily have to be a military nerve agent
that made them sick.
Maybe it was just their drinking water that was poisoned.
High in the Khamar-Daban mountains
is Lake Baikal.
And as well as being a tourist attraction for its
beautiful landscapes and popular trails, it’s also where tens of thousands of tons
of toxic waste have been dumped.
A pulp and a paper mill has been dumping chlorine
and other nasty chemicals into the lake since 1966.
And excrement and fuel have also been pumped in
at least that long.
One idea is that the group had been
topping up their water in the rivers downstream of Lake Baikal that morning, and they were hit by something like chlorine poisoning.
But then again, how did Valya survive
when no one else did, and why did it only happen to this one group? You’d expect more reports of people becoming sick after topping up their water bottles in local streams, especially given how big the lake is and how close it is
to some big towns and villages.
But there are just no other reports.
So if it wasn’t nerve gas or something they drank,
maybe they hadn’t been poisoned at all.
Maybe Valya was simply mistaken.
Another theory is that the account that Valya told was simply her mind trying to cope with trauma.
Human brains don’t remember things perfectly.
That’s because the job of memory isn’t to keep a
perfect record of what we’ve done.
Memory keeps hold of any information that our brains
think might be useful in the future – bits and pieces that might one day help keep us alive.
Some psychologists believe that’s why people
who nearly drown say they see their whole life flash before them.
It’s your brain’s way of trying to find something
from your life that can help you get out of the situation.
At the same time, our brains also twist
and distort our memories to help us make better sense of things,
especially when things are traumatic.
The group might’ve died of hypothermia
as they camped out – exposed, wet, hungry, and without a fire to warm them.
Valya might’ve survived because she was fitter
than the others, had warmer clothes, was sleeping in a slightly warmer spot,
or was just lucky.
Then when she woke up, she would’ve found
her friends dead or dying, some of them without their clothes due to
paradoxical undressing.
And then she could have panicked and run.
When asked, all Valya will say was that the cold rain
was the cause of what happened, and that Lyudmila isn’t to blame.
But, maybe she was, and Valya
couldn’t cope with that.
As a survival mechanism, maybe her brain ignored her
instructor’s bad choices, and it gave her a false memory of what happened.
It wasn’t just a poorly planned hike gone wrong, but some terrible, mysterious sickness
that passed from one to the other.
The chief specialist of the area’s rescue service
thinks that this is the most likely explanation.
He puts it down to mass psychosis
caused by hypothermia and exhaustion.
However, even he pointed out that others
survived heavy snow at the same time the group was out,
so why not them? He thinks that this might simply have been because
they weren’t prepared for the storm, but at the same time, they’d spent months getting ready
with a known master mountaineer with a reputation for excellence.
So, could that be true? They were supposed to be prepared for anything, and it doesn’t explain how Valya’s training
was good enough to keep her alive, but not the others.
So, with Valya refusing to open up
about what happened, and so many problems with each
of the proposed theories, the Khamar-Daban disaster
might always remain a mystery.
