The Last Warm Night on the Auspiya
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On 31 January 1959 nine skiers from Sverdlovsk camp in the forest by the Auspiya River, and their leader writes the last entry in the group diary.
23 to 31 January 1959
The story
Ten skiers leave Sverdlovsk on 23 January 1959. Most are students or graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute; one, Semyon Zolotaryov, is an instructor at a hiking base. Their leader is Igor Dyatlov. The plan is a hard ski trek in the northern Urals, with Mount Otorten as the goal.
On 28 January one of them, Yuri Yudin, turns back at a settlement called 2nd Northern because he is ill. That leaves nine: Igor Dyatlov, Lyudmila Dubinina, Zinaida Kolmogorova, Aleksander Kolevatov, Yuri Doroshenko, Semyon Zolotaryov, Yuri Krivonischenko, Rustem Slobodin and Nikolay Thibeaux-Brignolle.
For three days they follow a Mansi hunter's trail up the Lozva and then the Auspiya. The snow is more than a meter deep. On 31 January the lead skier drops his pack, breaks trail for five minutes, then goes back for it. They manage about a mile an hour.
By about four in the afternoon they are out of the trees on open, wind-packed snow. The 1959 investigator says wind and cold turned them back from the pass to the Lozva valley. They go back into the Auspiya valley, where the snow is deepest, and set up camp. They are too tired to dig a fire pit, so they build the fire on logs.
Dinner is eaten in the tent. Dyatlov writes that it is nice and warm. It is the last entry in the group diary.
What the record says
Wind is western, warm, piercing, with speed like the draft from airplanes at take off.
Dyatlov group diary, 31 January 1959 (signed Dyatlov), translation on dyatlovpass.com
Can’t imagine such comfort on the ridge, with howling wind outside, hundreds of kilometers away from human settlements.
Dyatlov group diary, 31 January 1959, last line of the last entry
31.I.59 the hikers reached Auspiya river and tried to go over the pass to the valley of Lozva river, but because of the low temperature and strong wind they had to go back down and stopped for overnight.
Resolution to close the case, 28 May 1959, sheet 384
The record shows the route, the dates and the weather from the group's own diaries, which were found in the tent and copied into the case file. The 1959 resolution confirms that Yudin left because of illness and that the group was pushed back from the pass by wind and cold on 31 January. Zinaida Kolmogorova's own diary stops on 30 January, as the search inventory notes. The story adds nothing here beyond the diaries; the feelings are the hikers' own words.