Chivruay Pass Incident
Later explainedSummary
Ten students on a ski trek died on a pass in the Lovozero mountains in January 1973. Their bodies were found between February and June, some at their tent and some up to 3 kilometres away. Five had left the tent without their equipment. One had given his warm clothing to a companion.
It is routinely called the second Dyatlov Pass, and the parallels are real, and the registry keeps this record precisely because of them.
Everything that appears inexplicable about Chivruay is a documented, well-understood, textbook consequence of dying of cold.
What is documented
The group. Ten students, from a tourist club at an aviation institute in Kuibyshev, now Samara. The leader was Mikhail Kuznetsov, aged twenty-three. They set out from Revda on 25 January on a ski route across the Lovozero mountains, planned to end at Kirovsk on 31 January.
The weather. On 27 to 28 January 1973 the group was caught on the pass by an extreme storm, with winds reported at up to 50 metres per second and a sharp fall in temperature.
What was found. The bodies were recovered in stages, over months. Some were found in February. The last was not found until June.
Five were found at the tent in early February, lying pressed together. Two were found in March about 300 metres away, and two in April about 3 kilometres away. The five who died away from the tent had left it without their equipment. One member, Novoselov, had given all his warm clothing to a companion.
The finding. The Soviet investigation concluded that the group had been caught in extreme weather and had died of hypothermia.
Leading explanations
Hypothermia in a violent storm. Established.
The features of this case that are usually presented as bizarre are not bizarre. They are what cold does, and every mountain rescue service and every forensic pathologist knows them. Two of the behaviours below, undressing and burrowing, are routinely claimed for this case and for Dyatlov Pass; no traced account of Chivruay records either, and they are set out here because they are what such claims misread.
Paradoxical undressing. In the later stages of hypothermia, a substantial proportion of victims remove their clothing. The mechanism is understood: as the body loses the ability to maintain vasoconstriction, blood rushes back into the peripheral vessels, and the sufferer experiences a sudden, overwhelming sensation of intense heat.
They are freezing to death, and they feel as though they are burning, and they take their clothes off.
This occurs in a large fraction of fatal hypothermia cases. It is found in mountain deaths, in urban exposure deaths, in every context in which people freeze. It is not strange. It is expected.
Terminal burrowing. In the final stage, hypothermia victims frequently crawl into small enclosed spaces: under furniture, behind rocks, into hollows and crevices. It is thought to be a brainstem-level response, a vestige of a hibernation-like reflex, and it is well documented.
They are found in places that seem to make no sense, and they got there because the brain, at the very end, sends them there.
Hypothermic confusion. Well before either of those, judgement collapses. Victims abandon equipment. They walk away from shelter. They make decisions that, examined afterwards, in a warm room, look insane.
They look insane because a person in that state may have a core temperature of around thirty degrees.
What the popular version gets wrong
"They took their clothes off, which makes no sense." No traced account of Chivruay records it. One man gave his warm clothing to a companion, which is an act of care, not confusion. Where people dying of cold do undress, the cause is well documented: it is called paradoxical undressing, and it happens to a great many of the people who freeze to death.
"They were found in strange places." The recovery records place them at the tent, about 300 metres away and about 3 kilometres away. Nothing in the traced accounts places a body anywhere stranger than that.
"They abandoned equipment that would have saved them." Hypothermic confusion. Documented. Expected.
"It's another Dyatlov, so Dyatlov must also be unexplained." The argument runs the other way, and this is why the registry keeps this record.
Chivruay has a settled explanation, and it shares features that are used, in the Dyatlov case, as evidence that something inexplicable occurred: a group leaving its tent in a storm, bodies scattered across the slope, abandoned gear.
If those features are explained by weather and hypothermia at Chivruay, then on their own they are not evidence of anything unusual at Dyatlov Pass either.
Current status
Later explained. Extreme weather, a group caught in the open on a pass, and hypothermia running its ordinary and well-documented course.
The registry keeps this record as a corrective, and it is aimed squarely at its own most famous entry.
Ten people died on a mountain in a storm, and the way they died, which is so often presented as strange, is the way people die of cold. It is presented as strange because dying of cold is strange, and because few of the people who write about mountain deaths have read the pathology.
Sources
- Soviet investigation into the deaths on the Chivruay Pass, 1973, as described in the press accounts below. The file itself has not been published.
- Recovery reports, Lovozero mountains, February to June 1973.
- Clinical and forensic literature on hypothermia, including paradoxical undressing and terminal burrowing.
- Meteorological records for the Kola Peninsula, 27 to 28 January 1973.
- Andreeva, E. (2019). "Po sledam, zametyonnym desyatkami zim." Murmansky Vestnik, 13 February 2019.
- Shabalina, I. (2018). "Istoricheskie versii. O gibeli desyati kuibyshevtsev vo vremya lyzhnogo pokhoda po Kolskomu poluostrovu." Samarskaya Gazeta, 25 March 2018.
- RT (2019). Account of the 1973 deaths in the mountains of the Kola Peninsula, 26 February 2019.
Last reviewed: September 2026. Records are provisional. Where the evidence changes, the entry changes. Found an error? Tell us.