Home · Book Reports · 2021 · Dead Mountain - The Untold True Story of the Dyatlov Pass Incident

designates my notes. / designates important.

Thoughts

The story itself was mildly interesting and made the read a breeze, but honestly I wasn’t particularly drawn in. I guessed what actually happened though while there is no hard evidence of what actually happened.

What I found more interesting is some of the incidental revelations of what life was life in the Soviet Union circa 1959.

page 66:

• A typical Soviet school day was broken into two periods: a morning session devoted to proper lessons, followed by a less structured afternoon session, during which pupils could pursue their own activities or gather for guest speakers.

• Unstructured learning, from what little insight I have via this book, seemed to be effective. There were a great many well educated citizens of the Soviet Union.

page 87:

• Furthermore, women were on equal footing with men.

• and then it collapsed…

• This equality was reflected in the Dyatlov group, where Zina and Lyuda were considered as capable as their male counterparts. “Within the team there was no gender. We were all equal in everything. We had a strict code of ethics and discipline.”

page 104:

• Particularly offensive to the Soviet government were bootleggers who reproduced American jazz records, music Stalin had declared a ’threat to civilization."

page 137:

• Yudin admits that the male members of the hiking group—Igor, Georgy and Doroshenko, in particular—had crushes on Zina, but he says there was shame attached to expressing interest in one person.

• Another potential reason for failure? Shame for monogamy.

page 138:

• All this celebrating was, of course, conducted without consuming alcohol—at least for the hikers. “Nobody drank, among the tourists, nobody,” Yudin insists, though he admits that he and his friends made exceptions on special occasions. On one particular New Year’s Eve, a group of roughly one hundred students went camping, bringing two bottles of champagne to go around. “Everybody had a spoonful of champagne and that’s it. But we were dancing and singing all night, because we didn’t need alcohol to have fun.”

page 189:

• I had been so dehydrated from repeated [vertigo induced] vomiting that during my ambulance ride to the hospital, paramedics had been unable to locate a vein in which to pump fluids into my system. [doesn’t dehydration make your veins stand out more?]