The mountains were gentle and rounded, their barren slopes rising from a vast boreal forest of birch and fir.
Dyatlov’s group would ski two hundred miles, on a route that no Russian, as far as anyone knew, had taken before. Though largely Russified by this time, the Mansi continued to pursue a semi-traditional way of life-hunting, fishing, and reindeer herding. The Mansi came into contact with Russians around the sixteenth century, when Russia was extending its control over Siberia.
Dyatlov’s itinerary lay three hundred and fifty miles north of Sverdlovsk, in the traditional territory of the Mansi, an indigenous people. In late 1958, Dyatlov began planning a winter expedition that would exemplify the boldness and vigor of a new Soviet generation: an ambitious sixteen-day cross-country ski trip in the Urals, the north-south mountain range that divides western Russia from Siberia, and thus Europe from Asia. The shock that the success of Sputnik delivered to the West further bolstered national confidence. Khrushchev’s Thaw had freed many political prisoners from Stalin’s Gulag, economic growth was robust, and the standard of living was rising. It was a time of optimism in the U.S.S.R. During his years there, Dyatlov led a number of arduous wilderness trips, often using outdoor equipment that he had invented or improved on. turned out topflight engineers to work in the nuclear-power and weapons industries, communications, and military engineering. One of the leading technical universities in the country, U.P.I. By then, he was an engineering student at the city’s Ural Polytechnic Institute. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik, in 1957, he constructed a telescope so that he and his friends could watch the satellite travel across the night sky. Born in 1936, near Sverdlovsk (now Yekaterinburg), he built radios as a kid and loved camping. Igor Dyatlov was a tinkerer, an inventor, and a devotee of the wilderness. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.