The kayakers had so many questions. Who was this woman staring at them? Why was she alone? And why was she covered in blood?
She was Valentina Utochenko – Valya to her friends – a 17-year-old student who grew up on a farm in Siberia, Russia.
Standing along the shore of the river coursing through the Khamar-Daban mountain range, she was crying and delirious.
She barely made any sense. She told the Ukrainian kayakers she was scared.
After trying to console her, she revealed she was one of seven people who mounted an expedition the week before in August 1993.
Her friends were dead.
The Khamar-Daban incident is a mystery that has puzzled investigators, fascinated amateur Reddit sleuths and, above all, traumatised a young woman.
Valya, the sole survivor of the group all from Kazakhstan, was unable to recollect what happened for days. But when she did, police were shocked.
What was the Khamar-Daban incident?
With its snowcapped mountains and towering trees, Khamar-Daban forms the views of many a tourist lounging in the holiday homes and bath houses that have sprung up over the remote Buryatia republic.
The range was – and still is – a popular hiking trail. Lyudmila Korovina, of the Petropavl Azimut tourist club, would have been the first to tell people this.
She knew her stuff. Lyudmila had been awarded a ‘Master of Sports’, one of Russia’s top honorary titles, for hiking.
The instructor was to lead 24-year-old Tatyana Filipenko, 23-year-old Alexander Krysin, 19-year-old Denis Shvachkin, 17-year-old Viktoriya ‘Vika’ Zalesova, 16-year-old Timur Bapanov and Valya on a trek over the mountains.
Denis had joined the group at the last minute without informing his parents. He simply left them a note: ‘I went to the mountains. I’ll be back soon.’
On August 2, the seven made it to Zun-Murino, a tiny, far-flung village where only a few hundred residents walk its less than 20 streets.
‘We had gone on hikes before. We had never had any life-threatening situations,’ Valya told the Russia-1 TV channel. ‘Everything was thought out down to the smallest detail: from shoes to underwear.’
Over two days, they stomped along two rivers and a watershed, up a mountain and ridge before settling on Retranslator, a peak named after an abandoned relay tower that looks over the region.
As they descended on August 4, the week of promised sun and clear skies was dampened by the rain and snow brought by a Mongolian cyclone. Their bags wet and heavy, Lyudmila made the hasty decision to set up camp in an exposed area just by a forest just 4km away.
‘We stopped at a height without a forest, pitched two tents. At 4am, the tent guy lines broke. We fixed them. At 6am, the stake was torn out. The sleeping bags were wet,’ Valya wrote in a note to investigators.
It was 10am the following day when everything changed, Valya would tell police, according to the Russian news outlet Gazeta.Ru.
At an altitude of 2,400 metres, Alexander began to clutch his face as he drifted behind the pack. He screamed, with the backpackers turning to see blood pouring out from his eyes and ears, his mouth frothing.
He was unconscious within minutes. ‘Korovina asked me to drag Vika down,’ Valya recalled in a taped testimony. ‘I climbed up to her, and she bit me. I dragged her down to the others.’
Lyudmila was next, suffering near-identical symptoms to Alexander as she clutched her throat. ‘Tatyana started banging her head on the rocks. Denis hid behind the rocks and climbed into his sleeping bag,’ added Valya
Victoria and Timur sprinted from the scene, only to collapse and throw up blood while clawing at their throats and tearing their clothing off.
Denis and Valya attempted to flee, too. Only one would make it – Valya – as Denis convulsed and collapsed.
Valya had just watched her friends seemingly die one by one, leaving her alone in the woods. She could do little else than set up a tent for the night and sleep.
‘In the morning, I went up, saw Tanya on the rocks, Denis, Timur, Vika. Higher up – Sasha and Korovina,’ Valya said.
They were all dead – Valya closed their eyes.
It would take four days for Valya to be rescued, having walked along the power lines strung over the mountains.
‘When I remember this picture, my heart sinks. There was a girl standing on the shore, screaming and waving her arms,’ said Alexander Kvitnitsky, a kayaker from Kyiv who found Valya.
‘When we got to the shore, she rushed to one of our participants and cried for a long time on her chest. She was incoherently telling us that people had died and that she was scared.’
The victims were found 12 days later, a delay due to Valya being unable to speak for several days.
‘It was a terrible picture. The guys were lying on a small ledge, some pressed close to each other, some a little further away,’ Yuri Golius, in charge of the search, told journalists at the time.
‘No eyes. Worms were crawling in the empty eye sockets and slightly open mouths.’
What happened to the hikers?
No one has ever been able to explain what – or who – killed the explorers.
But the incident has become something of a national legend in Siberia, dubbed by sleuths as ‘Dyatlov Pass 2.0’, named after an incident where nine hikers were found dead, naked and radioactive in the Russian wilderness.
And much like Dyatlov Pass, the explanations of the decades-old riddle of Khamar-Daban are a grab bag of shaky scientific explanations and conspiratorial tall tales.
Hypothermia
The official autopsy report states that all the victims died of hypothermia except Lyudmila, who died from a heart attack. They had next to no nutrients in their bodies, including glycogen, the body’s fuel.
Investigators said the six died from the freezing temperatures, being starved of oxygen at such a high altitude.
‘The strangest thing is that the guys were wet and cold all night, even before the first death, but they didn’t even try to warm up,’ said Leonid Izmailov, former deputy head of the Transbaikal Regional Search and Rescue Service.
‘Each of them had a sleeping bag and plastic film, but it remained untouched – everything was dry and in their backpacks.’
Hypothermia, a condition in which the body’s core temperature drops below 35°C, can cause hallucinations. In its final stages, ‘paradoxical undressing’ can set in, in which the victim irrationally strips off layers of clothing.
Soviet nerve agents
A nerve agent, also called nerve gas, freezes the nervous system. The substance is derived from pesticides and used as a chemical weapon.
And it was perhaps used by Soviet officials, armchair detectives have suggested.
The deadly nerve agent, Novichok, was tested near Khamar-Daban. As the gas lurked through the woods and the rivers – it can take months to dissipate – leading to the hikers’ instant deaths or eventual passing as they were paralysed and exposed to the frigid elements.
Some locals claimed that bears in the summer of 1993 had been throwing themselves in front of trains, which may have been caused by the gas.
Infrasound
Nikolai Fedorov, one of the rescuers, theorised that the hikers may have been driven mad by infrasound, a pitch too low for humans to hear.
‘Individual rocks under a strong wind can become an infrasound generator of enormous power, which causes a state of panic and unaccountable horror in a person,’ he said.
‘According to the girl who survived, her friends behaved restlessly, their speech was incoherent.’
Mushroom poisoning
Away from fluke anomalies and secret military operations, a popular theory is that the hikers simply ate magic mushrooms.
Lyudmila was known to forage, with mushroom poisoning symptoms – vomiting, loss of consciousness, seizures and hallucinations.
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Valya told the Russian news outlet KP in 2018 that she believes her group died from pulmonary edema, fluid in the lungs.
For Valya, however, the answer to what happened some 32 years ago would do little to change what it will always be to her – ‘a nightmare’.
‘What’s the point? It’s all useless,’ she said. ‘You can’t get them back.’
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