Yuri Yudin is the only surviving participant in the Dyatlov group’s notorious worldwide camping trip, who tragically died in 1959 under unclear circumstances. The tourist was able to survive only because he had to abandon the continuation of the journey due to the outbreak of the disease.
Biography
Yuri Yudin was born in 1937 in the village of Tabory, Sverdlovsk Region. Together with his brother and sister, he was raised by his mother, his father died at the front in 1942. The future tourist tried in everything to be a support to his family and not to let them down. He studied hard and successfully graduated from ten classes of the school. In 1954, he became a student of the Kirov Ural Polytechnic Institute in one of the engineering and economic specialties.
Already in his student years, health began to fail Yuri: he suffered from rheumatic heart disease, then dysentery. Despite this, the young man loved risk and since 1955 became interested in tourism, having been in hikes of varying degrees of difficulty. At the end of 1958, he joined a group of young tourists headed by Igor Dyatlov from the same Polytechnic Institute. Students (only ten people) were to go on a campaign of high complexity to the North Urals.
The campaign began on January 23, 1959. At first, everything went well, tourists moved forward, without deviating from the intended course. But already on January 26, Yuri felt unwell: long-standing rheumatic heart disease started. The young man began to move hard, and he decided to leave the group, returning to Sverdlovsk.
Tragedy at the Dyatlov Pass
“Dyatlovtsy” (as the group was later called) went north to Mount Otorten. In early February, they set up a tent for spending the night on a slope, which will later be called the “Dyatlov Pass”. Nothing is known about what happened after. A group of tourists did not contact in due time, an extensive search began. After some time, the search engines found a rugged and abandoned tent, and below the slope and near the trees at the beginning of the forest there were frozen and half-naked bodies of five tourists. Four more were found only at the end of spring in a ravine located a short distance away.
The investigative process has begun. Law enforcement agencies were puzzled by strange injuries on the bodies of students. It seemed that they could be physically dealt with (for example, local hunters, prisoners who escaped from the Ural camps, special services, etc.). Yuri Yudin was also inclined to the same version, who was attracted to participate in interrogations and identification procedures. He made a significant contribution to the investigation, saying that among the things discovered there was one outsider that did not belong to any of the group - a soldier's footcloth.
