The Skeleton Lake of Roopkund, India

http://www.atlasobscura.com/places/the-skeleton-lake-of-roopkund-india

by aasarava • 13 years ago

134 30 13 years ago

ekianjo5• 13 years ago

Can one really die from hail? I have seen pretty big ones now and then, but usually one would cover their heads with their hands at least, to make it safely through it.

gauravk3• 13 years ago

This should give some perspective :) : http://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/hail-no-an-account-of-t...

monsterix2• 13 years ago

Yes, in Asia there have been deaths in sufficient numbers due to freak hailstorms. [1][2]

Guess this has something to do with the first knock-off itself.

[1] http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2271147/Nine-people-...

[2] http://www.mathrubhumi.com/english/story.php?id=136175

ekianjo5• 13 years ago

Can hail storms be predicted accurately by the way ?

jlgreco• 13 years ago

9"/23cm hail would do you in pretty quick I would think. Even using my entire forearms I can only manage to partially cover my whole head. You'd be better off dropping down into the fetal position but if all the injuries were to the top of the head then it sounds like they didn't do that (maybe it started too quickly).

roel_v• 13 years ago

I think the comments to the article draw the correct conclusion - the author mixed up circumference with diameter, and the hail would have been 'only' 3 inches. Still pretty deadly, but not quite as terrifying as being bombarded with rock-hard soccer balls.

vacri• 13 years ago

These people were travellers, not joggers. They likely would have had some items with which to shield their heads - packs, pans, spare heavy clothing. Perhaps they did, and there were more than 200 - the survivors making it of the pass.

rurounijones• 13 years ago

There was a tornado near my village in Belgium (Hardly the land of freak weather) which was preceeded by a hailstorm. The hail was only about an inch across or so.

After the storm and tornado had gone through and we were outside evaluating the damage a man staggered into the village. He had been out jogging (Shorts and T-Shirt) when the hail fell and it looked like someone had beaten him all over his body (loads of individual Bruises, bleeding etc.).

And this was only relatively small hail in the grand scheme of things. I can easily imagine hail being able to kill someone.

gauravk3• 13 years ago

I was there at the site in 2010. It was an amazing trek (http://roopkund.com/).

Right now, the forest officials are struggling to preserve the remains because tourist often like to take the skeletons back with them as souvenirs. Since the lake is far off and frozen for eight months in a year, it is difficult to guard the area. Most skeletons and bones have been stolen over the years with only a few skulls and bones remaining around the frozen lake.

ern• 13 years ago

Right now, the forest officials are struggling to preserve the remains because tourist often like to take the skeletons back with them as souvenirs.

I that's happening, it is surprising that tourists can pass through customs with human remains, undetected.

gauravk3• 13 years ago

Well... India is a large country with a growing middle class. It doesn't need foreign tourists to do the damage.

mansigandhi• 13 years ago

It's not like all the tourists in India are from abroad. The majority are Indians from other states. We travel too, you know.

maaku• 13 years ago

Great, now I have one more irrational fear.

reeses• 13 years ago

I'd say a fear of the color blue or clowns is irrational. A fear of earthquakes, snakes, and huge hailstorms is rational (if extremely unlikely to occur).

Not to, you know, encourage your imminent agoraphobia.

Luyt2• 13 years ago

Never leave home without your helmet and armored shoulder pads ;-)

tn13• 13 years ago

Even though this mystery is as good as solved, this mystery death remains still a mystery

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dyatlov_Pass_incident

verroq• 13 years ago

I'm going to go ahead and say Cracked.com is probably correct on this one - avalanche.

http://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-myste...

ekianjo5• 13 years ago

Nice link - thanks for sharing.

Luyt2• 13 years ago

There exists a Skeptoid episode about this:

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4108

an excerpt:

"Here is my proposed explanation of what happened. It's wrong, of course, because it's done from my armchair 50 years after the fact and with no firsthand knowledge of the region, but it's completely reasonable and does adequately satisfy the facts as we know them. Nine skiers set up camp in an area with potential avalanche danger, but no more or less danger than would have been found if they set up anywhere else they could have reached before nightfall. Sometime during the night, a loud noise, either from a nearby avalanche, a jet aircraft, or military ordnance, convinced at least five members of the group that an avalanche was bearing down on them. They burst out of the tent wearing whatever they happened to be sleeping in and ran. At some point one of them fell and struck his head on a rock. They became lost in the dark and poor visibility, or simply found themselves stranded with their injured friend, and finally built a fire. They quickly got hypothermia and probably shouted themselves hoarse for their friends. Two of them lost consciousness and the others made a desperation decision: To take what little clothes their two unconscious buddies had and risk it all to try and make it back to camp. One made it 300 meters, the second made it 480, and the third a full 630 meters before all five were dead from hypothermia. Back at camp, the four who didn't panic and run away in the night got dressed, collected provisions, and began to search for their friends. They searched for hours, circling high and low, until at some point either through a slip or just bad luck, they were caught in a real avalanche. During the resulting turmoil one received a fatal skull fracture, one received twelve broken ribs, and one bit her tongue off, all perfectly plausible injuries during such a traumatic death. Their bodies remained buried until the spring thaw, as is so common with avalanche victims. At the open-casket funeral for the first five victims, relatives saw the combination of five days of winter sunburn in those days before sunscreen, and the mortician's effort to cover up frostbite and a full month of exposure to the elements, and described it as a strange orange color; though others described it simply as a deep tan, which is consistent with reasonable expectations. And who knows what hair would have looked like after all that exposure and who knows what kind of treatment done by the mortician, so I can't assign too much significance to what amounts to a few anecdotal reports from some funeral attendees, and not even all funeral attendees. Plus I'm quite certain that if UFOs had turned all of their hair really gray, don't you think the cold war Russian authorities would have had it colored back to normal for an open casket funeral? Their bodies had been exposed outdoors for weeks. Of course they looked terrible."

ekianjo5• 13 years ago

Not bad, I can buy that. However, bodies exposed outdoors, in the cold, do not age that much, especially if they are covered with clothes and so on. Not sure where the tan would originate from.

a-nikolaev• 13 years ago

The avalanche explanation does not seem to be very viable for modern investigators of this mystery. The information sources in English are scarce, unfortunately, you have to read Russian discussions of the incident. A few decades ago, there was published a book that popularized the avalanche theory, and the book was translated into English too. However, many people including the participants of the search expedition are saying that it could not be an avalanche. The ski poles were standing around the tent vertically, not affected by the avalanche. There is an evidence that the tent was not really covered with thick snow, and there was a flashlight laying on top of this snow (belonged to the group leader Igor Dyatlov). The slope is not steep at all, maybe 15-20 degrees. There were found footprints of 8-9 people walking away from the tent in organized ordered fashion. It could not happen if 3 or 4 of them were heavily injured by an avalanche. Even if there was some sort of avalache in the area, it just does not explain the whole crazyness, imho. And it is very unlikely that just a noise could make 9 sane people run away from their only shelter, without putting on any warm clothes or boots.. yes, most of them were walking down the hill with only socks on their feet. In my opinion, it is more likely that they were killed by another group of people, but there is no direct evidence of that either.

There are many other theories and possible explanations. The UFO theory is absurd of course, but, you know, people come up with such bizarre explanations because reasonable explanations are not very believable either. This is why many people are still trying to solve the mistery, they make expeditions in the area of Dyatlov Pass, trying to understand what could happen there in 1959. Probably, only new declassified documents, if there will be any, can shed some light on this mystery..

Btw, you can look at the photos taken by the group members (from the films found in their cameras): http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/aleksej-koskin/album/159799/

znowi• 13 years ago

Having read the page I don't see much mystery here. Avalanche seems to be the obvious explanation.

42_huh• 13 years ago

Going there next week for the trek :D

But why is this trending on HN?

vinodc• 13 years ago

HN tends to be popular in India at this hour.

pingou2• 13 years ago

It doesn't make sense to me, why did the bodies only have wounds on the head and shoulders ?

It seems intuitive that you protect your head with your hands and arms, as sudden as the hailstorm may have been, and once they collapsed to the ground their whole bodies should have been hit (although I guess their clothes could have protected them a bit) ?

Ma8ee2• 13 years ago

My guess is that those are the only wounds that are visible on the bone. On most of the rest of the body the bones are protected by soft tissue.

pingou2• 13 years ago

Maybe but I don’t think there’s that much soft tissue protecting the hands. Maybe they were stoned, then digged up for some reason?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stoning

That would explain why there wasn’t any survivor able to come back later to bury her comrades (if you curl you up I’m not sure how a hailstorm could be lethal to everyone in a big group)

The Skeleton Lake of Roopkund, India

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