Are you an outdoorsy type?

Do you like being out in nature, hiking and camping?

How about a fun trip into the sub-zero temperatures in the Ural Mountains of northern Russia?

What could possibly go wrong?

Welcome to strange and unexplained with me, Daisy Egan, a decidedly indoorsy type.

Unless there's a chair, a serene lake, and a cooler with chilled Chardonnay, I'll go ahead and skip the camping trip.

True, there will never be a mountain pass named after me, but the chances that I'll die a gruesome and completely

mystifying death on a snow-covered mountain are relatively low. This week, the Dad Love Pass,

the man it was named for and his group of hiker friends who died there, and why we're still

talking about it 60 years later.

Just a quick note before we dive in,

the names of the people involved in this story are Russian.

And while it's true that my grandfather was from the USSR,

he died before I was born, and I never learned any of the languages from the Soviet Empire.

That said, I researched pronunciations and will do my best.

I beg you, forgive me my shitty New York City public school education, and don't come from me on Twitter.

In late January 1959, 10 intrepid souls, mostly students in their 20s at the Ural Polytechnic Institute in Russia, set out for the O'Torton Mountain Range in the northern Ural Mountains of Russia.

When I first heard of this story, I assumed this was a group of scientists or military people doing some kind of official mountain-y-type business, collecting ice samples or whatever people

do up in the mountains, because why else would someone trek around in the freezing mountains

of northern anywhere?

The kids in this group, and a kid, by the way, is anyone under the age of 30,

were studying science at Polytech, but like nuclear physics and engineering,

...