So I've come up to the pluck there's it's covered in snow takes some of

snow off there's a portrait of a young man. It's a very Soviet looking design the young man in profile. He's looking forward into a bright future.

Underneath it says Iqbaladwits, there were nine of them. And then higher up it says,

in this mountain pass on a freezing night on the 2nd of February 1959 some tourists from the Urals Polytechnic Institute

died and then it lists their names Igor Di Diatlov, the leader of the group,

Zina Komagorova,

Yuri Doroshenko,

Rustams Labordin,

Yuri Krievo Nyshenko, Alexander Colavattov, Ludmila Dubinina,

Nicolaytibobrennol, Semionza Lettarov, he was the oldest one in the group, he was 38 years old when he died.

Then it says, in the memory of those who have gone and will never return,

we have named this mountain pass in their honor the Diatlov pass.

It's quite sobering looking at this and realizing just how young these people were, how much of life they had ahead of them,

and how little they expected when they pitched their tent on the slope of this mountain that that would be the last night of their lives.

Welcome to the BBC World Service. I'm Lucy Ash and in this program I'm exploring one of the

most baffling cold cases in Russian history, a case which has inspired countless theories over the decades.

But this year the authorities opened a new investigation and now promised to get to the bottom

of it once and for all.

I'm starting at the train station in Yacatrinburg,

Russia's fourth biggest city, just east of the Urals, the mountains which divide Europe

from Asia.

And I better get on the train quite quickly because it's about to leave. I think we're in the second coupe along. Let's get through here.

...