On the night of 14–15 June 1937, an avalanche of ice swept down onto Camp IV of a German expedition on Nanga Parbat, in the western Himalaya, and buried sixteen men as they slept. All of them died — seven German climbers and nine Sherpa porters, almost the entire climbing party — without warning and, by every later account, without waking. It was the deadliest single event in the history of mountaineering to that time, and it remains one of the worst. The mountain stands at 8,126 metres in what is now the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan; Camp IV lay at roughly 6,180 metres on a snow terrace above the Rakhiot Glacier, beneath the ice cliffs of Rakhiot Peak.
The expedition was led by Karl Wien and was the latest German attempt on a mountain that had become a national obsession after the disaster of 1934, when Willy Merkl’s expedition lost climbers and porters in a storm high on the same Rakhiot face. The 1937 party was working its way up that face, establishing camps in heavy snow, when the entire camp was overrun. The dead Germans were Karl Wien, Hans Hartmann, Adolf Göttner, Günther Hepp, Martin Pfeffer, Pert Müllritter and Otto Fankhauser. The nine Sherpas killed alongside them — men whose labour carried every load up that mountain and whose deaths were long recorded more faintly than the climbers’ — were Pasang, Nim Tsering, Mambahadur, Kami, Gyaljen Monjo, Jigmay, Chong Karma, Ang Tsering II and Da Thondup. This record names them in full.
The disaster left no survivors at the high camp to describe it, so its sequence was reconstructed only weeks later, when a relief expedition under Paul Bauer dug down through the avalanche debris to the buried tents. What they found — men still in their sleeping bags, faces calm, killed in an instant — established what had happened: a mass of ice had broken from the cliffs hundreds of metres above and crossed the supposedly safe terrace in seconds, entombing the camp under metres of snow and ice before anyone could stir.
In July 1936 four climbers — the Bavarians Andreas Hinterstoisser and Toni Kurz and the Austrians Willy Angerer and Edi Rainer — attempted the unclimbed north face of the Eiger in the Bernese Alps, and all four died. The last to die was the 23-year-old Toni Kurz, who survived the deaths of his three companions only to perish on a rope a few metres above his rescuers, unable to pass a knot with a frozen hand. His end is among the most harrowing in mountaineering, and it sealed the early reputation of the Eigerwand as the deadliest wall in the Alps.
The Eiger’s north face — the Nordwand, soon nicknamed the Mordwand or “murder wall” — is a concave sweep of rotten limestone, ice fields and constant rockfall rising roughly 1,800 metres beneath the 3,967-metre summit. In the mid-1930s it was the last great unsolved problem of the Alps, and its danger had already killed: in 1935 the German climbers Max Sedlmayr and Karl Mehringer had died high on the face at a spot thereafter called the Death Bivouac. National prestige hung on the wall in the Nazi era, drawing ambitious German and Austrian climbers to a route the local Swiss guides regarded as suicidal.
The 1936 party started up on 18 July and made good early progress, in part thanks to a bold sideways pitch Hinterstoisser found and fixed with rope — the move ever after called the Hinterstoisser Traverse. But rockfall injured Angerer, the weather turned, and the team decided to retreat. They could not recross the traverse, because the fixed rope had been pulled through, and were forced into a desperate downward struggle. An avalanche then swept Hinterstoisser to his death, killed Angerer against the wall, and left Rainer to die of asphyxiation crushed by the ropes. Kurz alone survived the night. The next day, 22 July, Grindelwald guides reached a point on the face close beneath him, but could not bridge the last overhang, and he died on the rope as they watched.
On the night of 1–2 February 1959, nine experienced Soviet ski-hikers died on the slopes of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Ural Mountains after fleeing their tent, which they had cut open from the inside, into a blizzard at temperatures near −25 to −40 °C. They died of hypothermia and traumatic injury within roughly a mile and a half of the tent, most without proper boots or outer clothing. The party was led by 23-year-old Igor Dyatlov, and the place where they died has carried his name ever since: Dyatlov Pass.
The group had set out as a ten-person ski tour toward the peak Otorten, an ambitious winter route undertaken by students and graduates of the Ural Polytechnic Institute. One member, Yuri Yudin, turned back early because of illness, which is why nine, not ten, died. When the party failed to return on schedule, searchers found the abandoned tent on 26 February, slit open from within, with the skiers’ boots, coats and supplies still inside. The first bodies were found nearby that month; the last four were recovered in early May from a snow-filled ravine, some bearing severe injuries — crushed chests and a fractured skull — and showing soft-tissue loss to the face that decomposition and the environment can explain.
The strange details — the cut tent, the lightly clad night flight, the violent injuries on some bodies — fed decades of theories ranging from a military weapons test to the wholly invented. The original 1959 inquiry closed by attributing the deaths to an unspecified “compelling natural force.” When Russian authorities reopened the case in 2019, they concluded in 2020 that an avalanche had most likely driven the party out of the tent; in 2021 a peer-reviewed study by the avalanche scientists Johan Gaume and Alexander Puzrin offered a physical mechanism — a small slab avalanche, triggered hours after the hikers cut into the slope to pitch their tent — consistent with both the flight and the crushing injuries.