From Ballen Studios, welcome to Late Nights with Nexpo, the official podcast of Youtube creator, Nexpo, featuring the most bizarre and chilling true stories and mysteries to be found. Listen to unravel the unexplained.New and exclusive episodes every Wednesday.Listen Now: https://ballen.lnk.to/latenightswithnexpoSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Chapter 1: What is 'Late Nights with Nexpo' about?
Hey, it's me, Mr. Ballin. Thank you so much for listening to Mr. Ballin's Medical Mysteries. Our studio, Ballin Studios, has another incredible brand new podcast for you to listen to, and it's hosted by none other than Nexpo, a YouTube creator with millions of subscribers on his channel.
Nexpo is truly an incredible storyteller, and now he's launching his podcast with new and exclusive stories you can't find anywhere else. It's called Late Nights with Nexpo, and each week, Nexpo will bring you a terrifying story that will absolutely shake you to your core.
From the most bizarre unsolved mysteries, to going down the internet's creepiest rabbit holes, to chilling true crime, Nexpo will explore the stories that actually keep him up at night. And if they're keeping him up, I'm pretty sure you'll want to listen with the lights on. or off, depending on how much you like to scare yourself. Either way, one thing's for sure, you'll be hooked.
So now, I am proud to present you a full episode of Late Nights with Nexpo. It's called Madness on the Mountain, and in it, Nexpo dives into an eerie mystery of death and survival, which still stumps people today. In 1993, seven hikers set out into the Camar de Bon mountains, but only one returned alive. And the reason for their sudden, violent deaths has never been explained.
So what happened on that mountain? After you finish listening to the episode, please go follow Late Nights with Nexpo wherever you get your podcasts. New episodes of Late Nights with Nexpo will come out every Wednesday. Enjoy.
Siberia, August 1993. The river is freezing cold. Snow melts from the Kamar-Daban mountain range, which looms overhead. Your kayak cuts through the water. You take in the fresh mountain air and the rugged landscape. It's a long overdue escape from the city. Out here, the only signs of civilization are power lines running over the mountains, which are easy enough to ignore.
But out of nowhere, something catches your eye and the peaceful atmosphere dissolves. There's someone standing on the far shore of the river, framed starkly against the trees. It's a teenage girl. She's waving her arms frantically, screaming for you to stop. From this distance, you can't quite make it out, but it looks almost like her jacket is stained with blood. You don't hesitate.
You dive into the frigid water and swim to shore. And when you reach the girl, she collapses into your arms. She's delirious, inconsolable. You can barely make out half of what she's saying through her sobs. She says she's scared, that she's all alone. You wonder why this girl is out in the wild by herself. But what she says next answers your question and makes your blood run as cold as the river.
Everyone else is dead. A week earlier, August 2nd, 1993. Two hiking groups from Kazakhstan climb up a steep trail, away from the nearest town. They're heading into the wilds of southern Siberia's Kamar-Daban mountain range. They're a school-sponsored hiking expedition, mostly in their teens and early 20s. One group is led by a man named Konstantin Kazantsev.
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Chapter 2: What mysteries does Nexpo explore in the podcast?
Combined with some scattered clouds around the peaks, she assumes that means there are pockets of bad weather at the high altitude. Lyudmila and her students might be getting some rain and wind, which is concerning, but nothing she hasn't handled before. Suddenly, however, Natalia stops in her tracks. A set of eyes are staring out at her from the foliage nearby, unblinking. It's a moose.
Natalia's mouth falls open and she wants to call the other hikers, but she doesn't. Mooses always steer clear of hikers, but for some reason, this one isn't intimidated by their presence at all. In fact, there's an almost aggressive air to its posture. It's an unsettling encounter, and that's when she remembers what the people in town told her about the bears in the area.
Something isn't right, and the animals can feel it. Slowly, she backs away. The moose boldly stands its ground. Natalia returns to her group and tries to put the moose out of her mind. She reminds herself that animals sometimes behave strangely, just like people do. She'll have to remember to tell her mother about this. A day passes, then another. The mood begins to shift, and concern sets in.
There's a chance that the summit group isn't even on the mountain at all. Maybe when the weather got bad, they retraced their steps and went back out the way they hiked in. Or perhaps they hustled down to the rendezvous point early and continued on before the valley group arrived. But then again, maybe not. The uncertainty of it all weighs heavily on them, especially Natalia.
On the second night, she dreams about her mother. In this dream, Lyudmila speaks directly to her, telling her that she can't get off the mountain. Natalia wakes in shock and has difficulty sleeping the rest of the night. Thoughts and fears about her mother's safety keep her awake.
She tries to tell herself that she's just being silly, that her mother's group is so late simply because Liudmila is being cautious about the weather. But after 48 hours, these excuses ring more and more hollow. At breakfast, she tells Constantine about her dream. She pleads with him to go back up the mountain and search. It is a grade 3 hike after all, and they don't need special gear.
Constantine is sympathetic to her concerns, but reminds her that they only have enough supplies for their full trek. They don't want to double back in search of Liudmila, only to run out of food and put their own hikers at risk. He's reassuring, firm, a good leader like her mother, and so she accepts his reasoning.
They're skilled hikers, sure, but they're not a professional search and rescue team. Soon after, they reach their final destination, a small town on the shores of the enormous Lake Baikal. But a cloud hangs over their arrival, because there's no sign of Liudmila's group here either. Natalia is beside herself now. They came together. The two groups were supposed to leave together.
Lyudmila even has train tickets for the whole group. Natalia doesn't know what to do. She's always looked up to her mother for strength, confidence, and this uncertain danger has no easy solution. Konstantin's eyes return to the high peaks looming in the distance. He begins to fear that he's made a terrible decision that'll haunt him for the rest of his life.
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Chapter 3: What happened on the Kamar-Daban mountain hike?
A curtain of blood obscures her face from view. Tatiana keeps smashing her head into these rocks until eventually she stops moving. Valentina is frozen, paralyzed by complete shock and panic. In the span of minutes and with zero warning, her entire group has dropped dead. Suddenly, a hand shoves Valentina, shaking her out of her stupor. Someone is still alive. It's one of the boys, Dennis.
He's on his hands and knees, bleeding from the ears and mouth. Yet he's able to muster up enough energy to give her one single command. Run. This shocks Valentina into action. She bolts downhill, making for the treeline. Behind her, Dennis tries to crawl after her, but he has no strength. She glances over her shoulder to make sure he's following, yet he isn't.
He's lying face-flat in the snow, completely immobile. By now, it's just Valentina. Overcome with fear and a burning desire to survive, she advances downhill through the swirling wind and blinding snow. Stumbling, crawling, before at last, she finally reaches the treeline and a shelter from the wind. She digs a sleeping bag out of her backpack and crawls inside.
She huddles into a bowl for warmth before she passes out. A day later, the weather subsides. Valentina wakes up on August 6th, and it's quiet. No screams, no howling wind, just the gentle rustling of trees and the drip, drip, drip of the melting snow. She cautiously emerges from her sleeping bag. The sun is out. Even though she slept for almost 24 hours, she doesn't feel rested.
The horrific sights from the day before are clear in her mind's eye. She wishes that she could dismiss it as a nightmare, something caused by a lack of sleep or exhaustion. But she knows the truth. She can't kid herself. She's alone. Valentina slowly starts to trudge back up the mountain. She's gotta see her fellow hikers. She needs to have some sense of what happened.
Before too long, the bodies come into sight. A cluster of four of them by the rocks, and two farther up the slope. They're all still and silent. Stealing herself, Valentina walks from body to body. She can't do anything for them now besides close their eyes. She passes Tatiana, the 24-year-old secretary, the one who smashed her face into the rocks not long ago.
She passes the small body of Timur, who was only 15 years old. He was the youngest of the group. Victoria was also there. Valentina couldn't help but feel some kinship with the other girl. Only a year younger than her, she had been so eager to hike that she had her parents persuade Liudmila to let her join them, even though she was an inexperienced hiker.
It breaks her heart to see Dennis, the boy who saved her, lying on the slope. If he hadn't told her to run, she might have died there as well. Once she's closed all their eyes, Valentina does her best to cover the bodies with one of the tents. She gathers whatever supplies she can from their packs, food, Liudmila's map, and a compass.
But as it turns out, the map and compass are of little use, because Valentina is lost. The snowdrifts make it impossible to follow the path that Liudmila planned for them. They were less than halfway through the 40-kilometer route, and Valentina doesn't want to risk hiking over the snowy peak alone. Instead, she decides to head back down in the general direction their group climbed up.
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