Content Warning: This section includes discussions of the violent deaths of nine people, including graphic descriptions of corpses.

Donnie Eichar is an American author and documentary filmmaker. He grew up in Florida but now lives in California. In 2010, a few months after hearing about the Dyatlov incident for the first time, Eichar traveled to Russia to learn more. He had no personal connection to the case and no mountaineering experience, but he was obsessed with learning the truth about what happened to the hikers. When his initial research proved less fruitful than he hoped, 39-year-old Eichar returned for a second visit to Russia in 2012, leaving behind a girlfriend, Julia Ortiz, and a one-year-old son, Dashiel. That visit forms the basis of most of Dead Mountain, as Eichar attempts to retrace the hikers’ steps to reconstruct the last few days of their lives at the site of the disaster in Holatchahl. 

Despite his lack of personal involvement in the case and his lack of experience, Eichar was determined to recreate the hikers’ journey and to come up with a plausible explanation for their mysterious deaths. Like everyone, Eichar brings his own biases and expectations to his efforts. He is an outsider with a limited understanding of what life was like in the Soviet Union in 1959.