There exists a Skeptoid episode about this:

http://skeptoid.com/episodes/4108

an excerpt:

"Here is my proposed explanation of what happened. It's wrong, of course, because it's done from my armchair 50 years after the fact and with no firsthand knowledge of the region, but it's completely reasonable and does adequately satisfy the facts as we know them. Nine skiers set up camp in an area with potential avalanche danger, but no more or less danger than would have been found if they set up anywhere else they could have reached before nightfall. Sometime during the night, a loud noise, either from a nearby avalanche, a jet aircraft, or military ordnance, convinced at least five members of the group that an avalanche was bearing down on them. They burst out of the tent wearing whatever they happened to be sleeping in and ran. At some point one of them fell and struck his head on a rock. They became lost in the dark and poor visibility, or simply found themselves stranded with their injured friend, and finally built a fire. They quickly got hypothermia and probably shouted themselves hoarse for their friends. Two of them lost consciousness and the others made a desperation decision: To take what little clothes their two unconscious buddies had and risk it all to try and make it back to camp. One made it 300 meters, the second made it 480, and the third a full 630 meters before all five were dead from hypothermia. Back at camp, the four who didn't panic and run away in the night got dressed, collected provisions, and began to search for their friends. They searched for hours, circling high and low, until at some point either through a slip or just bad luck, they were caught in a real avalanche. During the resulting turmoil one received a fatal skull fracture, one received twelve broken ribs, and one bit her tongue off, all perfectly plausible injuries during such a traumatic death. Their bodies remained buried until the spring thaw, as is so common with avalanche victims. At the open-casket funeral for the first five victims, relatives saw the combination of five days of winter sunburn in those days before sunscreen, and the mortician's effort to cover up frostbite and a full month of exposure to the elements, and described it as a strange orange color; though others described it simply as a deep tan, which is consistent with reasonable expectations. And who knows what hair would have looked like after all that exposure and who knows what kind of treatment done by the mortician, so I can't assign too much significance to what amounts to a few anecdotal reports from some funeral attendees, and not even all funeral attendees. Plus I'm quite certain that if UFOs had turned all of their hair really gray, don't you think the cold war Russian authorities would have had it colored back to normal for an open casket funeral? Their bodies had been exposed outdoors for weeks. Of course they looked terrible."

Not bad, I can buy that. However, bodies exposed outdoors, in the cold, do not age that much, especially if they are covered with clothes and so on. Not sure where the tan would originate from.

The avalanche explanation does not seem to be very viable for modern investigators of this mystery. The information sources in English are scarce, unfortunately, you have to read Russian discussions of the incident. A few decades ago, there was published a book that popularized the avalanche theory, and the book was translated into English too. However, many people including the participants of the search expedition are saying that it could not be an avalanche. The ski poles were standing around the tent vertically, not affected by the avalanche. There is an evidence that the tent was not really covered with thick snow, and there was a flashlight laying on top of this snow (belonged to the group leader Igor Dyatlov). The slope is not steep at all, maybe 15-20 degrees. There were found footprints of 8-9 people walking away from the tent in organized ordered fashion. It could not happen if 3 or 4 of them were heavily injured by an avalanche. Even if there was some sort of avalache in the area, it just does not explain the whole crazyness, imho. And it is very unlikely that just a noise could make 9 sane people run away from their only shelter, without putting on any warm clothes or boots.. yes, most of them were walking down the hill with only socks on their feet. In my opinion, it is more likely that they were killed by another group of people, but there is no direct evidence of that either.

There are many other theories and possible explanations. The UFO theory is absurd of course, but, you know, people come up with such bizarre explanations because reasonable explanations are not very believable either. This is why many people are still trying to solve the mistery, they make expeditions in the area of Dyatlov Pass, trying to understand what could happen there in 1959. Probably, only new declassified documents, if there will be any, can shed some light on this mystery..

Btw, you can look at the photos taken by the group members (from the films found in their cameras): http://fotki.yandex.ru/users/aleksej-koskin/album/159799/

I'm going to go ahead and say Cracked.com is probably correct on this one - avalanche.

http://www.cracked.com/article_16671_6-famous-unsolved-myste...

Having read the page I don't see much mystery here. Avalanche seems to be the obvious explanation.

Nice link - thanks for sharing.