WE GET UP IN HIGH WIND AT SPIKE CAMP TO PACK UP
FOR LATER CROSSING OF THE STORAGE RIVER
WHEN WE HEAR THE SOUND OF THE HELICOPTER
MAKING AN EARLY RUN AT THE MOUNTAINTOP BASE CAMP TO EVACUATE OUR TEAM;
WE RUSH ACROSS THE SWOLLEN RIVER HEAVILY LOADED THROUGH THE SINKING SILT,
TO RENDEZVOUS WITH RIVERBANK CHOPPER;
WE LIFT OFF AROUND THE SPECTACULAR
NEW-FALLEN SNOW ON THE MOUNTAINS,
SPOTTING SNOW SHEEP ON THE HILLSIDES AND THE IMPOSING AVACHA
VOLCANO AND FRESH LAVA FLOWS ON RETURN
TO THE VILLAGE OF KOZUREVSK,
SKIPPED OVER BY A CENTURY.
RENDEZVOUS WITH OUR HUGE TUNDRA LOCOMOTIVE "BUS/TRUCK"
TO RIDE OUT TO THE KAMCHATKA RIVER FERRY,
THEN, FROM MILKHAYA AND MALKA,
FINDING "NO ROOM IN THE INN" WHEREVER WE TRIED TO STAY,
WE MAKE A RUN FOR IT ALL THE WAY TO HOTEL PETROPAVLOSK TO CHECK IN AT 2:00 AM
TO UNPACK
August 28, 2001
A RAPID SCRAMBLE ACROSS THE RIVER
CLOSES OUT OUR CAMPS IN KAMCHATKA
WITH A HELICOPTER LIFTOFF TO RETURN AROUND AVACHA VOLACANO TO KOZUREVSK
AND A "LAND/LOCOMOTIVE" RIDE, CROSSING THE FERRY,
MILKAHA, MALKA, THEN ALL THE WAY BACK TO PETROPAVLOSK
AND A LATE NIGHT CHECK IN TO THE HOTEL PETROPAVLOSK
August 28, 2001
The leisurely morning and orderly departure was not to be. I had packed up the sleeping bag in the backpack and got my things rather close to being ready as Alan and I swapped tales of previous hunts from elk hunting in the west, to big game hunting in Zambia and Tanzania. One outfitter of Alan's in Zambia had a particularly bad run of luck losing three people-one of the clients crushed by an elephant. I had not yet got around to telling him about my near miss with a rampaging bull elephant at Lake Kariba, Zimbabwe, when we heard a noise. It was 9:15 AM and we were pulling on our windbreakers from a howling wind through the funnel-like valley where our camp was perched on a hill. When we looked up, there was an orange dot hanging in front of the imposing sight of Mount Tumrak in a fresh covering of very white snow.
The snow showed us the mountain more clearly in the wind-scoured sky-where our base camp TENT was. Sergei had just told us that our team at the base camp, now supplemented by Victor, had had a lot of trouble all night and that our tent, despite the loads of rocks, could take the high wind velocity no longer and had shattered into pieces under the assault of an all-night storm. We learned later that none of our team in the camp had got any sleep, not even teenage Slava, since they were all holding on to the tents which were ripped and flapping in the winds. Victor stood up all night holding on to the frame of the cook tent to hold it on the mountain, and when a strong gust ripped off his coat. It blew away, never to be recovered. The same fate was true for the sleeping bags of the two women whose tent was toppled and their bags were not seen again. They had called Sergei on the walkie-talkies this morning to say they were packing up what they could find of what was left.
The helicopter was scheduled to come in at 2:00 PM, but Vasili had judged that it looked like a several-day storm, and he elected to fly out the moment it cleared at all-and that was the sound we heard at 9:15 AM
Sergei realized immediately what this meant as the orange helicopter was seen coming toward the crest of the mountain and then beating a vertical ascent, sweeping sideways from the windward side and would settle down where the "TENT" was, where we could not see it. But that meant that in thirty minutes it would lift off again and be heading toward our area, but planning to land on the high banks of blueberry bushes beyond the alders on the other side of the river. That meant we were in trouble, since we were here with the complete camp with all its gear including the stash that Sergei retrieved last night, when he had come back in the rain under the rainbow and dropped it next to the two additional burdens that would have to make it across the river in at least four carries-two bear hides and skulls. It would take us well over an hour to make it just once through the soft silty bottom of the Storage River, now made more treacherous by the high winds that were blowing spindrift spumes across the surface, as though even this pristine wilderness river had taken in a big dose of detergent.
We grabbed everything portable in our arms as the rifles and packs were already on our backs, and staggered under the extra weight through the marsh to try to find a way to get into the river and across it, that would not be over our boots for starters. We walked in a file with Sergei first and me second with Alan, watching which way we would go, behind me. I got off to a quick start-with the wind whipping water and the soft silt sucking my feet down and the water coming in over the right boot top when I tried to rock it out. I did succeed in getting it out, and there was no need for Sergei to turn back and rescue either one of us as he hurried to drop the duffels and one bearskin and hurry back for another trip.
My biggest problem came with what appeared to be a sandbar in mid river that I saw big bear tracks over, so I thought it should hold me as well, as I was tipping in a few hundredweights less. Not so. I got sucked in deeper on what was apparently land than I had in the river bottom itself. But I rocked free and repeated the same getting stuck and then unstuck as before. It was very hard work, and I had put on the Gore-tex to shield me from the wind, and also for its pockets to carry more of the loose things around the camp. I sank deeper and got much warmer and wetter, and wanted to get to the far side just to open the zippers, but I did not know where to go if and when I reached the far bank. I finally plunged into the alders and found a rocky tributary streambed, where I could walk up the rocks, which rolled under foot.
At one point I looked up and saw the big orange helicopter beating up against the wind, which was so strong that I could not even hear it as close as it was coming in to land. When it did land, I could not see it until I fought my way out of the alders finding I had passed it by a long way going up the stream and through the thicket of alders. I stumbled and fought my way out into the clear until there were only blueberry bushes to snag at each step my hip bootfuls of water. The helicopter passengers and crew had realized what they had landed in as well, and sleepy or not, they all bailed out and were combing the berries the same way the bears that I had seen earlier were doing-and in the same place!
I was probably looking at the highest priced blueberry pickers on the planet, with a helicopter ticker running on idle. eating an occasional handful of berries while we waited for the return of Victor who had joined Sergei in trying to make a single last trip. I pulled off my boots and put on the climbing boots and shed one layer of windbreaking fabric, as each of the team up at Base Camp told what their night had been like. They had missed us-perhaps not as much as we had missed the handiwork of Irena the cook, --at least three times per day. The proudest announcement they had is that Slava was now a successful hunter. After he had put in long and patient hours with his "fishing pole" and string noose dangling over the holes of various ground squirrels, he had finally caught one. It had bit him on the finger when he pulled his noose tight around its head. They took pictures of him with his trophy, and they fed it some cheese and let it go.
We pulled apples from the stock as well as snatching blueberries all around the kneeling chopper, looking impatient to be off, in a photogenic pose against the now snow -whitewashed mountains. We would have to leave soon, or we would be eating as many meals as has been scooped up and carried down the mountain and supplemented by these berries as long as both held out. I saw Sergei emerging from the alders and ran to carry the extra sack he was balancing with an already full load. We hopped on board and sat on sacks, and even as the chopper roared to get up the lift, several of the TENT gang fell asleep.
We hovered over the broad glacially bulldozed Storage River Valley, and flew up over the river toward a saddle in the mountains where the trees left off and the new snow line was starting up. As we threaded the pass, two snow sheep bolted on the mountainside from the annoying beat of the chopper. This racket was no annoyance to us, since we could compare it with the inconvenience of a return climb up into a storm, swapping mosquito bites for frostbite.
When we had flown along the gap, looking up from each side of the helicopter at the mountains on either side, we came over a vast forest, roadless and laced with rivers. On the right side of the chopper, the woods had thinned somewhat and some stumps and charred remains of logs could be seen above the indication that this was no ordinary forest fire. All along the right side were frozen waves of what Hawaiians would call pahoehoe, the ropey lava flows. The source of this relatively recent lava field came in to view in majestic cloud wreath-Avache Volcano. We flew around it, as it seemed to be close enough to touch, since we ringed around the clouds to have the snow cone of the mountain clearly framed in my porthole-which, this time, I kept shut. On the other side of the chopper was a similar majestic mountain with the wonderful name of Tolbachek-3.950 meters.
We returned to the same abandoned airstrip from which we had left, and looked down from the air to see a huge bus/truck, painted yellow. Even at this height, the six-wheel drive diesel looked like a behemoth, similar to the big machines I had called "tundra locomotives" when we crossed the Kamchatka River with them joining us on the ferry, which I thought would sink under their added weight. "Look!" Elena had said, "There's our bus, waiting for us."
Vasili settled the big orange chopper down smoothly on the "Marsden's mats," the interlocking metal mesh girds used to create temporary airfields, "temporary" in this case probably being World War II era. I marked the GPS site "VERT" ("Vertilyot" is Russian for "helicopter," a Russian invention -with apologies to Leonardo da Vinci-thanks to Igor Sikorsky.) VERT is 56* 24.53 N, 159* 52.49 E. This makes it 62.0 miles from TENT at bearing 152*, 67.7 miles from BEAR @ 155*, and 66.1 miles from DOM-1 @ 154*
Vasili, the pilot, recognized me from having flown this same helicopter with me as passenger in May of 1990, as I had recognized the orange helicopter itself. It has the Cyrillic name "Sudrich" painted on it, the name of a spectacular volcano in Southern Kamchatka. He got out a card and calendar with a picture of the helicopter flying along the snow covered slopes of the very mountain I had recognized from my last trip where he had dropped me to hunt brown bears in the spring, Mount Kariotakis. Vasili went over to look at the gear being offloaded, and in a picturesque moment-with the three volcanoes around Kozurevsk as a backdrop, he picked up the skull and horns of my bighorn Kamchatka snow sheep and held them over his head. Vasili and Victor are old friends, going back fourteen years when Vasili was in helicopter school. This "Sudrich" is now a privatized company, with seven surplus military helicopters, doing business with gold miners, tourists, and principally, sports hunters, such as we are.
The three volcanoes in order around the little village of Kozurevsk (population at the peak of its year's best days-today, for example-does not pass 300) are 1) Skiveluch, 2) Kluchevskey, 3) Tolbachek. If I lived here, I suppose, in this tiny down, drab even on its best day, I might not notice them, but I cannot help staring at this rim of spectacular peaks, even as we were tossing out gear and guns and packing them into our heavy duty bus/truck. Slava was still sleepy, despite having napped on his father's lap in the helicopter-which shows how drowsy he was, since this was his first ever helicopter excursion. He was also cold, so I pulled out the new olive drab virgin wool sweater I had as my back up pack and gave it to him as a present. In his Moscow school-English, he said very politely, "Thank you very much." He then crawled onto the big pile of duffel in the bus, mixed up of cracked eggs, ram's skulls, hunting gear and leftover groceries, and went to sleep as the huge diesel ground along down the lava roads.
We first had to pick up a number of freebie passengers, about as many as could squeeze into the large cab, separated from the boxy payload behind it. This included the bare-chested Russian driver's girlfriend, her mother, another relative, who explained we would only be delayed a few minutes as we went around a partly built log cabin, not yet chinked, to load a rooftop full of cargo he was eager to get to Petropavlosk. All around the picket fences built around unpainted tiny cabins (the smaller, the easier to heat) beside huge wood piles, people were scurrying with the intensity I had seen in the bears-we both have to take advantage of these long periods of light to lay away stores for the coming harsh winter. The favored transportation here (aside from the luxury of our behemoth "bus" is a motorcycle with sidecar, which looks like the easily disassemblable snow machines I had seen so used and abused when I had hunted in the snows of May in Kamchatka in 1990. The people riding in the cycle and its sidecar wear the old fighter pilot cloth helmets, the kind with tubes sewn in to cushion the bumps to the head.
I looked out the dirty porthole window of our bus at what I called "Kozurevsk Gothic." Small family groups were exchanging the produce of the gardens with the very brief growing season but with the gigantism that comes from long light nights-like Alaska's huge cabbages. They were clustered around groups of found parts, lying in clusters like the snowbank that had hid them had just receded. The "high water mark" of a dirty snow line was on every structure. And most everybody here was not only known to everybody else, but also probably related. It was like a small frontier town in early US history frozen as a time capsule. The last thing these folk have had to be really proud of that made them aware that they were part of a greater whole was Sputnik. It probably has not really changed their life for the sixty year coming and going of the USSR, since they had no real knowledge that they were part of a world military machine and a Super Power-other than the fact that the labor requirement siphoned out most of the young men, such as the fourteen years Sergei had spent on a submarine. We are looking back more than into early "Sovietana"-this deep frozen time capsule goes back into Siberian centuries before the Tsars. Adaptation to a harsh environment makes for some rather hardy, but understandably insular isolated peoples. I come into this environment, with whatever sympathies I might have for their ethos, not as a foreigner, but as an extraterrestrial, almost precisely as I might be viewed in Central Africa. "And you paid all that, to come here?"
After about six stops in our "hesitation marks" around the repeated scenery of the same (only) few blocks of Kozurevsk-I passed "my " Post Office with which I became quite familiar in our outbound trip with six visits to the limited scene inside, from which my "Serial Letter B-0" was posted with what stamps they had-we finally got started. One of our last stops was at the driver's house, presumably since his girlfriend's mother wanted him to get a shirt, so he came out with an olive drab fishnet undershirt. We were only underway for twenty minutes when we reached the broader part of the Kamchatka River where we would have to wait for the ferry to carry us to the other side.
CROSS KAMCHATKA RIVER FERRY
WITH A WHITEWATER RAFTING TEAM
FROM THE CZECH REPUBLIC,
AND BEGIN LOOKING FOR OUR "ROOM IN THE INN"
We had a half hour wait since the ferry had just arrived at the far side of the river. There were groups of people waiting for the ferry including a group of nine adventurers who heard me say something in English, and went to get one member of the group to come talk with me. He turns out to be a pediatrician interested in public health and had done two years twice in Bethesda, so we could do the "small world" bit, in reminiscing about our times at NIH. This turns out to be a nine-person team of white water rafters from the Czech Republic who had come to run the rivers, fish and climb one of the volcanoes. They had a good time, and the fact that one of them spoke Russian he said "reduced the prices by one half." For example, he asked me, "How much are you paying for that big bus?" I reluctantly told him I did not know, but that we had a Russian who was doing all the "arranging." "That is a knock-off model of an old US military truck that they discontinued since it burned too much fuel." I had no trouble believing that.
He then told me that they had had a very good time, and had rafted rivers, shot dozens of rolls of film, and had a round trip air fare from Prague through Saint Petersburg to PKC and back, all for about $400 US each. He was astounded to get the answer when he asked how much was the air fare for the Magadan Air round trip to Anchorage, since for me, in this Mafioso monopoly air carrier, it was $1580, not counting the round trip to Anchorage from DC. I was not eager to tell him more about costs of things, since he would have got the wrong idea about what I was doing here, but it is sure that my guide will get more in a single tip than they are paying for their holiday-so it may pay to be a down market Eastern European in shopping for affordable accommodation!
They were surprised to see an American here, and asked if I had heard of the Czech Republic. Now it was my turn to play the "Bethesda Game." I named the several professors I had visited at Charles University and the Czech Cardiovascular Clinic, and said I liked Konopiste as a short excursion out of town. "Small world-Chapter Two" had one of the rafters recognize the name of my contact in Charles University since it was his uncle, and one of the others worked at Konopiste. So much for their delusions of an insular American; they must now think that I do undercover intelligence work!
The ferry returned and our huge bus backed on to it. Along the back rail were salmon fillets hanging to dry in the sun. Actually, they were on their way toward being "salmon fume", but not to my tastes, since they were hanging over the rail next to the diesel exhaust from the tug that pushes the barge that makes the ferry move. A few of the salmon could still be seen in the turbid water, but they were dying or close to dead, floating downstream on the reverse of the arduous upstream "do and die" mission on which they had set out. I took pictures of the ferry crossing the river in front of Tolbachek Volcano, when we emerged from the far side of the river crossing.
We went pounding down the road at the highest rpm this 11 ton (tare weight empty) truck could muster, until we stopped abruptly at no where particularly notable. There is a sacred spring just off the roadside, and it is in a grotto marked off by a grove of trees with thousands of ribbons tied around all the branches of the trees leading to the spring. This is a Russian "make-a-wish" habit. If you drink from this cold water spring, or bathe in it (wash your face without drying! instructed the girlfriend's mother, and you will always return here.) I did as told, but did not tie a ribbon around the already saturated trees. The purpose of having all those people designated by thousands of ribbons in this barren place is like the Cheshire cat who disappeared leaving behind only the smile. There were no Russians here, just their wishes. And to paraphrase Alice B. Tolkas only slightly, "there is no here here!"
And there would not be any accommodation for them if they did return! We stopped at Malka after dark, and tried to find someone, as scarce as they were on the way up to find and to get an accommodation from them-they have not got the hang of "marketing" yet-we finally found someone and they said they had nothing to offer-the same comment as we were given when we checked the large "restaurant" with a sign saying "cafeteria" at Milkaya. Neither was doing business. Another "spa lodge" explained that there were military movements to be going on later and there was no room in the inn. We had stopped at the same small café in Milkaya, next to the dingy looking skating rink for hockey games the other eleven months of the year, where we had fed ourselves on the way up since we were "too early for breakfast" at 9:45 AM on the outbound trip, and now we were here too close to closing time -about 6:30 PM. So once again, we fixed and ate our own lunch, with one reluctant kitchen helper serving us the hot water for the "chai."
We made four more stops to check on the "no vacancy" if we see a group of No Vacancy provisions can be made up out of our own "mobile home" since almost all of our personal things is useful to them. But, after midnight, we resigned ourselves to giving up the hope of finding anything here, and we hauled for the city of Petropavlosk-even there being turned down twice, until we returned to the largest (only?) hotel in PKC, where we unpacked and crashed at 2:30 AM. So, our inglorious climax of this day starting out of a sleeping bag in the wilderness, is to wind up in the same hotel (which has another under-rated joy-hot water!) where I had started out this trip what seems like dozens of years ago!