PRE-DAWN DEPARTURE FROM MALKA FOR A LONG ROAD TRIP ALONG CENTRAL KA,
CHATKA TO SEE FOXES CAVORTING ON THE ROAD AND ARRIVE AT KAMCHATKA RIVER,
CROSSED ONCE BY BRIDGE-FILLED WITH DEAD NA DYING SALMON-AND ONCE BY FERRY-ALONG
WITH MASSIVE SOVIET-ERA ARMY TRUCKS, TO ARRIVE IN CENTRAL KAMCHATKA
VILLAGE-LOOKING BACK EIGHTY YEARS AS I TRY SWIX TIME SOT BUY STAMPS AND POST
CARDS;
WAIT TO GO FORWARD BY HUGE OLD SOVIET-ERA HELICOPTER. TAKEOFF OVER FRESH LAVE
FILEDS FROM VOLCANOES AND ARRIVE AT MOUNTAIN CRATER RIM TO SET UP TENT-OUR
BASE CAMP FOR THE HUNTS, WITH A SPOTTING OF OLD SOLITARY KAMCHATKA BIG HORN
RAM AT DUSK
AUGUST 20, 2001
ROAD TRIP UP THROUGH CENTRAL KAMCHATKA
TO A CENTURY-PREVIOUS RELIC VILLAGE
OF KOZUREVSK: (POP. 300 AND DIMINISHING)
We drove up through the center of the peninsula until it was dark and cold, and, after several tries at facilities that were closed, we took refuge in a thermal spa at Malka. I can report to you that this resort being built over the hot springs of Malka has no hot water.
We left pre-dawn and drove still further through endless birch forests, stopping to watch a family of red foxes and the kits play in the road. An ermine darted across near me. Huge forests of capricale territory and marshy, mosquito-swarming muskeg looked like the moose habitat around Fairbanks. Our team got to know each other well and was quite compatible and good-natured. They were curious that I took notes and observations of things with "gun and camera and tape recorder" in this voyage into the wilderness of central Kamchatka.
We came to the Kamchatka River twice, once when it was a clear clean stream with scores of salmon carcasses floating downstream after their spawning. And the second time we crossed it, we had to wait where it was a broader more turbid river nearer the Pacific Ocean. There we waited for a ferry to carry us across. As I walked the riverbanks, the first footsteps I encountered were those of a big bear--then two little bears---not a good idea to pursue these into the tall grass armed with a Nikon. I got on the ferry, looking at the ludicrous Russian Soviet-era truck/buses, which are land locomotives, over twenty-ton tundra machines. I was unaware that just such a behemoth would be our "bus "on the return trip. We arrived in the village of Kozurevsk--which has missed the twentieth century. After six tries at their hole-in-the wall post office, I got a few stamps from their stock of all they had after they were sent for on bicycle.
THE HELICOPTER FLIGHT TO THE BASE CAMP
ON MOUNT TUMRAK
We went to a place where there had once been an air strip, now abandoned, with the buildings looking like a world war II ghost town, trees and bushes growing up through the file cases and bureaucrats' offices. We waited while the INMARSAT phone, which only worked variably, let us know our chopper would be coming in an hour. It is familiar to me! The same big old orange Soviet-era chopper that I had been on in May of 2000 when we had piled it full of hunters and their gear, arrived, piloted expertly by Vasili, a friend of Victor's for fourteen years, and who had been my pilot back then, fifteen months before. We tossed all the tons of gear inside and then sat wherever we could on the sacks and boxes, as it roared off and soared up and over the fresh lava fields from the still active volcanoes. One of them, Avacha, is a perfect snow cone and is breath-takingly beautiful seen from any level.
We climbed through the "stony clouds" and settled down toward the ground without landing, as several boxes wrapped in duck tape were pushed off the chopper at one hunter's campsite, and a big milk cylinder was dropped on another. We then stalled in forward progress and started to vibrate as we climbed straight up and then slipped sideways to carefully land on a rocky rim of a crater. This "lunar landing" far above treeline was Mount Tumrak--our home base for the camp I marked TENT on GPS. The chopper's propwash had my backpack and several other items tumbling away from where they had been tossed out of the swinging back doors of the big orange cargo box, as the chopper rose up in the windy clouds we had settled through. We set up in a hurry, and before sunset, we had spotted one old ram at a distance. We spent much of the night holding the tent down from the high winds that were howling and requiring us to pile tons of rocks on the tent to prevent its blowing away. AUG-C-5