Stolby

Once upon a time, I used to get up at 7:00 every morning. As I remember it, this wasn’t too challenging. I had one of those bunk beds with a sofa on the lower level, and I’d leave my alarm clock on the sofa, so that when it went off, I had no other choice than to get out of bed, go down a level, and turn it off. If my memory serves me right, I used to fling myself lithely out of bed and into mid-air, do a graceful twist so that I was facing the frame of my bed, reach out and grab it, swing towards the space between the bed (upper level) and the sofa (lower level), let go just as I was on the perfect trajectory to land softly in an upright seated position against the cushioned back of the sofa, and turn off my alarm just seconds after it had begun ringing. All of this was executed as a sort of learned reflex, so I would do it with my eyes closed, and even learned how to kick my blanket off in preparation for takeoff in a semi-conscious state as soon as I heard the first beep from my alarm.

This is no longer the case.

Yesterday, my alarm went off at 7:00. It roused me just enough to allow me to reset it, bleary eyed, for 7:15, and drift back into blissful dreams of hiking in the picturesque nature reserve across the river from Krasnoyarsk.

…

It went off again at 7:15, which annoyed me for some reason. So I topped it up with another fifteen minutes, and dozed off again.

…

You can imagine how ticked off I was when the bloody thing had the persistence to go off AGAIN at 7:30.

Normal people would ask themselves at this point why they had set the alarm for 7 in the first place, but I wasn’t really in the mood for conformity at this hour, so I just covered all those niggling doubts with a huge, sleepy picture of Stolby nature reserve, its soaring pillars of rock bristling with grizzly bears and encircled by wheeling birds of prey, and popped back off to the world where deadlines don’t exist.

At a time which could have been 7:31 or 20:00 for all I knew, something woke me up, and my pesky mind got back to its usual bothersome tricks like thinking.

‘Why are you dreaming about Stolby?’ it thought.

‘I’m not sure.’ I replied, willing sleep to wash back over me. ‘Go back to sleep.’

‘I mean I’ve never even been to Stolby.’ it continued.

‘Mmmm. Shut up mind.’

‘I want to go to Stolby.’

‘Well you’re going today so you can see it then. Now will you PLEASE just…’

That was probably approximately when I scrambled out of bed and looked, despairing, at my phone. It had just gone eight o’clock.

I did what I always do when I’m annoyed at myself for oversleeping, and yanked the curtains open while staring straight at the windows behind and forcing my sleepy eyes wide open. It’s a good punishment for myself, and I’m pretty sure the sudden flood of morning light shows my retinae exactly why they shouldn’t mess with the alarms that yesterday me set. Only my mind doesn’t seem to care about future me punishing my retinae, so I’ll have to think up a new, more effective punishment soon. I’m thinking along the lines of cold shower, having a haircut, not letting myself say please or thank you more than four times an hour. But all that feels a bit military to me, and I’m not about that, so I’ll have to keep thinking. Any suggestions very welcome. Anyway, as I said, I flung the curtains open. Then I closed them again twenty seconds later because I had to get changed and there’s another tower block directly opposite. Definitely going to need a new punishment.

I had planned to leave for the nature reserve at 8:00 on the dot. By 8:20, I’d had breakfast and worked out what I was going to wear. I was out the door by 8:30, and kinda wondering why I don’t just go to bed earlier.

By pure chance, I got on a bus whose driver seemed to take speed limits as a challenge, like ‘bet you can’t go faster than 80 down this trafficky main road!’ Turns out he could. Fortunately for me, this meant that my journey, which was meant to take somewhere approaching two hours, was reduced instead to a mere life-threatening one and a half, and I arrived bang on time at 10:00. As soon as I stepped off the bus, my phone pinged with a text from the guy who I was going to meet here ‘gonna be late. Sorry’

The stop where I got off was the end of bus route 37. On the way here, the bus had crossed the river, hurtled through the sprawling districts of the right bank, powered down an A road for a while, stopped at Bobrovy Log, a self-proclaimed ‘fun park’ in the foothills of the nature reserve, where you could see ski lifts and slopes waiting for the imminent snow, and finally, screamed to a halt where the road became track and the concrete flats gave way to a wacky mix of cottages, miniature personal palaces, and shacks. This was the liminal zone between city and wilderness, where the nature reserve hadn’t yet started, but nor had the shops and overhead cables. In the distance, you could see rocky cliff faces and swathes of pine forest. Just a bit further down the track, there were no more houses. It was in this direction that Dmitry and I headed when he arrived a couple of minutes later.

Probably the most scenic bus stop I've ever seen

Dmitry is a guide in Stolby, so he knows his way around, and that was evident from the beginning. As we were walking down the track towards the hills and forests, he walked up to a man who was in the process of closing a heavy metal gate and said ‘mind if we take a shortcut through here?’ The man kindly let us, and we forged our way through the heavy undergrowth and over the rickety walkways inside his camp. Dmitry explained that schools and organisations used this place as a sort of adventure camp due to its proximity to Stolby, and you could occasionally make out glimpses of very old wooden huts which served as dormitories through the dense bushes.

Then we arrived at the entrance to the reserve, which was a winding dirt track that led uphill into the forest. We soon came to an open area, like a bowl surrounded by hills topped by orange fingers of stone on every side. He pointed out that this area had been used as a quarry to get rocks for one of the main bridges across the Yenisei, and pointed to a scarred wall of reddish stone below the hill on the left. Then he designed with his finger the route that we were going to take. We’ll go up here to the right, then through that rock formation, over that hill, past those rocks, and back down to our left. He pointed to the tallest column of rock towering above us on our right-hand side, and said ‘that’s one of my favourite areas, but we won’t go there today, because I saw two bears there yesterday.’ I laughed uncertainly. He took a flare out of his bag and slipped it into his pocket.

'Beware, bears!'

This was a gentler landscape than that afforded by Chornaya Sopka, but it felt somehow richer too. Perhaps it was the expansiveness of the forest around Chornaya Sopka that made it feel like something from a film, whereas this landscape felt more like something from a novel. It had little details here and there which the eye was drawn to. The forest here wasn’t a blanket, it was interrupted by jagged pillars of rock or bare cliff faces. In short, it felt more varied, if a little less spectacular.

 As we were walking, Dmitry pointed out birds and small mammals, occasionally flippantly adding ‘this is very tasty.’ He also showed me some cliff faces that were popular with local climbers, and we did some of our own rock climbing, which probably didn’t look half as cool in real life as it did in my mind. Dmitry works with INTERRA as a volunteer. He helps them organise a yearly exchange with young people from Germany, and he was impressively knowledgeable about just about anything the conversation turned to. Last week, I quizzed the members of INTERRA’s English Club on British history, and none of them had heard of Henry VIII. So it seemed doubly impressive when Dmitry told me, not only about Henry VIII and his wives, but also about the Church of England and Henry’s dispute with the Pope. It seems to me that he’d be better qualified than a lot of the busier city types in Krasnoyarsk to take on a lot of the bigwig city jobs, but he doesn’t want one of them, he likes being a guide and walking in the fresh air every day. And indeed, the air here was very fresh. I always used to think that the idea that humans can distinguish between polluted and clean air was ridiculous, but being in Krasnoyarsk has proved me wrong. You can smell the fumes in town, and they’re everywhere. But out here, everything felt different. The air was cold and clean, and the mud below our feet was still frozen solid, as yet untouched by the sun.

When we got back down to the bottom of the track, we saw our bus leaving. We waved at the driver, but he didn’t stop for us, and we had to wait twenty minutes for the next bus.

Two old ladies climbed out of a car, and the man driving it accelerated away. One of them walked up to me.

‘How long till the next bus?’ she asked.

‘About twenty minutes.’ I replied.

‘Ah.’ She sat down slowly and shakily under the bus shelter and her friend sat next to her. Then she got her phone out and started blasting screaming metal music. This continued for the best part of twenty minutes. Can’t say it’s what I expected from a babushka, but I’m always happy to be surprised.