Neralakhand Festivalnaya

Except for public figures, the names of people in this story have been changed for privacy.

The seventh chapter of the Putorana Plateau trip. This day was for the photo tour only.

An hour and a half by boat

It took us an hour and a half by boat to get there. We got up early, breakfast was at 8 a.m.. It’s very cold on the boat, so wrap up well and put on under your jacket everything you’ve got. I got the most uncomfortable seat: a bench at the back of the boat with no backrest. But it turned out you could lie down on it, which is what I did. That’s how I travelled: lying down, admiring the views. It was wonderful.

Neralakh

The first stop is the Neralakh river and waterfall. It’s about 50 kilometres by water from the base, and a couple of kilometres on a trail from the shore. The waterfall is very impressive: the water is wild, the flow powerful. Nikita warned that ten people have already fallen here. We liked it so much that we forgot about the mountain: we took photos, filmed with drones, sat and watched.

Festivalnaya

It’s fifteen minutes by boat to the mountain, to the Kamenny peninsula, though on the way to the shore we got a bit lost. From there a trail leads to an isthmus by Lake Kapchuk. First we went to look at a pika, a local animal, a fluffy squeaking ball. Pikas live in boulder fields and blend in with the stones so well that we barely found them 🙂

We only started climbing at 3 p.m.. Festivalnaya is much easier than the plateau, though to some it may seem hard. The mountain goes in layers: a sharp climb, a level stretch, another climb, not especially long, and so on. At first there’s earth underfoot, but the higher you go, the more boulders.

At some point we realised we weren’t going to make it and decided to run as high as we could in half an hour. It was tough but bearable. I’d thought it would be much harder after the plateau. We stopped at 500 metres; the whole mountain is about 750.

The view from there: on the right Lake Lama, on the left Lake Kapchuk, and between them a narrow strip of forest. Nikita and Misha launched drones, and after a while we heard the cries of birds of prey. Three birds that looked like falcons or hawks attacked a drone 😅 They circled and tried to peck it, but Nikita pulled it away in time.

We were running out of time, so we raced down 😅 We didn’t get to see the sunset. The boat didn’t start right away, but Nikita sorted it out. On the way back it got dark and even colder. Luckily, Lena gave me her down jacket.

The aurora we’d been waiting for

In the evening, while we sat on the bean bags, Misha burst into the house and called everyone out to see the northern lights. It was the best aurora of the trip: it was visible without any night mode, it stretched across the whole sky and shimmered in different colours. At one point a “corona” appeared, when the aurora seems to sparkle out of a single point. Anya and I simply squealed with delight.

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