September 16th, 2008 ~ Pribaikalsky National Park, Siberia

Suzanne on the shore of Lake Baikal

We're camped tonight in what may well be the hut of Baba Yaga. The absence of windows or a door may be the first clue.

Yesterday we drove to Lake Baikal from Irkutsk--John Griffith of California Conservation Corps, Suzanne Wilson of the Pacific Crest Trail Association, John Schubert of the US Forest Service, Roma Chubakova and Anya Belova as our guides. Our intent is to hike all of the Great Baikal Trail from Lastvyanka to Bol'shoe Goloustnoe, a distance of 60 kilometers (about 36 miles).

At the trailhead (the end of a dirt road), we loaded our packs with bags of grains, wedges of hard cheese, some loaves of dense bread, cans of unidentifiable contents (some with images of vegetables on the labels, others with what seem to be creatures in the cow realm), and lots and lots of sugar. A bag of granulated sugar. A box of sugar cubes just for munching. Chocolate bars. Hard candies. Sweet biscuits. Also two big, black pots and two little tents.

John Schubert And the Porridge Pot

The Russians had told us that we should bring our own sleeping bags (my Feathered Friends Rockhopper rules!), but they would provide sleeping pads. "Okay, this is a sleeping wafer," John Griffith said as we rolled up the thinnest of foam mats and lashed them to our packs.

We set out on a trail that seemed to begin with what Suzanne called a PUD--"Pointless Up and Down"--that took us for an hour steeply up to the top of a ridge and then right back down again to the lake. It turned out to be a necessary ascent and descent to get to the roadless wilderness coastline of this part of the lake. Along the way we used a very sweet stretch of trail that had been laid out by our friend Robin Clark five years ago when she came here from Seattle to help the Great Baikal Trail Association get started.

And that is perhaps the most amazing thing about this effort. Young people from Irkutsk decided that "their" lake and "their" national parks were being abused. Rather than just complain about it, they have set out to build a trail system to encourage people to get into the backcountry and become aware of what there that can use their care, too. In just a few years the program has grown to attract volunteers from Russia and a number of other nations, and the work they have accomplished with limited tools and few resources is remarkable. They speak about their "club" rather than "organization" and in many ways it is that, too-a social group for people in their late teens and twenties to get together for all sorts of activities, mostly centering on the environment.

High on the Great Baikal Trail

By dusk yesterday we had covered six or seven miles and came to a wide beach alongside the lake where we made our camp. It was a full moon night, so I slept under the open sky with sound of the waves of Lake Baikal in my head.

The sky was clear and a strong, chilly wind was blowing off the lake this morning as we packed up and hiked on, and the trail got real interesting real fast. The GBT volunteers have worked on sections here, too, linking together pieces of existing trail and building new tread where its needed. The shoreline of Lake Baikal through this area is very steep with crumbling cliffs extending right down to the water. The trail often clings to the edges of cliffs as the only place that's passable, a drop of 50 to 500 feet not unusual just off the edge of the tread. Where washouts have occurred, we had to scramble steeply up to the top of the erosion, ease our way across to the other side, and then make an airy descent to the original trail. Slipping is out of the question, as a fall will probably take us on a long tumble all the way to the water. As my teenage friends of the Monday Night Supper Club would say, there were places that were hella-scary.

Roma and Anya wanted to know how they should get the trail through those dangerous places. We have some ideas and we will have more (dynamite would come in handy), but my advice at the moment is to make sure your emergency evacuation insurance is paid in full.

As we hiked, Anya told us stories. She is in her early 20s, about to finish her studies in languages at the university (she speaks Russian, English, Italian, and some Spanish), and was a terrific person to have along. She loves Russian folk stories, and told about Baba Yaga, the old witch who lives in a house that runs through the forest on chicken legs, chasing the children. I know that story from the composer Mussourgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" with a piano piece, the Hut of Baba Yaga.

It began to rain late in the afternoon. We started looking for places to camp and we came into a wooden valley that had, by golly, a tiny log cabin. Our shelter for the night! Though when we got close, we saw it had no door. It had no windows. "It is the hut of Baba Yaga, I think," Anya said. "It is time now for us to be frightened."

In fact, it was a cabin being constructed and was complete except for cutting the windows and door and putting in the floor. We wiggled under the bottom logs and now find ourselves inside the hut in a big pile of fragrant wood shavings left by the workmen shaping the logs. We're going to wiggle back out soon to build a fire and cook dinner, but for the moment it's really great to be sheltered from the rain, rolling out our sleeping wafers for the night on top of wood shavings and hoping this house doesn't suddenly rise up on chicken legs and go running through the Siberian forest with us still inside.

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