Taiga country
'Berlin is a shitty town.' Jo's remark, waking us from contemplation, reminds us of what we've really been talking about as plans have grown for trips to Ecuador, Irian Jaya, Kamchatka.
The lines on his face betray the stress of driving a taxi in a town where a cabbie is murdered weekly. 'You should come to Russia with us,' offers Jen in a moment of sympathy. Outside, anarchist squatters fight police, skinheads torch Turkish stores and BMWs appropriate the potholed streets of East Berlin. He agrees with hardly a moment's hesitation.
Next morning, while attempting to arrange a visa in the Russian embassy, Jo runs into two friends planning a trip to the Siberian Altai. We don't need much persuading. Our Czech friends have warned us that the two requirements for climbing in the Tian Shan, our first plan, are US dollars and jumars. We had neglected to bring jumars.
Two wet Husky puppies bark and whinge and try to steal the cold deep fried meat patties that are our lunch. We are at Ust-Koksa airport, the point of arrival for tourists planning to see the high peaks of the Altai. Next to us is a group from St Petersburg.
'Where is your Russian?' asks one, curious.
'We don't need one,' we reply. And this is true. Jo and his friends Long and Sabine went to school in the east, where Russian was compulsory. The Russians, they complain, got to learn English.
'Where is your helicopter?' asks another. We'd like to know too.
Before we can cross the Katun river and begin walking, a dour old man appears from the amongst the log huts by the bridge, smoking black tobacco rolled in newspaper. He wants 25 roubles a day from each of us before we can cross. Long mutters about capitalism, and we eventually agree on four days.
Shortly after we've crawled into our tent there is a shout from Jo, who's dossed outside, startling the local villager just reaching under the fly to grab my boots. We stoke the fire up large and take turns waiting, ice axe on knees, wondering what we'll do if we need to use it.
'It's like the wild west out there,' the man from Sovenz had said. 'They'd slit your throat for a thousand bucks.'
After three days accompanied by the roar of the Ak-Kem river in its narrow forested valley, the last spruces struggle out across a broad tundra terrace. The river slips out from a pearl grey lake, quickly growing loud and unruly. Drizzle turns to rain.
Our friends from St Petersburg tell us not to worry, that because the moon will soon be full the weather will clear. This seems plausible, and so we spend a day making pancakes and finishing our wild raspberry jam.
That evening the cloud lifts. Behind rises the white wall of the Katunsky range.
In the winter of 1903, Samuel Turner, who later made the first ascent of Tutoko, visited the Altai while on a tour of the Siberian dairy industry. He failed in his attempt to climb the highest peak, Belucha, solo. As consolation he claimed that another peak he had reached the top of was in fact three thousand feet higher. 'Soon after,' reported the Daily Mail, 'Mr Turner felt ill; he attributed it to having poisoned himself by drinking soup out of a tin, and to a diet of snow-water with black bread and dry rusks, and tinned articles...it was hopeless to go on.' We took heed, and purchased our supplies in Czechoslovakia. All the same, Turner described his journey as a 'brief spell of glorious essence of life.' As the weather clears, we begin to see why.
Next morning we are up early, and after a meal of german baby food we set off towards the Ak-kem glacier. We pass the buildings of the official climbing camp, and a faded sign on the tundra which proclaims the site to be 'Aeroport Belucha'. The glacier is almost as moraine covered as those in New Zealand, so we feel right at home. Above rise a string of four thousand metre peaks, with evocative names like Pik Twentieth Anniversary of the Glorious October Revolution. We camp for the night beneath the north face of Belucha, next to a semi-permanent canvas structure that houses the mountain rescue service. We meet several climbers from the Tomsk Touristical Club who take great interest in the design of our equipment and show us a volume on the history of Belucha. For some reason Samuel Turner is not mentioned. The Tomsk climbers seem to think that it is not the season for our planned route on Belucha from the northeast over Pik Delone. Jen and I can't see what the problem could be, but we are outvoted. 'I am no Himmelfahrtscommando,' says Jo, and so we cross the col below Delone's northeast ridge. This takes us down into the neve of the Sadozhnikova Mensu glacier, where we put up our tents and collapse from the heat of the afternoon. At about six we awake, intending to have dinner and climb the normal route by moonlight. Black clouds fast approaching from the north tell us otherwise however, and we fortify the tents and go back to bed. It is perfectly clear by the early hours of next morning, and after a great deal of cursing the MSR is persuaded to cook another meal on Russian petrol. Jen and I tell the others that we are off to climb the mountain no matter what, and so Jo decides to come too. The regular route ascends the glacier to a col and around a shelf on the south side to the base of the short southeast ridge. The Tomsk climbers are just ahead, having camped higher, and as they perform complex rope techniques on the ridge we gaze out towards the distant peaks of the Mongolian Altai. The summit is a broad slope, but the highest rocks are festooned with placques of a orthodox religious nature, an iceaxe and a bell, which we ring to announce our arrival. There is also a cylinder in which we are supposed to leave a record of our ascent. Fortunately the Russians have brought spare paper.
Several days later. It is 2.30am. Jo and I have dressed and are sitting in the tent wondering whether to leap out waving our iceaxes at the drunkards harassing Long and Sabine close by.
'Deutsche Tabak!' one mumbles, 'Vodka! Goldenes Geld! Dein Geld oder dein Leben! Ich mochte Sie!'
After a little while, however, his friend puts him back on his horse and they wander off, cursing loudly, through the bushes.
We are not sure what to make of this. Yesterday, we had stopped for lunch just short of a farm building, and the occupants, an agricutural brigade of buddhist Mongols, had come out to meet us. Even here, on the far edge of communist society, agriculture has been thoroughly collectivised. They invite us in and slice chunks of meat off the huge bowl of bones sitting in the middle of the room for us. This is washed down with koumis, fermented mare's milk. We swap a large hunting knife which Long has brought for sugar, butter, flour and several kilos of smoked horse meat. Later, as we continue up the wide and remote Argut valley one of the brigade, Jura, comes past on his horse and takes Jen and two of our packs to the village. It is a spectacular evening. The path winds up over a high barren bluff, marked by tall stone cairns (the literal translation from Russian is stone pygmies). We don't linger in the village. Dogs snarl behind us as one man comes out to tell us about his time in Berlin with the Red Army. It is him and Jura who visit us that night.
I am sick. Vaguely I notice the deep blue of the river, the rich carpet of moss, berries and butter mushrooms that lies beneath the taiga. Occaisionally I even glance upwards to unknown valleys in the southern Chuya mountains. Snowfields lurk high above the dour forest. Mostly though, I think about food, about not losing the track, and about what the route ahead will be like. Fortunately we've met some more Russians, from Novosibirsk, who told us our planned route did not in fact exist, that our hand drawn German map is in error. The Chuya mountains lie to the east of the Katunsky range and the Argut valley, and are divided into two parts by the Karagem river, tributary of the Argut. We hope to cross the northern range to Aktash, a town on the main road south into Mongolia from the regional capital, Gorno-Altaisk.
Incredibly the weather, which has been mostly cloudy and damp since we came down from Belucha, now clears, and we are able to cross from the Karagem over a high pass into the Shavla valley. It is the end of summer. The stunted alpine scrub is just turning a reddish tinge. Above is the huge snowy bulk of Masheey and the sharp south face of Ak-Oyuk. Across the pass, we camp beneath the ice peaks of Mechta (Dream). These mountains, although not high, and evidently regarded by Russians as useful mainly as training for bigger things, were the most beautiful we saw in the CIS.
From the Shavla valley, the route out takes us up out of the taiga forest onto a high and bleak tundra plateau. A party of Russian trampers invite us to a 'small festival'. Many songs are sung about Russia's problems, and a great deal of sweetened condensed milk eaten.
Aktash. The road to Siberia. Peroxide blond women in high heels and short skirts negotiate the uneven roads. A huge picture of Lenin, adorned with socialist exhortations, still glares from the local Soviet building. Beneath the memorial to the Great Patriotic War, an ageing unshaven alchoholic sits with his vodka bottle.
– Climbing and tramping in the Siberian Altai in 1992. This story was first published in the 1993 New Zealand Alpine Journal.