The Lure of Kunashir

packhorse in tow, i scramble along the rocky pacific coast of Kunashir, the southernmost of Russia’s Kurile Islands, a volcanic chain extending from Kamchatka to Japan. As the sun sets over the island, robing the lofty cones of active and extinct volcanoes in red and golden hues, my husband, photographer Igor Shpilenok, and I cross the salmon-choked Tyatina River.

We are searching for a small cabin, occasionally used by rangers patrolling the Kurilsky Nature Reserve, which protects nearly half the island. The cabin, where we plan to spend the next three nights, eludes us as darkness cloaks the island. We hear the deep call of the Blakiston’s fish owl, one of the largest predatory birds on Earth and, with only a few dozen pairs remaining, one of the rarest. A rustling sound emanates from dense underbrush and, suddenly, a large figure stands before us. Igor greets the shape, thinking it is a particularly tall and burly person. It lets out a roar. The horse balks and the creature vanishes. Our first bear encounter. We realize that we are blocking the bear’s path from the hills to its evening fishing hole. We encounter four more bears, including a mother with cubs. Thankfully, none confronts us. Perhaps the hulking figure of our horse with backpacks piled high scared them off. Finally, we locate the cabin and settle in for the night, realizing that scavenging bears have broken all the windows.

So ends our third day on Kunashir Island, the last stop on a 5,000-mile trip across Russia to document the country’s vast protected areas system, which began from our home in the Bryansk Forest Nature Reserve in western Russia. We were lured to Kunashir by stories of pristine wilderness, wild salmon runs and bears – more than 200 inhabit the island, the largest density of bears in all of Russia. Elated to have finally arrived on the island, we realize that our mission to document Kunashir is all the more pressing due to growing threats from gold mining, overfishing, and political disputes with Japan, which could jeopardize the sanctity of the island and its strictly-protected nature reserve.

our first day on kunashir, we descended into the
yawning crater of the Golovnin Volcano with our guide, Irina Nevedomskaya. Irina runs the environmental education department at the Kurilsky Nature Reserve. The vegetation in this protected crater, formed after the volcano’s cone collapsed, is green and dense, despite the harsh atmosphere in the volcano, which spews out hydrogen sulfide. As we pass a stand of ermine birches with eerily crooked trunks, a startled mountain hare bounds into the underbrush. Igor spots a sable darting over a log. Irina points out a clump of extremely rare Glenn spruce trees, dark green against a bright green carpet of Kurile bamboo. Being in the gut of an active volcano makes me a little jumpy. Irina calms me, saying that the last major eruption was more than 600 years ago.

On the crater floor, we leave the trail to bushwhack through the thick mat of waist-high bamboo. Reaching the center, we ascend one of two lava domes, formed during one of the volcano’s last eruptions. Creeping branches of dwarf pine hug the dome’s rocky terrain and lichens cling to stones. Two lakes, named “Hot” and “Boiling” – for the gases that make the water appear to boil, flank the domes, warmed by volcanic gases. Their crystal clear waters reveal sediments brilliantly colored yellow, green, blue, and orange from the brew of elements found in the water.

Descending the dome on the opposite side, we skirt fumaroles spewing hot steam and encrusted with bright yellow crystals of sulfur. We wade in the pleasantly warm Hot Lake to a ranger station on the crater floor. I find shards of fine Japanese china among the lake’s pebbles, a scarce reminder that Japanese once inhabited these islands, after displacing the indigenous Ainu people.

We spend the night outside the ranger station under a starry sky. Mosquitoes wake me early, so I hike down a small ravine penetrating the crater’s rim to the ocean coast. I pass through a dense, seemingly tropical forest of rare Daimyo oak, downy Japanese maple, and Japanese big-leaf magnolia. Black drupes of Sakhalin cork tree and succulent grape clusters hang heavily on trees and vines. The greenhouse-like climate of Kunashir supports more than a thousand species of vascular plants, many of giant proportions. I note that the leaf of a giant coltsfoot could substitute for an umbrella in a downpour.

Further on, a Japanese snake slithers across my path, and I take comfort in knowing that none of the island’s three endemic snakes is poisonous. The trail ends abruptly at a cliff overlooking a remote cove nestled between the Pacific Ocean and Sea of Okhotsk, near the southern end of the 75-mile-long island. Lifting my binoculars to look across a narrow strait of blue-green water, I glimpse cars on a coastal highway of the Japanese island of Hokkaido. Startled, I nearly fall off my rock. Kunashir feels so remote, so undiscovered, it is hard for me to believe that civilization is only a stone’s throw away. Japan claims the islands of Kunashir, Iturup, Shikotan and the Habomais, which were seized by the Soviets in the last days of World War II. The dispute colors all negotiations between the two countries, and now I see why.

later, we head to the separate, northern section of the reserve, which protects much of the upper half of the island, and the highest of Kunashir’s four active volcanoes, Tyatya. First, we drive 20 miles to the bleak town of Yuzhno-Kurilsk and then transfer to an amphibious tank-like vehicle to take us 12 miles along the roadless Pacific coast at low tide. Peering out the portholes, I glimpse a pointed rock formation known as Devil’s Finger in the middle of a shallow bay. Thousands of birds circle overhead. A cacophony of calls of slaty-backed gulls, tufted puffins, and rhinoceros auklets can be heard even over the roar of the tank. Kunashir is on one of the nine major migratory routes for birds in the world, and thousands of ducks, geese, and waders stop here in spring and fall.

After a bumpy ride along the tidemark, broken by a quick dip into a thermal spring, we reach the reserve’s border station on the Filatov River and are greeted by Andrei Arkhangelsky, a tall, muscular ranger, bald with a long moustache twirled up at the ends. I walk to the river to wash my hands and see hundreds of pink salmon, in brilliant mating colors and with bellies ready to burst, jostling their way up the narrow river. They slither over one another, oblivious of my presence and even my touch.

Andrei slits open the belly of a salmon he caught with his hands, explaining that, while fishing in spawning areas is prohibited, rangers are allowed to catch some fish daily for their food at the remote outpost. A clump of bright orange eggs slips out of the fish’s gut into a metal bowl. Andrei rinses the eggs, adds some salt, and lets them sit for five minutes. “Here, try some,” he says, spreading it on bread with butter. Although I am not partial to caviar, this fresh treat was delicious.

We spend the evening over a few traditional shots of vodka, accompanied by toasts to our health and to Kunashir. The next day, Igor and I borrow Andrei’s horse and tie our packs to the saddle, shaping the imposing silhouette that will save us at dusk from an onslaught of bears. We set out on the 10-mile trek to the wild Tyatina River, at the base of the Tyatya Volcano. We come first to the Saratovka River where it drains into the Pacific. It is too deep for our rubber hip boots, so we undress and ford the river. Salmon, fighting their way upstream to spawn, beat against our legs. We see bear prints twice the size of my hand in the wet sand. Further along the rocky coast, we watch rare sea otters bobbing in the surf only a hundred feet offshore. Endangered largha seals sun on rocks after gorging on salmon. Steller’s sea lions and killer and humpback whales are also said to inhabit these waters.

We sleep that night in the cabin that has been ransacked by bears and, at dawn, wind our way up the broad Tyatina River, hopping from stone to stone. The Tyatya Volcano (see cover), with one of the world’s most perfectly formed cones, towers 1819 meters above us, its shoulders clothed in a cape of fog. The forested banks of the river are strewn with half-eaten salmon, which are so plentiful the bears only eat the most nutritious parts, the brain and the larvae. We encounter several more bears, including a mother with two cubs vaulting from rocks into the water, literally throwing themselves at the fish. We take a dip in the chilly water and dry in the sun. That day, we count more than three dozen white-tailed sea-eagles gliding along the river to feast on salmon. As evening draws near, we turn back to the cabin, having decided not to scale the volcano looming overhead.

When we wake the next morning, we are surprised to see two dozen brightly-clothed, mostly elderly Japanese disembarking from a boat onto the isolated beach near our cabin. The ranger Andrei, receiving word of their visit over the reserve’s radio, hiked here to escort them to a nearby cemetery, where their ancestors are buried. Many of these visitors were removed from the island in 1948. On this, their first return visit, they are astonished to find only trees and bushes where a village of 300 once stood. Expecting to find people here, they brought bags of gifts – Japanese candy, beer, juice, and other food items. Finding no settlers, they give the entire stash to Andrei and us.

Our final destination is the small miners’ settlement of Rudnoye, accessible by the only road in the North – two muddy, widely-spaced ruts. A Russian mining company is reopening an abandoned gold mine in the reserve’s buffer zone, in violation of federal conservation legislation. Igor sets out along the 18-mile road on foot while I wait with our backpacks for a ride with a supply truck, expected sometime today. The truck finally comes and I climb on top of the boxes. The three geologists on board inform me that they are packed with a ton of dynamite. The truck jerks and bucks, barely making it up a steep incline; a deep canyon abuts on the left. From the top of a pass, under a cloudless sky, unusual in this monsoon climate, I see the Pacific Ocean and Tyatya Volcano behind me and the Sea of Okhotsk and Ruruy Volcano ahead. I have never seen such a breathtaking scene in my life. Lusciously green hills climb to the bare, blackened tops of steep volcanoes, then plunge into the deep blue sea.

Crossing the Severyanka River, the largest spawning river on the west side of the island, we arrive at Rudnoye on the Okhotsk Sea. Igor waits with Evgeny Grigoriev, director of the Kurilsky Nature Reserve, a pleasant, large man of about 40 with spiky gray hair. A truck dumps gold ore on the riverbank as Evgeny tells us that the governor of the Sakhalin Province has just approved full-scale mining operations in the buffer zone. Environmentalists fear that the mining, which would include opening a 72-meter pit and clearing forests in the river valley, would jeopardize important salmon spawning areas and that a planned enrichment plant, which would use sodium cyanide to process the gold ore, would poison the productive coastal waters. Salmon poaching, already an environmental concern, would undoubtedly increase with the expansion of the mining settlement to more than 200 people. Rangers apprehended a group of geologists with 14 barrels of salmon caviar a week earlier. Some weeks later, I learn that Evgeny is successful in reversing the governor’s decision to launch full-scale mining operations – at least for now. The mining company is nonetheless continuing its exploratory operations and expanding its work force at Rudnoye.

We return to Yuzhno-Kurilsk on Evgeny’s motorized rubber boat, through rough waters. My clothes are wet from the splashing waves and the wind whips through my hair. A fog begins to settle over the island, ringing the peaks of volcanoes like the brim of a hat. Lost in thought, I watch the wild, verdant island pass before my eyes. Perhaps the fact that its pristine wilderness is so coveted is what makes Kunashir so special, enchanted even. Sadly, I wonder if time is running out for the island. With the lure of gold and caviar for the Russians or land for the Japanese, how long can Kunashir’s forests and rivers remain wild?   RL