Chertovo Gorodishche

Chertovo Gorodishche is a rock crest about 70 metres long on top of an unnamed 347-metre hill in the left bank of the Semipalatinka river, twenty kilometres north-west of Yekaterinburg. The upper part of the massif is made of separate slabs up to 34 metres high — the work of weathering that has been shaping the granite for ages. The rocks are granites of the Verkh-Isetsky massif about 300 million years old. The name is explained in two ways: either as a memory of an ancient sanctuary whose rites gave the place to the 'evil spirits', or as a distortion of a Mansi expression reshaped into 'chertovo'. Mass tourism arrived by rail: the Iset station became the starting point back in the early 20th century. The rock is protected as a nature monument of 116 hectares with geomorphological, botanical and archaeological profiles. Since the 1960s Chertovo Gorodishche has been one of the USSR's first climbing crags: routes from 6a to 7c+ run up the north wall, and generations of Ural climbers have trained here. In 1980–1985 the rock was closed for recovery, then reopened.