The Karst of Kamensk

Description

The southeast of Sverdlovsk Oblast, about a hundred kilometres from Yekaterinburg, is a karst world of its own: the limestones of the Sulolozh-Kamensk district hold the region’s largest cave and a rock with a through arch over the Iset River. The two points are sixteen kilometres apart in a straight line and combine into a single day on the road to Kamensk-Uralsky. Smolinskaya Cave has been known since the nineteenth century: the first description and plan were made by researcher V. G. Olesov and published in 1895 in the UOLE Proceedings. The studied passages stretch for almost eight hundred and ninety metres at a depth of over thirty; the grottoes keep names left by monks of the 1890s — the “Great Cell” twenty-five by seven metres, “Favor”, “Altar” and the legendary “Road to Hell” passage. Unlike most Ural caves, this one can be visited without special training — with a torch, helmet and warm clothes: inside, it stays four to five degrees all year round. The Stone Gates rock rises on the right bank of the Iset: twenty metres of limestone with a through opening up to ten metres high — essentially a karst cave washed out by water that became an arch: at the top it narrows to four or five metres, at the water it opens to eight. The rock was described as early as 1804 by historian Nikolai Popov under the name “Vorotnoy Kamen”; in 1909 it was photographed by Prokudin-Gorsky and Metenkov, and in 1934 a survey declaring the local limestone unfit for industry saved the arch from a quarry. The best angle on the arch is from the left bank in morning light; in summer, excursion boats from Kamensk-Uralsky sail to the rock, and in winter one can approach right across the ice of the Iset. Together with Smolinskaya Cave the rock belongs to a single karst cluster of the district, so it makes sense to cover both on one trip.