Oleni Ruchyi and Azov Mountain

Description

A packed day southwest of Yekaterinburg: a nature park on the Serga River, a rocky mountain near Polevskoy and, on the way, one of the most atmospheric abandoned sites of the Urals. The loop between the outermost points is about a hundred and forty kilometres; in summer part of the route is conveniently covered by suburban trains. The first stop is the Didino tunnel, a concrete ear gaping in the forest on the slope of Belaya Hill. They started cutting it in 1913, but the engineers miscalculated, the opposing adits never met, and the tunnel was finished only by 1918: its length is over a kilometre. Trains ran here for seventy-seven years, until 1995, and in 2022 the art group “PSLCh” left inscriptions on the portals and in the middle, after the parable of King Solomon’s ring: “Everything passes”, “This too shall pass”, “Nothing passes”. The tunnel is in emergency condition — enter with a torch and care, and a regular car cannot reach the portals. The main part of the day is Oleni Ruchyi (“Deer Streams”), the first nature park of Sverdlovsk Oblast. An equipped trail with suspension bridges and boardwalks runs along the Serga: past the Svetlaya, Dyrovaty Kamen and Lyagushka cliffs, past the Druzhba, Arakayevskaya and Mshistaya caves. The park’s symbol is the painted Red Elk on the Pisanitsa rock, about three thousand years old; traces of people here stretch back at least fourteen millennia. The main riverside loop takes three to five hours. In the evening there is time for Azov Mountain near Polevskoy: Bolshoy Azov reaches 589 metres, and the summits are crowned by ball-shaped basalt cliffs up to twenty-five metres high. In 1940 schoolchildren found a hoard of forty-four copper and bronze cult objects of the Permian animal style here, and archaeologist Evgenia Bers believed the summit was an Iron Age sanctuary. It is with Azov Mountain that Pavel Bazhov linked his tale “Dear Namechko” about the maid Azovka — an equipped trail, “The Legends of Azov Mountain”, leads to the top.