Visim, Starik-Kamen and Kachkanar

Description

A two-day route north from Nizhny Tagil: a taiga reserve, a lookout cliff on the watershed of two great rivers, and the summit called the roof of the Middle Urals. Visim and Kachkanar are about two hundred road kilometres apart, so it makes sense to split the trip with an overnight stop — in Nizhny Tagil or Kachkanar. The Visimsky Reserve protects mountain southern-taiga forests in the headwaters of the Chusovaya’s tributaries; since 2001 it has been part of the UNESCO world network of biosphere reserves. Protection is strict: access is allowed only with the administration’s approval, but nearby is the settlement of Visim, the birthplace of writer Dmitry Mamin-Sibiryak, with his house museum and the historic fabric of an old ironworks village. When the reserve was re-established, it was even proposed to name it “Maminsky” after the writer. Starik-Kamen is one of the highest summits of the Veselye Hills ridge: 755 metres, a three-hundred-metre crest of gabbro-diorite with a fifty-metre eastern cliff. The conventional line of the Volga–Ob watershed — the border of Europe and Asia — passes through the summit: water from one slope flows to the Chusovaya and the Kama, from the other to the Tagil and the Tobol. The ascent along a forest road from Chernoistochinsk takes a couple of hours, and on a clear day the crest shows Nizhny Tagil, Nevyansk and a chain of ridges to the horizon. The finale is Kachkanar, whose northern summit rises to 878.7 metres — the highest point of the Middle Urals within Sverdlovsk Oblast. Bizarre cliffs with names of their own stand on the crest, the most famous being Verblyud, “the Camel”, which by one version gave the whole mountain its name. Since 1957 the Kachkanar mining and processing plant has operated at the foot and part of the massif is occupied by the pit, but the ascent remains the main attraction of the northern Middle Urals: two or three hours from the town to the crest, with panoramas of Nizhny Tagil and endless Ural forests.