Completely Alone with Nature

Rachel Dickinson has written a short essay for The Atlantic about a trip she made to the Kamchatka Pen­in­sula, a part of the world I would dearly like to visit:

It’s easy to delude yourself into thinking you’re com­pletely alone with nature in the wild Bering Sea, but every so often, around a bend, a ghostly aban­doned Soviet-​era building rises from the cliffs. We passed a weather station high on a hillside, and a derelict fox farm, with its concrete barn and rows of col­lapsing cages that used to hold the animals, raised for their fur.

One foggy morning we went ashore. On the beach, ravens were picking at the carcass of a young gray whale. Huge ribs and jawbones were scattered every­where. As we walked on the tundra beyond the beach, I almost fell into a small circular hole, and then realized I was sur­rounded by low, hummock-​like food-​storage shelters made of whale ribs covered with sod. We had come across a hunting camp where Yupiks have been but­chering their massive catch for hundreds of years.

There is some more inform­a­tion on the Yupik people on Wiki­pedia, here. (The Wiki­pedia article on the Siberian Yupik is also worth a read.)