A Land Without People, and Without Peaks

The silence here presses on you. Not the cozy quiet of a forest — a hollow, stony silence, where all you hear is wind and water. Welcome to the Putorana Plateau, deep in Siberia.

Its area runs to around two hundred fifty thousand square kilometers — bigger than the United Kingdom. And its permanent population comes to about ten people, staffing a weather station by Lake Agata. Ten people, in a country-sized stretch of wilderness.

The landscape here is the direct result of a catastrophe. Two hundred fifty million years ago, enormous eruptions poured out layer upon layer of basalt, step after step. That's why the summits are flat, without a single sharp peak — the Evenki people called them "mountains without tops." It's hard to put it better.

Water found its way into every crack in the basalt. The result: more than twenty thousand waterfalls and more than twenty-five thousand lakes. These are tectonic lakes — narrow, with sheer cliff banks — which gives the plateau its other name, "the land of steep-shored lakes." There are no roads. The only way in is by water, or by air.

In eighteen forty-four, the naturalist Alexander von Middendorff was the first to describe this place for science. The Dolgan, Nganasan, and Evenki peoples had known it long before that — though even these nomadic hunters never lingered here for long.

Today the plateau carries Russia's largest migration of wild reindeer. About nineteen percent of the territory falls under a nature reserve listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. And climate scientists point to Putorana as one of the very first places where the changes sweeping the Far North become visible.

Some places simply aren't made for people. Putorana is one of them.

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