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Articles by Julia Phillips

Kamchatka Observer: Goodbye

In her final post for the Kamchatka Observer blog, author Julia Phillips writes about saying goodbye to the snowmobiles, bear cubs, and superlatively...

Goodbye

In her final post for the Kamchatka Observer blog, author Julia Phillips writes about saying goodbye to the snowmobiles, bear cubs, and superlatively...

In Valley of the Geysers, a 'Month of Silence'

Every spring for more than 15 years, Kamchatka's famous federal nature reserve has announced a temporary restriction on visits to two of its best-known...

Lessons in Itelmen

The Itelmen language, spoken by an ethnic group indigenous to the Kamchatka peninsula, is both tantalizingly rich and worryingly rare.

Building Burton Park

Snowboard manufacturer Burton's official distributor in Russia held a countrywide contest rewarding cities with new snow parks, and the comparatively...

Post-Election Petropavlovsk

Between the lava, geysers, ice fields, and brown bears that roam the peninsula, Kamchatka could not seem more distant from the protests that blistered...

A Fiery Win for Dog Musher

Winner of the Beringia dog race Andrei Semashkin learned days into the three-week competition that his house had burned down.

Off to the Races

"The dogs," we shouted to each other, and pressed closer together. Someone called out and pointed to a hill on the horizon. A dark sled was zigzagging...

Outside Looking In

It's one thing to stand at a distance and say "Kamchatka" as shorthand for a certain remote experience. It's another to visit, travel through, and depart...

Cost of Living

Relatively high salaries have been instituted to compensate for the peninsula's remoteness, but consumer prices are marked up to a ludicrous degree...

From One Extreme to Another

Linda Bortoletto spent two months with eight reindeer herders, two cooks, and 2,000 reindeer in a stunning landscape ringed by rivers and mountains...

At War With Poaching in Protected Areas

A naturalist adopted three bear cubs in an effort to protect them from poachers, but his project ended tragically.

Revolutionary Times

The other side of the country spent last month counting Facebook event attendees and shouting on the streets. But those who mention the protests...

Departure

Recently, I spoke to a woman who moved from Moscow to work in a Kamchatkan nature reserve. "Every time I close my eyes, no matter where I am …...

Learning to Mush

In January 2011, Lisa Strecker returned to Kamchatka from Germany to begin training for the Beringia dog sled race, certified by the Guinness Book...

Cohabiting with Natural Disaster

Like Iceland, Patagonia, and Alaska, Kamchatka has been called a "land of fire and ice". Taken literally, this title is a perfect fit: the peninsula...

Duma Vote on Kamchatka

"We said it—We did it!" read a United Russia campaign poster pasted to the window of one of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky's buses. Under its caption...

Paradise in the Kronotsky Reserve

In 1933, the prominent Soviet volcanologist Boris Piip visited the Uzon caldera. "Here there is no September, no summer, no fall — here, now is paradise...

Snowbound

Winter is coming to the peninsula. In the past couple of weeks, the sky here has lowered and started shining orange at night. Three blizzards have...

Visiting the Capital

"Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky is not a city. It's a phantom," journalist Dmitry Gubin wrote in a recent article in Ogonyok magazine.

Cannonballs and Missile Tests

After leaving Alaska, Korean Airlines Flight 007 veered off course, flew steadily to the north of its planned flight path, and eventually passed into prohibited...

Bear Country

When the weather was better, the bear warnings were constant: don't walk alone; when in the woods, make noise by talking or singing; carry fireworks...

Twenty Years with the Gerasimovs

In 1992, Nikolai Gerasimov constructed a facility outside Petropavlovsk that would assume sole responsibility for the recovery of the Aleutian Canada...

Day of National Unity

"If you're not doing anything," he said, "you should come to the Russian March with us." I stared at him. "But I'm not Russian," I said. He stared back...

In the Valley of the Geysers

Seventy years ago, Tatyana Ustinova and Anysyfor Krupenin, a geologist and a guide respectively from one of Kamchatka's nature reserves, set out to find...

Welcome to Kamchatka

Your day starts here. First the sky brightens over Big Diomede Island in the Bering Strait. The sun rises next on Chukotka — frozen, barely populated...