On the coast of the Sea of Okhotsk, on the southern bank of Ozernaya River, at the tip of the Kamchatka Peninsula lies the southernmost settlement of Kamchatka, the town of Ozernovsky. A town of 2,500 people lives and breathes sockeye salmon. The Ozernaya River has the largest run of sockeye salmon in Asia and the whole economy of this town revolves around it. Without fish, there is no work, no life.

Located about 140 miles from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the regional center, Ozernovsky was founded in 1907. Most buildings are dilapidated, dating to the Soviet times of the 1940s to the 1980s. Dirt roads, hardly passable after rain, connect Ozernovsky to the village of Zaporozhie, located on the opposite side of the river. Pictured above is a kindergarten, located in Zaporozhie.

About half dozen companies fish for salmon in the river and along the coast. A number of processing plants process the fish on-site and load finished product on trampers, cargo boats that transport fish, waiting just off shore. Rusted parts of one of such vessels still stick from the intertidal and lay scattered along the coastline. The story goes that about 5 years ago, a 200-foot vessel was anchored offshore when a major soccer game started on TV. The crew decided to move closer to town for better TV reception, but a storm picked up, and by the time they’ve realized they were being pushed on shore by waves and wind, it was too late to save the boat.

The town’s coastline is actually litered with rusted boats and unrecognizable metal parts. Old cards scatter the grasslands around town, giving it a ghost-like appearance.

One day I was exploring the hills south of town. I came across an old cemetery, overgrown with wildflowers. Red stars on metal peaks adored more patriotic graves. The cemetery looked forgotten, as if the people who were supposed to visit it have also died or left town. A little further down the bluff, a non-functioning lighthouse came to view. It piqued my curiosity. Only when I sat down on a bluff did I see a rusted sign with a radiation warning (pictured below). As I later found out, the lighthouse contained batteries with plutonium, or such, that are still scattered around the site. But do not worry, I was told, it’s probably safe if I don’t touch anything.

Also see Part I: Kamchatka and Part II: Kamchatka: the MI-8 Helicopter.

The MI-8s were originally designed for military use, but are now widely used to carry people and cargo all over Kamchatka. They are not cheap, costing about $2,500/hr. For that amount of money, you’d think it would be at least a comfortable ride, but half a dozen times I flew on them last summer, I had to balance myself on containers of food, duffel bags, wood pellets, or be stuffed as a sardine with about 15 other people. There are two benches that sit 8.

It takes three people to fly and navigate them, although I sometimes wondered if it was part of job security. Photo below, taken by Tikhrun Shpilinuk, was taken on one of our flights about a kilometer up in the air.

But Kamchatka is about the landscape. A very active region, full of mountains and volcanoes, criss-crossed by rivers, it is a sight of beauty and awe. Frozen in winter, under a thick blanket of snow, it made me appreciate how wild and severe it was. Almost every mountain top had bear foot prints descending into the valleys below.

By May – June, the white blanket is yanked off by the Spring, revealing lush green fields that burst into bloom by August. The transformation is as unbeliveable as it is breath-taking.

Also see Part I: Kamchatka.

In the summer of 2011, I spent over a month on Kamchatka Peninsula in the Russian Far East. For the most part, I was working as as a fisheries sustainability expert in a fishing town of Ozernovsky, population 2,000. The Ozernaya River, born at Kurilskoe Lake about 40 kilometers inland, and emptying into the Sea of Okhotsk just past the town, has the largest sockeye salmon run in Asia, akin to the one in Bristol Bay, Alaska. It supports an in-river beach seine and coastal set trap net commercial fishery Over the next month, I will be posting photos of life in Ozernovsky and the sockeye salmon commercial fishery. I will also have posts about other places I’ve visited along the way, such as Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, the central city in Kamchatka and of St. Petersburg, on the other side of Russia.

A view of a volcano taken during a helicopter flight from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to Ozernovsky.

Continued from Olympic Peninsula – an aerial view. Part I.

We were stranded on an abandoned airstrip 20 miles from the nearest town. Even at this remote location we had cell phone reception. Jane, our pilot, called her husband. They had a second plane, a tiny Piper, with a front seat for the pilot and a back seat for two people, with one seat belt to share between the passengers. It was an adorable but slow plane, with an average speed of 40 mph over land. It was going to take 3 or 4 hours before her husband would come here from Portland to pick us up.

The day was sunny and warm, and the three of us had time to explore the area. An abandoned plane support facility, with a plush doll hanging in the middle from a metal hook, had surely seen better days. It was surprising unvandalized, with intact glass windows and no garbage. A wooden one-story NOAA meteorological facility nearby had an older lady solely working there, launching weather ballons, like clockwork, every 12 hours.

The little Piper came to our rescue around 6 pm, just as the sun was touching the horizon. As all four of us couldn’t fit in it, Jane found a hotel in the nearest town that agreed to send out a car to pick her up for the night. Her husband would return the next day to get her. The Piper had glass windows from floor to ceiling on both sides, making for a spectacular view, but no heat. The bit of warm air coming from the engine into the cockpit didn’t reach past the pilot, and we weren’t dressed for cold weather, expecting to be back in Portland by late afternoon. Flying several miles high with the sun down and no heat, we were very cold the whole way back. We didn’t make it back until around 11 pm, but still happy not to spend the night under the wing of the broken down plane on the abandoned airplane.

As I’ve mentioned in the last post, I made a couple of flights last fall over the Olympic Peninsula, Washington to photograph some of the key rivers the Wild Salmon Center has been working on. It was a gray, foggy morning, which cleared by mid-day, when the sun was high up, making the scenery below rather contrasty. What did stand out on that trip was our mis-adventure. There were three of us in the little 4-person Cessna – my colleague, Amber, who was keeping track of where we needed to go and what river I was photographing, our pilot, Jane, and I.

We took off from an airfield near Portland, Oregon and once over the peninsula, started flying zig-zag along the predetermined rivers, from the coast up to the Olympic Mountains, where these rivers begin. The mountains, covered in snow, were gorgeous, but the turns were tight and we had to be careful. By about 2 pm, my memory cards were full, and we decided to land on a small, abandoned airstrip near Forks, Washington, to have lunch and offload the photos. Jane’s map warned to watch for cows and deer before landing. It was nice and warm on the ground, and the food and hot tea disappeared quickly. As we were taxing for take off, to continue the shoot, Jane was doing the pre-flight check. Unexpectedly, our engine died. Jane turned it back on and it died again. The third time was no different. There was something wrong with the engine, which meant we had to cancel the flight. The only problem was we were good 20 miles from the nearest town and a day’s worth of driving from Portland, and without a car.

Stay tuned. Next week’s post will have the happy ending.

In October of 2011, I made a couple of trips in a small fixed-wing plane over the Olympic Peninsula, Washington to photograph key rivers and watersheds for the Wild Salmon Center. The Wild Salmon Center is a Portland, Oregon based international NGO that works around the Pacific Rim to preserve healthy salmon habitats and to conserve wild salmon stocks. The flights were an adventure, complete with a breakdown on an abandoned air strip near Forks, Washington, the site of the Twilight series. In my next post, I will tell the tale of our adventure and post photos of the rivers from that shoot.

While flying above twisted rivers and forested mountains, I spotted several mountain-top logging operations. The Olympic Peninsula contains a number of state and national parks as well as major salmon rivers of the Pacific Northwest. It was one of the last unexplored and uncharted territories of the Lower 48 states, but became a major logging site in the 20th Century. Although the days of wide-spread intense clear-cutting are gone, shaved mountaintops and valleys are cut deep into the landscape.

With new technological innovations, the remnant logging is taking place on mountain tops, which were previously inaccessible to this activity. I was surprised at the efficiency and speed of trees being fallen. As I was flying past a logging camp, I saw the arm of a tractor grabbing a tree and carefully laying the tree trunk down, then reaching for the next tree and laying it  down within a minute.

Yet I still use paper napkins.

After moving out of Juneau, I get too see our glacier only once or twice a year, and I am shocked at how fast it is melting away. It is only a matter of time, probably  a decade, at most, the glacier will retract beyond the lake and we won’t have any more icebergs gracefully floating around the lake.

The original Gold Town blog post: http://www.mihaelblikshteyn.com/blog/2010/01/gold-town-nickelodeon

One of the advantages of residing in Portland, Oregon is its central location from many interesting parks, preserves, and natural curiosities. A couple of weeks ago, amidst a break in the clouds, I made a weekend gateway for the Painted Hills Unit of the John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in central Oregon.

Located about 75 miles east of Bend, “Painted Hills is named after the colorful layers of its hills corresponding to various geological eras, formed when the area was an ancient river floodplain” (Wikipedia).

One thing for sure, there is a bottomless well of very interesting people in Arcata, California. I decided to start documenting many of the more colorful people I come across. With the waining days of warm sunshine, and my busy fieldwork schedule, I can only spend a couple of hours each weekend roaming around downtown Arcata, looking for people to photograph. Here’s my first attempt.