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Updated: May 13, 2025
Taking our places again in the canoes after breakfast, we poled on up the river, shooting occasionally at flying ducks and swans, and picking as we passed long branches full of wild cherries which drooped low over the water. About noon we left the canoes to go around a long bend in the river, and started on foot with a native guide for Yolofka.
The scenery from this point in clear weather must be magnificent, as it overlooks the Tigil Valley and the Okhotsk Sea on one side, and the Pacific Ocean, the valleys of the Yolofka and the Kamchatka, and the grand peaks of Suveilich and Kluchefskoi on the other.
At Kluchei we abandoned our rafts, and took Kamchadal log canoes, which could be propelled more easily against the rapid current of the Yolofka River, which we had now to ascend.
When we tired of music we made an amicable adjustment of our respective legs in the narrow canoe, and lying back upon our bearskins slept soundly, undisturbed by the splash of the water and the scraping of poles at our very ears. We camped that night on a high sandy beach over the water, ten or twelve miles south of Yolofka.
We entered the Yolofka about noon. This river empties into the Kamchatka from the north, twelve versts above Kluchei. Its shores are generally low and marshy, and thickly overgrown with rushes and reedy grass, which furnish cover for thousands of ducks, geese, and wild swans.
All other neighbouring beauties of scenery are merely tributary to this, and are valued only according to their capability of relieving and setting forth this magnificent peak, whose colossal dimensions rise in one unbroken sweep of snow from the grassy valleys of the Kamchatka and Yolofka, which terminate at its base.
Brandy was dealt out freely to all our men in the cover of a tin pail, but its stimulating influence was so counteracted by cold that it was hardly perceptible. The poor starosta of Yolofka, with dripping clothes, blue lips, chattering teeth, and black hair plastered over his white cheeks, seemed upon the point of giving out.
We caught occasional glimpses, through openings in the mist, of the Yolofka River, thousands of feet below, and the smoke-plumed head of the distant volcano, floating in a great sea of bluish clouds; but a new detachment of straggling vapours from the Okhotsk Sea came drifting across the mountain-top, and breaking furiously in our faces, blotted out everything except the mossy ground, over which plodded our tired, dispirited horses.
This route was considerably longer than the one by the Yolofka pass, but its practicability was much more certain.
After a great many prolonged consultations with sundry natives, who were supposed to know something about the country, but who carefully avoided responsibility by telling as little as possible, the Major concluded to try the Yolofka pass, and ordered canoes to be ready on Saturday morning to carry us up the Yolofka River.
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