Things to find in Russia
18 legends, 3 gem & mineral ground, 1 cave on the free Club 49 adventure map
What the map holds here
- Baltic amber Gem & mineral ground
Ninety percent of the world’s amber comes from one place: the blue-earth layer of the Samland coast on the Baltic, where a 40-million-year-old forest’s resin is dug and dredged in industrial quantities, and washes up on beaches...
Open it on the map - Dyatlov Pass Legend
Nine experienced ski hikers died on the slope of Kholat Syakhl in the northern Urals on the night of 1 to 2 February 1959. The tent was found half collapsed under snow and cut open from the inside. Five bodies were on the slope...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Kizhi Pogost Legend
Two wooden churches on an island in Lake Onega, and the frames of them were raised without a single nail. The Church of the Transfiguration went up in 1714, its altar laid on 6 June that year, and carries 22 domes at 37 metres;...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Lake Baikal Legend
The deepest lake in the world at 1,642 metres, the oldest at 25 to 30 million years, and the largest by volume: 23,615 cubic kilometres, somewhere between 22 and 23 percent of all the fresh surface water on the planet and about...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Oymyakon, the pole of cold Legend
On 6 February 1933 the weather station here recorded -67.7 C, the coldest temperature ever officially measured at a permanently inhabited place in the northern hemisphere. The village sits in a valley in the Yana-Oymyakon...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Amber Room Legend
One of the great real lost-treasure mysteries. The Amber Room was a chamber lined entirely in carved amber, gold leaf and mirrors, a gift to Russia in 1716 and called an eighth wonder of the world. The Nazis looted it from the...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Kola Superdeep Borehole Legend
The deepest hole anybody has ever drilled into the Earth: 12,262 metres straight down, reached in 1989 on the Kola Peninsula. Drilling stopped for good in 1992 at 11,882 m on a fourth attempt because the rock was 180 C, far...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Kungur ice cave Legend
A gypsum cave on the right bank of the Sylva in Perm Krai with ice in it all year. Peter the Great’s decree sent the geographer Semyon Remezov to document it in 1703, it has been taking visitors since 1914, and over five million...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Lena Pillars Legend
A wall of stone columns 150 to 300 metres high running along the Lena river in the Sakha Republic, thickest between Petrovskoye and Tit-Ary. They are Cambrian, laid down in ancient sea basins as alternating limestone, marlstone,...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Manpupuner pillars Legend
A bare plateau west of the Urals with seven stone pillars on it, 30 to 42 metres tall, and nothing else around them. The rock is about 200 million years old and the shape is straightforward once you know it: the mountain here was...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Mir diamond pit, Yakutia Gem & mineral ground
A hole 525 metres deep and 1,200 metres across, cut into the permafrost of the Sakha Republic, and the fourth deepest excavated pit on Earth. Through the 1960s it produced ten million carats of diamond a year, about a fifth of it...
Open it on the map - The Patomskiy crater Legend
A ring of broken limestone 160 metres across and 40 metres tall standing in Siberian forest, with a smaller mound about 12 metres high sitting in the middle of it, roughly 350 km from Bodaibo. The Evenki knew it and avoided it,...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Putorana Plateau Legend
This is the top of the Siberian Traps, 800 km by 500 of basalt above the Arctic Circle, east of the Yenisei: the eruption that coincided with the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history. Erosion has cut it into flat-topped...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Ruskeala marble quarry Legend
The marble here was found in 1765 and worked from 1769, and it went into buildings you already know: St Isaac’s Cathedral, the Winter Palace, and later several St Petersburg Metro stations. The main pit runs about 460 metres...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Sampo of the Kalevala Legend
Finland’s national epic, the Kalevala, gathered from ancient sung poetry, turns on the Sampo: a magical mill forged by the smith Ilmarinen that grinds out grain, salt and gold endlessly, a machine of pure abundance. The...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Solovetsky Islands Legend
An archipelago in the White Sea with two histories stacked on the same ground. Two monks from Kirillo-Belozersky founded a monastery here in the second quarter of the fifteenth century and by the 1500s it was one of the...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Ural emeralds & gems Gem & mineral ground
The Ural Mountains east of Yekaterinburg are one of the richest gem provinces on Earth: the Malysheva mine has produced Russian emeralds since 1831, and it was here, in the same ground, that alexandrite (the stone that changes...
Open it on the map - The Valley of Geysers Legend
The second largest concentration of geysers on Earth, around ninety of them along six kilometres of the Geysernaya river on Kamchatka, inside the Kronotsky Nature Reserve. There is no road. Helicopters are the only realistic way...
Open it on the map · Read the story - The Valley of Geysers, Kamchatka Cave
The second largest concentration of geysers on earth, about ninety of them plus hot springs packed into a six-kilometre basin on the Kamchatka Peninsula, with rock at 250 degrees C only 500 metres down. A local scientist, Tatyana...
Open it on the map - Tunguska Legend
On the morning of 30 June 1908, at about 07:17, something detonated five to ten kilometres above the Podkamennaya Tunguska river and flattened 2,150 square kilometres of forest in a pattern shaped like a butterfly. Estimates of...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Veryovkina Cave Legend
The second deepest known cave on Earth at 2,209 metres, after Krubera on the same massif. The entrance is a hole three by four metres at 2,285 m altitude, dropping straight into a 32 metre shaft; at minus 400 there is a pit...
Open it on the map · Read the story - Wrangel Island Legend
An Arctic island between the Chukchi and East Siberian seas where the woolly mammoth outlived everywhere else. The generally accepted last population survived here until roughly four thousand years ago, radiocarbon putting it...
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Every one of these is sourced
Each entry links to the record it came from. Access rules, permits and land status vary by country and are noted where the source states them, check locally before you go.
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