The Valley of Geysers

Ninety geysers, reachable only by helicopter

The Valley of Geysers is a six-kilometre basin on the Kamchatka Peninsula in Russia's far east, holding around ninety geysers and many hot springs, the second-largest concentration of geysers in the world. Most lie on the left bank of the Geysernaya River, which keeps cutting deeper as geothermal water flows into it from the young stratovolcano Kikhpinych; 500 metres below the caldera floor the rock has been measured at 250°C. It lies inside the Kronotsky Nature Reserve, part of the Volcanoes of Kamchatka World Heritage Site, and there is no road. Helicopters are the only practical way in.

The geysers were discovered in 1941 by a local scientist, Tatyana Ustinova, who found the first of them, Pervenets, the Firstborn. She published fourteen years later, but little exploration followed until 1972, a systematic survey came in the mid-1970s, and automatic monitoring began in 1990. More than thirty geysers were named, among them Velikan, the Giant, which can throw water up to 40 metres. From the 1980s the valley was promoted as one of the great sights of the Soviet far east; foreigners were let in from 1991, and about 3,000 visitors a year came, mostly by helicopter.

On 3 June 2007 a snow-covered slope collapsed within seconds. Millions of cubic metres of rock and mud poured down the Vodopadny creek into the Geysernaya and ran about two kilometres downriver, stopping metres from the valley's hotel. The slide built a dam up to 60 metres high, and a lake rose rapidly behind it, drowning the geysers upstream. It looked like the end; a World Wildlife Fund spokesman called it the loss of one of the great natural wonders of the world. Then, on the evening of 7 June, the river found its way through the dam and the water began to fall, nine metres in the first four hours.

Kamchatka's volcanologists counted the damage. Pervenets, Ustinova's Firstborn, was buried, along with the Troynoy group and a 30-metre waterfall; geysers Bolshoi and Maly lay under the new lake. But the main field, Vitrazh, the Stained Glass, and Velikan itself had survived, and eight large geysers were still erupting, about half the major ones there had been. The slide struck during the filming of the documentary Wild Russia, which caught the valley both before and after.

The story did not end there. In 2013 heavy rains brought down a new landslide that broke the natural dam and freed the drowned springs, and when the water subsided their geysers began to play again.