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WONDERS OF NATURE
Lake Baikal. Nature miracle
There is no other such famous lake in the world as the Russian Baikal. It is unique and fabulous, and all other Russian lakes seem small and shallow in front of it. The enormous size and depth of this lake, the amazing purity and transparency of its emerald-greenish waters, the harsh beauty of the shores make an indelible impression. And if you ask experienced travelers to name the three most beautiful corners of Russia, then all of them will definitely name Lake Baikal among others.
The "big ocean-sea" was the name given to the boundless lake by the Russian Cossack explorers of the 1643th century who first saw it. However, the Cossack Pentecostal Kurbat Ivanov, who led his detachment to the Baikal shores in XNUMX, was not the discoverer of Baikal in the full sense of the word. Before the arrival of the Russians, different peoples had lived here for many centuries. And all of them gave majestic names to the huge reservoir. The Mongols, for example, called it Dalainor - "Great Lake", and the Evenki - Lama, which means "sea". And even now, residents of coastal villages, speaking of Baikal, usually call it the sea. And no wonder: the length of the giant reservoir is six hundred and forty kilometers (slightly less than from Moscow to St. Petersburg), and the width in the middle part reaches eighty kilometers! There are no lakes deeper than Baikal on the continents of our planet: an echo sounder measured 1637 meters east of Olkhon Island. The bottom of the Baikal depression is located 1200 meters below the ocean level - this is the lowest place on the entire land of the globe. The basin of the lake holds a fifth of all fresh water on Earth. To carry it to the sea, all the rivers of the planet would have to work for eight months! In terms of water volume, Baikal is almost a hundred times larger than the Sea of \uXNUMXb\uXNUMXbAzov and thirty times the Aral Sea. A distinctive feature of Baikal is its venerable age. Most of the Earth's lakes, even such large ones as Ladoga, Issyk-Kul, Verkhnee or Victoria, have existed for only a few millennia, while Baikal is about thirty to forty million years old! It is clear that for such a long time, the richest and most peculiar animal world appeared and developed in it, striking scientists, and not only them. Now 1200 species of animals living in Baikal are known. And three-quarters of them are found nowhere else in the world! Here lives, in particular, a special kind of seal - the Baikal seal. How a typical inhabitant of the seas - a seal - got into a fresh lake, and even located four thousand kilometers from the nearest sea, is still a mystery to science. No less a mystery for scientists is the unique golomyanka fish living in Baikal. Deprived of scales, large-mouthed and so transparent that the insides are visible, it, like some tropical fish, does not spawn, but gives birth to live fry. In the fresh waters of Lake Baikal (and only in them) there are several species of gobies - relatives of the well-known inhabitants of the Black and Azov Seas. A unique and also purely Baikal fish is the famous omul. It is difficult to find a dish tastier in fish gastronomy than freshly salted Baikal omul melting in your mouth. And the amphipods, mollusks, sponges, and so on, unusual and also typical only for Baikal, are not even worth mentioning, otherwise our story risks turning into a lecture on zoology. Suffice it to say that scientists had to single out a special Baikal zoogeographic region on the world map. The shores of Lake Baikal are amazingly beautiful, mountainous, wooded, everywhere enlivened by shallow, smoothly rounded bays and spectacular high remnant rocks on capes. The west bank drops steeply into the water. The slopes of the Baikal and Primorsky ridges covered with dark greenery of the taiga approach the lake itself, being reflected in it as in a mirror. Only at the foot of the rocks remains a narrow strip of the beach, interrupted by cliffs-capes going straight into the lake. Many secluded coves here can be climbed only by a single steep descent, or even by rope. But solitude and complete merging with nature are guaranteed, in such places voluntary "Robinsons" often spend their holidays. And the eastern coast of the lake is sloping, friendly. The mountains of the Barguzinsky Range extend far from Baikal, leaving room for coastal meadows and sunny tracts at the confluence of cheerful, talkative mountain rivers. Finally, the southern part of the lake, bordered by the gentle hills of the Khamar-Daban ridge, is the most developed and inhabited. The Circum-Baikal Railway passes here, mines, timber industry enterprises and the infamous paper mill, which pollutes the priceless Baikal water, are located here, most of the tourist centers and other places of recreation are located here. But most of the Baikal coast is still an almost untouched world of Siberian nature. The entire northern half of the lake, starting from Olkhon Island, is sparsely populated. There are practically no roads here, villages meet after twenty or thirty, or even fifty kilometers. The more pleasure the traveler receives, being one on one with the taiga, mountains and "His Majesty Baikal". The huge lake noticeably affects the surrounding area. In summer it is five or six degrees cooler here, and in winter it is ten degrees warmer than far from Baikal, for example, in Irkutsk. Therefore, the lake is covered with ice only at the end of December, and the only river flowing from it, the fast and wide Angara, does not freeze at all for the first thirty kilometers. And even below, she puts on an ice coat differently from most other rivers, that is, from the surface. On the Angara, the so-called bottom ice first forms, which then floats up and closes the river. Summer on Baikal is hot, but due to strong winds, the water in it is constantly mixed, and its upper layers do not have time to warm up. Therefore, even in July, the water temperature in the lake is ten degrees, and only seasoned people swim in it. It is interesting that all the main geographical elements on Baikal are one at a time: one large island - Olkhon, one archipelago - the Ushkachi Islands, one peninsula - Svyatoy Nos, one large bay - Chivyrkuisky, one strait - the Small Sea, and, finally, one large tributary - the Selenga River, which carries as much water into the lake as all the other rivers flowing into Baikal - and there are more than two hundred of them. The Angara, also the one and only, has already been mentioned above. It is difficult to say what is more interesting for a traveler - the lake itself and its inhabitants, or such diverse and full of surprises Baikal shores. The wide expanse of the lake, merging with the sky in the distance, amazes with its beauty in calm weather. When there is no wind, you can, being on the shore, admire for hours through the amazingly clear Baikal water its flora and fauna. At the bottom of the lake there are dense accumulations of green and brown algae, in which you can see fish of various species. Here appeared a flock of gobies with angular heads and bulging eyes. With their wide fins, disproportionately large compared to the body, gobies are a bit like butterflies. Following them, several large omuls quickly rush by. Maybe they were frightened away by a large white-nosed whitefish or a huge fat sturgeon lurking in a thicket of algae. White seagulls flew up from the nearby cliff. But, noticing the life in the clear water of the lake, they immediately rushed down with a cry. You can talk about the shores of Baikal endlessly. There are so many amazing places, bizarre rocks, wild gorges, noisy waterfalls, healing springs and cozy bays on its 2000-kilometer coastline and coastal islands that a separate book could be dedicated to them. The main flow of tourists usually goes to one of the most picturesque corners of Lake Baikal - Peschanaya Bay. Located relatively close to the source of the Angara on the western shore of the lake, it is so popular that a special motor ship from Irkutsk even goes here (only the only "all-weather" transport of Baikal, the "one-pipe giant" "Komsomolets", an old a veteran ship that has been sailing on the lake for more than half a century). On the shores of Peschanaya Bay, the houses of a small camp site are white. Those who like comfort settle here, and wildlife lovers go along the coast to neighboring bays, where there are no traces of civilization. The warm sand of the luxurious beaches in the bays allows you to quickly warm up after exploring the invigorating Baikal water, and the conquest of fantastic rock structures on the Bolshoi and Maly Kolokolny coastal capes will pleasantly diversify the leisure time of tourists who have come here. In terms of the beauty of their rocks, the surroundings of Peschanaya will not yield to the famous Crimean Karadag or the coast of the Sea of Japan. Spectacular outlines of rocky capes and steep banks are generally characteristic of the western shores of the lake. No wonder Chekhov, who visited Lake Baikal on his way from Sakhalin, compared the coast near the village of Listvenichnoye, at the very source of the Angara, with the Crimean Yalta. The so-called stilted trees, which are not found in other places of Baikal, are also interesting here. The wind blows sand at the base of gnarled pines growing along the edge of the beach, and they climb deeper roots trying to resist the pressure of autumn storms. As a result, strange plants appear near the shore, fancifully bent by the wind and towering one and a half to two meters above the beach on clumsy "legs" - props, like some kind of Martian spiders. Another pearl of Baikal - the island of Olkhon - with its severe appearance differs sharply from the enchanting soft outlines of the coast and the bright, juicy colors of the landscape of Peschanaya Bay. This large, high and mountainous island, more than seventy kilometers long, is actually a special country surrounded by Baikal waters, a somewhat gloomy country, but majestic and attractive in its own way. The highest point of the island - Mount Zhima - has a height of almost one thousand three hundred meters above sea level. It rises more than eight hundred meters above the Baikal waters, and from its top offers a magnificent view of the expanses of the lake, the distant, hazy eastern shore and the picturesque cliffs of Olkhon itself. Between the island and the western shore of Lake Baikal there is a body of water almost closed in the south and wide open in the north - the Small Sea. It communicates with the southern part of the Small Sea Lake through the narrow Olkhonsky Gate Strait - one of the most dangerous places for navigation on Baikal. The fact is that a huge lake has not only a peculiar animal world, but also its own special meteorological regime. The winds of Lake Baikal are not the same as in other places. Suddenly escaping from narrow mountain gorges, they sometimes bring a lot of trouble. Each wind has its own local name, usually after the name of the river, from the valley of which it flies to the lake expanse: barguzin, kultuk, verkhovka, gloss, sarma, shelonik, khiuz, siver, and so on. The most ferocious of them are the barguzin sung in an old song and the furious sarma that rages in autumn and winter in the Small Sea, just opposite the Olkhon Gates. Sarma, falling from the mountains into the narrow space of the Small Sea, reaches hurricane strength, breaks the crests of the waves, forms tornadoes, raises clouds of spray, which quickly freeze in the air. The howl of the wind and the roar of the waves are so strong that they drown out the sound of the shot. The majestic and formidable beauty of these storms can probably only be conveyed by an artist's brush or symphonic music. The waters of Bayal boil angrily and furiously: sometimes it seems that the tops of the waves reach black, low clouds. The rocks tremble from the impact of the waves and emit a deaf, ominous rumble. Woe to the tugboat or the fishing seiner that finds itself in the strait at such a time. Only the "one-pipe giant" "Komsomolets", the only one in the entire Baikal fleet, decides to pass through the Small Sea when the sarma is blowing. In the autumn of 1902, the Alexander Nevsky steamer, towing three barges with fishermen, got into a sarma and, unable to cope with the wind with all the power of its machines, cut off the tugboats, after which it hardly reached the port, having received severe damage. One barge was thrown by the wind onto the sandy shore, and the people on it escaped, while the other two crashed against the stones. Those of the fishermen who managed to get ashore were heavily iced over and died of hypothermia. And yet, Olkhon, despite the vagaries of the weather, is one of the most picturesque places on Baikal. The peculiar view of its small sea shores, as if sawn by the surf, spectacular rocky capes with many caves, stunning views from these capes to the east, where the Baikal expanses turn blue to the horizon, and to the west, where wooded mountains approach the sandy beaches of the Small Sea - all this makes Olkhon extraordinarily attractive for travelers. On the east coast, the Svyatoy Nos peninsula is considered the most interesting and diverse corner. There are also many picturesque mountainous capes and cozy bays, and nearby is the secluded archipelago of the Ushkany Islands, any of which is just a Robinson's dream. But especially attracts travelers located to the north of the peninsula Chivyrkuisky Bay, not in the Baikal style shallow and warm. In any of its many bays, for example, in the amazingly beautiful Zmeinaya Bay, you can live for a month or two and feed on new impressions every day. Fishing, swimming, hiking in the mountains and capes of the Holy Nose, for berries and mushrooms, and just evening thoughts by the lake, sitting on a mighty pine trunk thrown out by the waves and contemplating the lake surface with seagulls flying above it and a white ridge of clouds over the mountains - all this will be deposited in the recesses of the soul with an unfading feeling of some kind of calm sunny happiness, the like of which you will not experience in any other part of the Earth ... One of the places on the coast of the peninsula is especially mysterious and interesting. This is a site of the so-called "singing sands". Such sands, found on our planet only in a few places, form here a whole beach, seven to ten meters wide. The sand on it is fine-grained, grayish-yellow, superbly sorted. When walking along the upper dry part of the beach, the sand emits a loud creak, very similar to the creak of leather shoes. If you rake the sand with your feet along the way, the creak intensifies and turns into a jerky howl. sand creaks and howls also when it is raked with a stick or hand. If you press the sand vertically with your foot or hit something from top to bottom, then instead of a creak, only a faint crunch is heard, similar to how dry starch crunches when stirred. Obviously, the "singing" of sand depends on the size and shape of the sand, their moisture content, roughness and other properties, but the mystery of the origin of "singing sands" has not yet been solved by science. There are natural corners in Russia that conquer immediately and forever. And you don't have to be a zoologist, geologist or lake specialist to believe in the uniqueness of Baikal. It is enough just to be able to see and compare, and then any traveler who has visited the "glorious sea" at least once will surely appreciate the fairness and accuracy of the old proverb: "He who has not seen Baikal has not known Siberia..." Author: B.Wagner
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