Kamchatka has many amazing places to create eco-friendly health trails
Anton Ulatov, a follower of a healthy lifestyle, proposed creating an ecological and educational hiking trail with a length of about 20 kilometers near the regional center, Kamchatka.Today reports with reference to the Kamchatka Territory Development Corporation.
The initiative was supported by the Corporation and the Legislative Assembly of the region. The proposal was also considered at the recently held Kamchatka Investment Forum, which included Evgeny Rakityansky, an architect of hiking trails and coordinator of volunteer programs at the Federal Center for Trail Engineering.
He lives in the small town of Baikalsk in the Irkutsk region. This is where the movement was born 24 years ago, and then it was picked up in many regions of the country. Evgeny Rakityansky spoke about his work.
– Initially, we did this solely on the principles of volunteerism, without attracting investments, regional and federal grants. We, both ourselves and the subjects of the relevant business, had to prove that hiking trails can have not only ecological and educational benefits, but also commercial ones.
– Have you managed to combine these seemingly very far from each other categories?
– Not immediately. There were no examples of creating trails in the form in which we imagined them in Russia, so mistakes and failures were inevitable, but “experience, the son of difficult mistakes” came. We have also defined for ourselves the basic principles of our activities. For example, a trail is alive and in demand only when it becomes a family vacation destination, accessible for children from 4-5 years old to walk along it. With my parents, of course. Creating more complex routes eliminates their widespread use. They are difficult for the economy and costly to maintain. We are focusing on Class 1 – 3 trails. Conceptually, they are subordinated to our idea of making the beauty of nature accessible to the average layman.
– And how does the commercial component coexist with this maxim?
– It’s organic. I’ll give you an example of a trail in the south of Lake Baikal. It connects the town of Slyudyanka and Chersky Peak. Its length is 22 kilometers. The route provides an opportunity to explore several unique natural monuments near Lake Baikal. We have been working on the trail for 10 years. During this period, its annual attendance increased from 8,000 to 100. The increase was not due to tourists, who are commonly called “bowlers”, that is, those who are ready to overcome a route of any complexity and without requesting infrastructure, but thanks to family groups. Their needs are different. Family groups prioritize safety and comfort. From 2005 to 2019 alone, the number of accommodations in the Baikal trails increased fourfold, and the annual occupancy rate of campsites doubled. This is a clear commercial effect. Trails create additional attractive niches for SMEs.
Returning to the Slyudyanka – Chersky Peak trail, I would like to note another indicator of its effectiveness. The number of visitors to the trail has increased 12-fold, but at the same time, the amount of garbage that has to be disposed of has decreased many times.
– What, in your opinion, are the reasons for such a positive, and at the same time unexpected result?
– Our guests learn to love nature, and therefore try to minimize the damage caused to it. The long-term experience of trail building has convinced us of the short-term result of various kinds of environmental actions and educational events. It is necessary to make a person fall in love with nature, to teach them to understand the beauty of the world around them, and then society will come to a stable realization of the need to save it, to transfer our planet to the next generations in its original form.
– You have, of course, got acquainted with Anton Ulatov’s hiking trail project. From your point of view, to what extent does it meet the above criteria?
– The project is certainly interesting. I understand his approach and welcome the concepts he focuses on. Residents and guests of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky will have an additional opportunity for an active family vacation. The trail, as Anton says, although it will pass almost along the outskirts of the regional center, nevertheless, it will allow you to get acquainted with very picturesque places that many citizens do not even suspect.
– How can you characterize the work on creating trails?
– When implementing a project, an architect or a trail designer should turn into a director making a fascinating film about nature. And just as not everyone manages to create a talented tape, not every terrain trail becomes in demand.
When we create a trail, we must model traveling along it not as moving from point A to point B, but as a process of enjoying the nature around us and the dynamics of a comfortable journey. There are many amazing places in Kamchatka where exactly such trails can be created.
– The other day, the head of the State Duma Committee on Tourism, Sangaji Tarbayev, proposed not to develop mass tourism in Kamchatka, Yakutia and the Baikal region, so as not to cause irreparable damage to the unique nature of these regions. How would you rate this position?
– I can only welcome concerns about the state of nature in our regions. But the final conclusions about the maximum possible tourist flow to Kamchatka, Lake Baikal, and Yakutia should be made after a thorough and comprehensive scientific examination. I can only say that trails with a regulated strict order of their passage create a minimal anthropogenic impact on nature. Perhaps this is the path we should follow, not only in Kamchatka, Yakutia and the Baikal region, but throughout Russia in order to preserve the fragile natural world of our country.
In the photo: an approximate route of a hiking trail in the vicinity of Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky; Anton Ulatov, President of the Federal Center for Trail Engineering Egor Vlasov, Evgeny Rakityansky (from left to right).