Nalychevo Park

Nalychevo was the trip where my legs finally gave out on me, in the best possible way. There’s no road in, which sounds like a minor detail until you’re three days into a hike with a pack full of gear and Lia is the one who has to remind you that yes, this is still technically a vacation. Most people fly in by helicopter from Petropavlovsk, and we did that on the way out, but going in on foot along the river valley felt like the only honest way to arrive somewhere this remote.

The park sits in a natural basin ringed by three volcanoes, Avachinsky, Koryaksky, and Zhupanovsky, and the trail in tracks the Nalycheva River through meadows that in July are absolutely thick with wildflowers, purple and yellow and white all tangled together up to your knees. Brown bears use these same meadows to feed on the vegetation before salmon season really gets going, and our guide made us keep a rhythm of shouting and clapping through the thicker brush, which felt paranoid until we found a print in the mud bigger than my hand.

The hot springs are the whole point once you’re actually there, though. There are several clusters scattered through the park, and the main one near the ranger station has simple wooden pools built right into the ground where the mineral water collects. We got in one evening as a light snow started falling, completely incongruous with the warmth against my skin, steam rising up to meet the snowflakes before they landed. I’ve been to plenty of hot springs since moving to Mexico, but nothing that combined temperature extremes quite that dramatically, or that felt quite that earned after three days of hiking to get there.

There’s a small ranger station and a handful of very basic cabins if you don’t want to camp, which we didn’t, mostly because Lia had reached her limit with tent stakes by that point. The rangers there live an almost monastic existence, months at a stretch with only the occasional helicopter drop for supplies, and one of them, a quiet guy named Pavel, showed us where to find a second smaller spring away from the main pools that barely anyone uses.

Flying out by helicopter a few days later, watching the whole basin shrink beneath us with its steam vents and meadows and that ring of volcanoes standing guard, I understood why nobody bothered building a road. Some places are better for staying hard to reach.

When to go: July and August bring the wildflower bloom and the most reliable weather for the multi-day trek in; helicopter access runs largely year-round but bookings get tight in peak summer.