Arshan

The Tunka Valley opens up between Irkutsk and the Mongolian border in a way that hits you like a fact you should have known earlier — a broad alpine valley framed by the Eastern Sayan mountains on the south and gentler hills to the north, the kind of landscape that seems proportioned for something larger than ordinary human life. Arshan sits at the valley’s eastern end where a river comes down fast from the mountains, and the village exists because of what that river carries: mineral water, carbonated and iron-rich, bubbling up from a series of springs that Buryats have been using medicinally for centuries before the Soviet health system discovered them and built a sanatorium.

I arrived in late May, when the village was just emerging from winter and the sanatorium patients were doing their morning constitutional in tracksuits along the main path, clutching cups of the spring water with the focused dedication of people following doctor’s orders. The springs are organized by type — one for the stomach, one for the heart, one for the nervous system — and the tasting pavilion where you fill your cup is a Soviet-era structure that leans gently to one side and appears to have been painted recently in a color that no longer matches anything nearby. The water tastes of metal and bubbles faintly on the tongue. It is not delicious. Apparently that is not the point.

What Arshan holds that the sanatorium brochures don’t adequately account for is the Buddhism-shamanism hybrid that has organized Buryat spiritual life in this valley for as long as anyone can trace. The little Buddhist temple at the edge of the village — small, brightly painted in yellow and red, sitting in a courtyard of pine trees — is attended by monks who chant at six in the morning in a way that drifts up the hillside to wherever you happen to be. Prayer flags are strung between the trees around the springs themselves, an informal arrangement that nobody seems to have planned but that seems exactly right: the flags snapping in the mountain wind, the spring water bubbling up cold and mineral from the ground, the specific quality of mountain silence underneath the sound of both.

The hike up into the Sayan foothills above the village is why many visitors come — and many of those visitors are Russians from Irkutsk or Ulan-Ude who have been coming to this trail their entire lives. The path climbs through cedar and pine forest to a series of waterfalls, the upper one at about 1,800 meters, where the snow persists into late June and the view back down the valley shows you the full scale of the Tunka corridor. On a clear day in May you can see the volcanic cone of Chersky Peak, more than 3,000 meters, snow-covered and improbably sharp. I sat at the upper waterfall for an hour eating bread and cheese and feeling the particular satisfaction of high altitude on a windless afternoon.

The village’s wooden guesthouses are run by Buryat families who serve dinner family-style: buuzy, braised mutton with wild herbs, sour cream, black tea so strong it reads as opaque. Evenings here are slow in the way that mountain villages are slow — dark comes early even in May, the temperature drops fast after sunset, and there is nothing to do except eat well and sit by the window and watch the stars appear over the Sayan ridge. There are no bars, no entertainment, no Wi-Fi in most places. The sanatorium guests seem to consider this a feature. After two days, so did I.

When to go: June and July for the clearest mountain views and full hiking season, wildflowers on the alpine meadows, and the springs at their most sociable. August is warm and popular. May has lingering snow on the upper trails but dramatic clarity in the air. December through February, Arshan is covered in deep snow and serves a smaller crowd of Irkutsk families who know about it — the springs still run, the springs always run, and the hot bathhouse at the sanatorium costs next to nothing.