Lena Pillars

Getting to the Lena Pillars is the kind of journey that makes you understand the scale of Siberia in your body rather than on a map. They stand on the bank of the Lena River in the Sakha Republic — Yakutia — which is the largest and one of the coldest administrative regions on the planet, a place where winter temperatures routinely drop below minus fifty. We came in summer, which in Yakutia means a brief, intense, mosquito-plagued window of warmth, and we reached the pillars the only way you can: by boat, several hours upriver from Yakutsk, watching the taiga slide past in an unbroken green wall.

A wall of stone on a river of distance

The Lena Pillars are a UNESCO World Heritage site, and the bureaucratic phrase undersells them completely. They are a near-continuous rampart of vertical limestone columns, some over a hundred metres tall, running for roughly forty kilometres along the right bank of the river. From the water they rise straight out of the forest like the ruined wall of some impossible city, weathered into spires and buttresses and gaps, the rock a pale ochre against the dark green of the taiga and the wide pewter sheet of the Lena. The river here is enormous — kilometres wide in places — and the sense of distance is total. There is nothing else. No towns, no roads, no other boats for hours. Just water, forest, stone, and a sky that in midsummer barely gets dark.

You can land at a designated spot and climb a wooden boardwalk and stair system up onto the top of the pillars, which is steep and sweaty work in the brief summer heat, with mosquitoes operating in what I can only describe as organised formations. Lia, who treats biting insects as a personal challenge rather than a deterrent, charged up ahead. The reward at the top is a viewpoint out over the whole sweep of the river and the columns marching off into the haze in both directions, a view that genuinely stopped me talking, which Lia will tell you is rare.

The long way home

What stays with me about the Lena Pillars is not just the rock but everything around it. On the boat back our Yakut guide talked about the permafrost beneath the forest, about the mammoth tusks that erode out of the riverbanks each spring, about winters so cold that the river becomes a road and trucks drive on it for months. We stopped on a sandbar to grill river fish over a fire and drink tea while the long northern evening refused to end, the sun sliding along the horizon without quite setting.

This is not a casual destination. It takes effort, money, and a tolerance for both mosquitoes and very long days on a boat. But standing on top of those pillars, with Yakutia stretching out unbroken in every direction, I felt about as far from everywhere as I have ever been — which, for me, is the whole point of going anywhere.

When to go: June through early September is the only practical window, when the river is open and boat tours run from Yakutsk. July is warmest but also peak mosquito season — bring serious repellent and a head net. The boat trip is a long day or an overnight; book through an operator in Yakutsk, as independent access is effectively impossible.