Lena Pillars

Listen first. The water of the Lena moves past almost without a sound, broad and brown and patient. Above it, a wall of stone rises in columns, ridges and towers. In the low northern light the rock turns grey, then ochre, then a soft rust red. The air smells of larch resin and cold river water. Somewhere up on the ridge, a bird calls once and goes quiet. You are standing in front of the Lena Pillars, one of the great natural stone forests of the far north.

This place sits in the Sakha Republic, also called Yakutia, in north-eastern Siberia. The Lena is one of the longest rivers on Earth. It runs north for thousands of kilometres before it reaches the Arctic Ocean. Here, upstream from the city of Yakutsk, the river has cut along a high plateau. The result is this long line of cliffs on the riverbank, stretching on for many kilometres. Most visitors arrive the same way people have always arrived — by water.

Look closely at the stone itself. It is mostly limestone and related rocks, laid down in layers. Those layers formed on the floor of a warm, shallow sea. That sea existed more than five hundred million years ago, in a period that geologists call the Cambrian. It is hard to imagine now, with permafrost under your feet and winter only a few months away. But this frozen corner of Siberia was once tropical seabed, full of early marine life.

That early life is the first great surprise of the pillars. The Cambrian is famous for what scientists call the Cambrian explosion. This was a period when complex animal life spread quickly across the oceans. The rocks of this area hold fossils from that time. They include traces of reef-building creatures and some of the earliest animals with hard shells. Researchers from around the world have studied these layers. For them, this riverbank is a long page from the early history of animal life.

So how did a flat seabed become a forest of stone towers? The answer is the climate. This part of Siberia has one of the most extreme climates on the planet. Winters fall far below minus forty degrees. Summers can bring real heat. The difference between the coldest winter night and the hottest summer day can approach a hundred degrees Celsius. Few places anywhere on Earth swing so far, so regularly, from one extreme to the other.

That swing is the sculptor. Water seeps into cracks in the rock. In autumn it freezes and expands, and pushes the cracks a little wider. In spring it thaws, and the loose pieces fall. Year after year, this cycle breaks the cliffs apart along their natural lines of weakness. Small streams and gullies cut down between the columns. What remains standing are the harder sections — the pillars, spires and narrow walls you see in front of you.

You can see this process still at work. Look at the base of the cliffs. There are slopes of broken stone, called scree, piled against the rock. Some pieces are fresh and sharp at the edges. Others are rounded and covered with lichen. The pillars are not a finished monument. They are a scene in the middle of slow change. Some of the towers standing today will fall, and new ones will separate from the cliff behind them.

In 1995 the area became a protected nature park. In 2012, UNESCO added the Lena Pillars to its World Heritage List. UNESCO gave this status for the natural landscape and for the value of the Cambrian fossil record here. The site was one of the first natural World Heritage Sites in this part of Russia. Today the park protects not only the pillars but also the forests, rivers and wildlife of the surrounding plateau.

The second surprise is much younger than the rock. In the sediments of this region, people have found the bones of Ice Age animals. Among them are remains of woolly mammoths and ancient bison. These animals lived here in the last glacial period, when grassland covered much of Siberia. So the riverbank holds two very different worlds. Deep in the stone lies the Cambrian sea. Higher up, in the loose ground, lie traces of the mammoth steppe.

The park holds another unusual landscape that many visitors never hear about. In parts of the area, there are open fields of sand, almost like small deserts. Locals call these sandy areas tukulans. They seem out of place in a land of taiga — the thick northern forest of larch and pine. Standing on the warm sand in summer, with the cold river nearby, you can feel how strange and varied this corner of Siberia really is.

For the Sakha people, the native people of Yakutia, the land and the river carry spiritual meaning. Traditional Sakha belief holds that spirits live in nature — in rivers, forests and remarkable places like these cliffs. Locals say the pillars deserve respect, and some travellers leave small offerings or tie ribbons at special spots. The exact stories vary from person to person. Treat them as living tradition, not as a fixed history from a book.

If you climb to the top, there is a path and a series of wooden stairs up the slope. The climb is steep in places, so take it slowly. From the upper viewpoint, the river spreads out far below you. The tops of the pillars rise right next to the edge. On a clear day you can see the Lena curve away into the distance, with forest on both banks and almost no sign of people.

Before you leave, stand still for one more minute. Look at the line where the stone meets the sky, and then down to where it meets the water. Every crack you see began with a single winter of frost. Every layer began as mud on an ancient sea floor. As your boat pulls away, watch the pillars slowly close together into one long wall. Then the river turns, and they are gone behind the forest.