Two days ago we left the grim streets of industrial Barnaul for Gorno-Altaisk, the capital city of the Altai Republic. Arriving after a five hour drive in a speeding minivan, our beleaguered bodies crammed in among the sharp corners of our equipment, our eyes delighted at the sight of Gorno’s verdant hills and (almost) quaint city streets (if one averts the eyes from the Brutalist-style of ubiquitous concrete architecture). We got our bearings and slept off a little of the jet lag and then got down to business, interviewing the Director of the National Museum, Rima Yerkinova, and finally meeting all the people we’ve only talked with by phone or heard about for all these months of planning.

We left Gorno late last night and arrived in Erdogan, a rugged hamlet that appeared ghostly at night, its tumble-down barns and fences ethereally lit by our vans’ headlights. But, waking this morning, we discovered we’d arrived to a neat little village lying in the lap of voluptuous hills that would laugh the green off the Irish countryside. This preternaturally quiet valley is where the powerful Katun River broadens after it drops several thousand feet from the eastern Altai mountains. For 30 years the Russian government has wanted to put a massive hydroelectric dam on this site, ostensibly to power local industry and homes, but the plans have so far be shown to be economically unviable, not to mention environmentally tragic. However, the Katun Dam project is still high on many officials’ lists, so locals brought us out here to remind the world that the river and valley remain at risk.