For twenty-three days I saw no newspapers, no clocks, no calendars, no mirrors. Time and identity melted into the landscape of the Altai: racing clouds and falling rain, a new and growing moon, shamans’ fires sputtering under spoonfuls of cow’s milk and crackling to devour dry cedar. I was transfixed by the rippling green mountains that gave way to snowy peaks as we traveled higher into the heart of central Asia, emerging onto the treeless plateau that is a secret and sacred place where Russia, Mongolia, Kazakhstan and China meet.Half way through the trip, our four-person film crew spent almost an hour struggling to figure out what day of the week it was — and what date in June? When we decided it was Saturday, June 16, I called my wife in California, only to be told that I was wrong, it was actually Sunday, June 17. We laughed. In a timeless world it didn’t matter. (Just one less day of shooting…)

But every day, everyone around us seemed to know exactly where we were in relation to the earth and the moon and the mountains. People kept noticing that we had started our new film project with the changing from old to new moon and everyone felt that was auspicious — a good sign.

I came with a list of ideas and questions: What is the history of cultural repression in the Altai? What forms did it take, and what was the effect on shamanism? How is identity tied to land here, and how does it compare to America or Australia? What areas have WWF and UNESCO and the former Soviet government “protected” and why did local Altaians establish different protections, in the new “nature parks”? What are the different standards and values reflected in these community protected areas? What do Altaians see as important and needing protection? How are culture and nature integrated in their protected areas? If these new protected areas attract tourists, spiritual pilgrims, could the influx pollute the land and undermine protection efforts? What is the Altai strategy to communicate to tourists what the land means to the local indigenous people?

We were guided through our mountain journey by Chagat Almashev, director of the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. Starting long before our arrival, Chagat cautioned us that political activism is limited and is not the way the local people work. Better to work on the cultural protection level, Chagat counseled: identify sacred sites, map them, assure their authenticity and identity in the complex bureaucratic Russian system, talk to elders and leaders, seek local input and consensus, and take care not to impose an American environmental activist agenda. “This is the best way to protect the Altai,” said Chagat.

Early on, Chagat introduced us to Svetlana Baidysheva, the Altai Republic’s Deputy Minister of Economic Development. In a national tourism development competition against all the other Russian republics, the Altai won, which will translate into $2.8 million per year in federal money. Chagat wants local consultation and some measure of control of future tourism development. Major European investment is about to pour into the Altai. Svetlana told us that she projects 6.6 billion rubles per year will be invested (which I calculate at $260 million per year), with a German firm to handle infrastructure design and construction, and an Austrian firm to handle financing and financial management. On the day we met Svetlana, 20 Germans had just visited. A ski resort is being planned along with major infrastructure development. Will the Altai become a European playground?

We had dinner in Gorno Altaisk with Svetlana, who raised her glass of vodka, wished us well on our journey and offered this toast: “Altai is a sacred site. Nature responds to your intentions.”

Maya Erlenbaeva is mapping sacred sites for the Foundation for Sustainable Development of Altai. She has spent the last two years meeting with elders and visiting sacred places around Kosh Agach and recording detailed information and locations on maps.Maya’s colleague, Chagat Almashev, explained: “Russians don’t recognize spiritual places, they’re intangible. So our strategy is to ‘passport’ sacred sites, to record information that will validate them in the Russian system, with every detail properly recorded. Then they will exist—they will be real.”

After we interviewed Maria by the fire in her yurt, with a brilliant sunbeam shining down from the hole in the ceiling, she invited us to visit a sacred spring in the mountains nearby. Maria wanted to perform a purification ceremony for Maya and to show her some standing stones above the spring.

We drove across rugged country and climbed into a beautiful valley. Maria built a fire and offered milk as she whispered prayers and sang. Chagat, Maya and Maria prepared prayer clothes which each of us tied to a tree next to the spring. After hiking up into the hills, Maria showed Maya a field full of standing stones and carefully explained each one to the diligent sacred site mapper. We will have to wait for translations to know what Maria told Maya, as we filmed the whole scene without any idea what was going on.

After we climbed down and a chill breeze whistled up the valley, Maria insisted that I take off my clothes and bathe in the frigid waters of the sacred spring. It was a necessary ritual. She and Maya sat down by the fire and turned their backs as I followed the shaman’s instructions. I don’t think they peeked, but I could hear them laughing.

When we met the shaman Maria Amanchina in Kosh Agach she asked us about our dreams. She wanted to know where we had been and what we had felt as we traveled through the Altai. I told her that I had two dreams while camping on Oochen Mek. In one dream, I saw a bird flying from below. It had a red underbelly and black and white striped wings. Danil Mamyev had told me the next morning that a village in Karakol Valley takes its name from a bird of similar description. I also told Maria of a second dream, in which I saw Danil standing in a lake, waist deep in water.Maria told us she would consider our request for filming, and wished us well on our journey to the Ukok, saying that we were welcome to use the firewood she had left there. A few days later we returned with fresh new tales about the blizzards that always seem to sweep in when we film with Danil.

I told Maria about an idea I was working on, an insight that came to me on Oochen Mek as I listened to Danil talk about shamanism: “Danil told us the true role of a shaman is to interact with the natural world, and to enable people to open up so they can decide for themselves where they need to go and when to visit sacred sites. It strikes me that the goals of the shaman and goals of the artist-filmmaker are very similar: to help open up each person’s inherent qualities and abilities…to enable relationship with place and with other people…to show signs or images that stimulates one’s inner work…and to inspire change.”

Maria replied: “You are on the right track with your thinking.”

Both Maria and Danil talked a lot about signs, interacting with the land, the natural relationship between a person and their place, opening oneself to a sacred land. It reminded me of what Vine Deloria said in our last film, In the Light of Reverence: “If you look at the earth, there are certain places that seem to have power and we don’t know what kind of power it is, except you have a different feeling — you feel energized. And that’s why in lot of the ceremonies you simply go out into the land, at a certain place, under supervision of a medicine man, and open yourself up. What I think is powerful about these religions is you can continue to have revelations. What the revelation is telling you is how you and your community, at this time in life, can adjust to the rest of the world. So it’s not like we designated a place and said: ‘This is going to be sacred.’ It came out of a lot of experience. The idea is not to pretend to own it, not to exploit it, but to respect it. Trying to get people to see that that’s a dimension of religion is really difficult.”After considering our request to film, Maria replied: “I have always said no, and I have had many requests. In this case I say yes.”

There is a big international black market for rock art – petroglyphs and cliff paintings – ancient sacred images that depict traditional knowledge rooted in the landscape. In southern Utah, people are using battery-powered saws to cut sandstone slabs off cliffs, which end up hanging in living rooms in New York and Tokyo. I’ve been looking for a graphic example of an attempt to steal a petroglyph for 20 years.

In the Altai, tourists can buy a boulder with a thousand year-old carving at a roadside stand for $30. At Chui Oozy Nature Park, which was formed to protect the rock art from vandalism and thieves, I finally found solid evidence to illustrate the problem.

The person trying to steal this image of an Argali mountain sheep had started to remove a circular piece of rock, but made a bad hammer stroke that broke off one of the animal’s horns. Having ruined the image, the thief gave up and walked away. This image illustrates the need for protection of sacred sites through community involvement and better public education, and demonstrates the need for more resources to fund ranger patrols and law enforcement. (Click on the image to enlarge it.)

We made it out of Kosh-Agach and up to the Ukok Nature Park’s camp at the sacred radon springs, cold water baths that Maria told us would reinvigorate us (if not make us glow a bit for the next 200 years!)  As soon as we arrived a massive snow storm headed our way. We quickly geared up to film with Danil, driving the wazi (Russian army van) up the road as far as we could go and then stumbling through the falling snow to a precipice. We filmed Danil in a short interview (see our Pilgrimage to a Sacred Site video) as long as we all could take it and then retreated to the warm and dry cabins.

Once the storm blew through, we sat down with Sergei and Danil to talk about what brought us to the Ukok Plateau. Gas. And, more specifically, Gazprom’s plans to build a natural gas pipeline through this majestic, biodiverse plateau to China.Local Altaians are up in arms over this plan. While Gazprom has made promises to protect the environment and landscape and bring energy to the local district, people do not believe it. The Ukok is where the Ice Princess was unearthed from her grave and where many other burial sites have been disturbed.

Many Altaians believe the Russian federal authorities are in a rush to exploit the country’s natural resources for profit and may destroy the land and culture of the Altai to accomplish their goals. During the interview Sergei brought out his map to show Danil the planned path of the pipeline.

Two days ago we repacked all our gear and selves back into our two minivans and made our way along the Chuisky Tract (the only “highway” through the Altai). This two-lane road was once a part of the Silk Road and still functions as the main conduit for anything moving from Russia, China and Mongolia through the precipitous heights of the Golden Mountains of Altai. We pass goats, pigs, men on horseback and logging trucks on our long ascent before we are passed up by some flash vehicles bearing Moscow license plates. The Altai is now a tourist destination for many affluent Russians eager to hunt, fish, climb, ski and lounge on the sunny banks of the marvelous Katun River which winds its way down from sacred Mt. Belukha in the far southwest of the country.

But, today, we’ve gone the opposite direction. We head to Kosh-Agach, the easternmost town in the Altai. It sits on the near-barren high steppe, cowering under the snowy peaks that stand as sentinels marking the entrance to the Ukok Pass. Tomorrow we will head out early to drive up the pass and camp on the edge of the Ukok Plateau. But, today, we discover the town of Kosh-Agach, a dusty and ragged place that can hardly be called a city but which has more sprawl than a town could justify. The frigid vast blue sky above our heads, the unpaved streets riddled with potholes and wheel tracks and the bleak wooden storefronts lend this place the air of a squatter town in the old American West. The few people lingering on the streets hardly look at us, although we Patagonia-clad crew of Americans with film gear tumbling out the back of late model vehicles must be an odd sight. Soon, the man we came to meet, Sergei Orchurdaipov — Director of the Ukok Nature Park and representative to the Altai Assembly for Kosh-Agach Rayon — shows up. He’s a hefty man in Russian camo fatigues with a buzz cut, fashionable sunglasses and a booming laugh. He’s nothing like Danil, but these two men know each other well and clasp hands, smiling and nodding while certainly exchanging at little joke in Altai about these strange Americans.

…to our incredible crew! After days of rain, Will and Andy — ever the über-professionals — take a break from their “rest” day to dry out the equipment.

We’re a week into our shoot and are exhausted but elated. We are back in residence at the Uch-Enmek nature park yurts having just returned from three days climbing through the wet alpine wildnerness to Ooch Enmek mountain with Danil (a phenomenal guide who manages to maintain his humor while we interview him in the sleeting rain and bitter cold and, later, takes pity on the shivering Americans and builds the perfect fire to dry us out). He never shows signs of fatigue, even though he took a collective 50 pounds or so of equipment off our backs and carried it on his pack for our trek down the mountain.Back on the sunny Karakol valley floor, our film team has met up with our friends from the US, Jennifer Castner and Alyson Ewald, who run the Altai Project, an NGO that works with Altai communities on sustainable energy and economic development. Here we stand AFTER a nap and banya (hot steambath) but before the night’s shashlik (grilled lamb) and vodka. We owe a lot to Jennifer and Alyson (standing on the left) and the tight-knit group of people working on cultural, economic and environmental issues in this beautiful place. The Altai is not a place one Googles easily to find accurate and abundant information. We took time to talk to as many people as possible in the U.S. who know the country well and they introduced us to the most perspicacious and generous people in the Altai. This includes Danil (pictured center) and our friend Chagat Almashev, who runs the Fund for the Sustainable Development of the Altai, and Joanna Dobson, our wonderful translator and a British expat who has lived in Ongudai for many years (standing far right).

After three days and two nights of slogging through rain, mud and sleet — Danil our infatigable guide and inspiration — we emerge from the Siberian forest and toe-step up the slick moraine to where Danil will give his offering to the mountain.And this is the moment just before the clouds descended upon us and, in a matter of twenty seconds, slid across the distant comb-like peak thwartingour efforts to film the mountain and reminding us of man’s necessary humility when in the realm of the natural.

We arrived last night to the cozy campground at Ooch Enmek Nature Park, a serene round of traditional gers (a type of large yurt) at the edge of the sacred Karakol Valley. We are here to find out how Altaians protect this landscape, which has been an important burial ground for millenia (as evidenced by the numerous kurgans or stone burial mounds) and center of steppe culture where petroglyphs and standing stones are signs of the continuous cycle of life in this valley.This morning, our guide Chagat and our translator Joanna brought us a visitor. Someone who, undoubtedly, will change everything we’ve planned for these three weeks and take us off in some wonderful new direction. For months we’ve been told by our local contacts that we must meet the elusive Danil Mamyev, that he knows everything about the Altai, that he has the most profound spiritual gravity, that he is the guide in this country. I was thus surprised when the stocky fiftyish man with unusually (for a contemporary Altaian) long gray hair and a bright red Gore-Tex jacket strode into camp. With a vise-like handshake that would put John Wayne to shame, Danil greeted us with a suspicious look in his inscrutable black eyes and then asked us to come with him to sit in the shade.As he sat with the grace of a bodhisattva under the broad canopy of a plane tree, he listened to us describe our project with no reaction. After Toby delicately inquired whether Danil would be interested in speaking with us on camera, in describing his work as Director of the Nature Park and his own personal connection to the land, I guessed we were certain to be disappointed. Danil, however, gave a quick satisfied nod and finally smiled. Would we be interested in going up to his sacred mountain Ooch Enmek? he queried. He was going up there anyway on a pilgrimage and he would be happy to have us along.Needless to say, we got our things together immediately.

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 horrific. 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.

We met today with Rima Yerkinova, the director of the Altai Museum, and interviewed her (for four hours!) about the 1993 disturbance of a 2,500 year-old burial on the sacred Ukok Plateau by Russian archaeologists. A young woman’s body, frozen in permafrost, was removed from an elaborate grave and the Altai people still feel very strongly that the desecration can only be healed by the return of the so-called “Ice Princess,” which the museum director prefers to call “the Ukok Princess.” Rima showed us four paintings by different Altaian artists, which she said were depictions of the Ukok Princess. The deep emotions triggered by the unearthing of an important ancestor, a woman whose dignity was physically violated, has yielded an outpouring of creative energy. The collecive unconscious of the Altai people has been stimulated by the woman’s spirit, says Rima. Russian archaeologists taking a body, treating it with chemicals to preserve it, and then displaying it in a glass case — all in the name of science — has had an unexpected positive impact by inspiring the Altaian people to express their feelings and their vision of who they are in art. Adding to the unsettled feelings is a proposal by Russian energy giant Gazprom to construct a natural gas pipeline and road across the Ukok Plateau into neighboring China. Clearly, as these four paintings illustrate, the identity and the soul of the Altaian people are profoundly linked to land and ancestors — and delicate political relationships with Russia and China.

Today, we finally put to use the 700 lbs. of equipment that we’ve hauled halfway around the world. Our first interview of Losing Sacred Ground was with Mikhail Shishin, a pensive professor of cultural anthropology and philosophy in Barnaul. He also is the committed leader of a determined group of Russians and Altaians that have formed The Fund for the 21st Century Altai, an NGO that works to educate Russians and the international community about the unique culture and environment of the Altai.Speaking of the rapid development going on in Altai — including the proposed natural gas pipeline that Russia is building to China through the Ukok Plateau — Mikhail struck a somber but rational note:”It seems to me that we’ve reached a point in Altai when we need to balance everything very carefully. We can either have a world where everything is homogenously globalized, where pipelines are everywhere, roads are everywhere, and people move freely, OR we can set aside certain places, places that preserve culture and spirituality, places where water remains and where enormous glaciers are reservoirs for all humanity. The taiga is here, where the air is regenerated and we receive oxygen – perhaps this is more important?”

Here’s the Sacred Land Film Project crew, looking jet-lagged yet spry, in Moscow’s Red Square. From left to right, we are Will Parrinello (camera), Toby McLeod (director/producer), Andy Black (sound and camera) and Ashley Tindall (associate producer). After a 14 hour flight from San Francisco through Atlanta and what will be a 12-hour layover (and sprint to see the sights) in Moscow, we will take a red-eye flight and arrive in the Soviet-era city of Barnaul (Altaisky Krai province) around 6 am. That will make it around a 36-hour sprint to the other side of the world! Thankfully we’re coming back to Moscow at the end of this trip, so this won’t be all you see of this fascinating city of politics, churches, shopping and traffic.