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.
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