sun colours

During the last two weeks of May, Yakutsk was surrounded by forest fires. There were something like 37 blazes burning in various areas of Yakutia, mostly to the north, east, and south; just as Yakutsk spent the winter enveloped in ice fog, its location in the valley made it susceptible to collecting smog that sometimes grew as thick as that in winter, obscuring vision beyond a few city blocks. The sunsets were disturbingly vivid, with the sun always gleaming a copper-scarlet amongst a mauve-violet haze.

May was a month of dust, hair always dulled and teeth gritty from walking too long outside. The grass not yet green, just grey from early sage and golden sand. This photo was taken from the top of a hill at the edge of the Erkeeni hochoto (plain, translates better as 'landmass', I think) in Khangalassy ulus. A carved eagle (clan ancestor of the region's Sakha) overlooks the river flatlands, above a field where the Ysyakh festival usually takes place.

Looking up the Erkeeni, away from the river towards the Gorny highlands (eventually). There are three major 'plains' on the Lena River... The city of Yakutsk is located in the Tuimaada valley (Tuimaada is the older, Sakha name for the city); the Erkeeni stretches into the hills south and west of the Tuimaada. There's something that feels very gentle about the land here; it's never sharp or steep, it moves in great soft glacial swells, mirroring the Lena itself. It gives easily to the little fingers of wind and water, but still it persists.

A sandpiper by the lake at the Orto Doidu nature park -- I think it's the kind called a lookuut in Sakha, but I could be mistaken. It was so lovely to watch it peck about in the water; with the sunlight on the surface, it looked as if it was eating gold leaf.

Still lake at almost-sunset, Orto Doidu, the edge of the Erkeeni hills. It's June now, and everything is much greener, and the sun does not sleep through the night. Officially sunset is nearly 11:30pm and sunrise is at 3:00am, but the light is continuous; it just weakens to a pale bluish white, gets restless, and rises again. There is such anticipation for Ysyakh at the solstice, which I should probably try to start to explain...