The twin peaks of Mount Elbrus Camp form the backdrop to a camp near the head of the Malka valley
A Circuit of Mount Elbrus
Roger Butler looks back on a memorable backpacking trip in the Caucasus
“
W
e have been stolen.”
Sergei had just shouted and I peered
out of the tent to see him jogging off down the
valley. His boots had disappeared in the night
and he suspected they were now somewhere in
the cluster of timber cottages we had passed
the previous afternoon. Dawn light touched the
nearby peaks and the great white dome of Elbrus
shimmered overhead like a huge marshmallow.
It wasn’t the first time we’d run into
problems. A few nights earlier, the thunder of
hooves announced the arrival of another local
thief who helped himself to trekking poles and
a line of freshly-rinsed washing. And, shortly
before we left for the Caucasus, my ears had
pricked up when the radio mentioned a terrorist
incident in the airport at a back-of-beyond
Russian town called Mineralnye Vody. The story
had fallen off the radar by noon but, knowing we
would be landing there in just a few days’ time,
we did start to wonder whether this was the best
place for a summer ‘holiday’.
On arrival, we were puzzled when our
guides - a maths professor from St Petersburg
University and one of his Ukranian pupils
who couldn’t speak a word of English – shook
our hands and told us our trip was cancelled:
“Local problems - we must walk round Mount
Elbrus.” Our original plans to trek towards the
frontier with Georgia had been shelved and we
simply had to go with the flow. And, initially,
it was quite a flow – as dusk descended, a giant
mudslide blocked our progress up the long
Baksan valley and we eventually arrived outside
the concrete bunker of a hotel at three in the
morning.
12 Outdoor focus | autumn 2019