The country between Gizhiga and Yamsk was entirely different in character from anything which I had previously seen in Siberia.  There were no such great desolate plains as those between Gizhiga and Anadyrsk and in the northern part of Kamchatka.  On the contrary, the whole coast of the Okhotsk Sea, for nearly six hundred miles west of Gizhiga, was one wilderness of rugged, broken, almost impassable mountains, intersected by deep valleys and ravines, and heavily timbered with dense pine and larch forests.  The Stanavoi range of mountains, which sweeps up around the Okhotsk Sea from the Chinese frontier, keeps everywhere near the coast line, and sends down between its lateral spurs hundreds of small rivers and streams which run through deep wooded valleys to the sea.  The road, or rather the travelled route from Gizhiga to Yamsk, crosses all these streams and lateral spurs at right angles, keeping about midway between the great mountain range and the sea.  Most of the dividing ridges between these streams are nothing but high, bare watersheds, which can be easily crossed; but at one point, about a hundred and fifty versts west of Gizhiga, the central range sends out to the seacoast, a great spur of mountains 2500 or 3000 feet in height, which completely blocks up the road.  Along the bases of these mountains runs a deep, gloomy valley known as the Viliga, whose upper end pierces the central Stanavoi range and affords an outlet to the winds pent up between the steppes and the sea.  In winter when the open water of the Okhotsk Sea is warmer than the frozen plains north of the mountains, the air over the former rises, and a colder atmosphere rushes through the valley of the Viliga to take its place.  In summer, while the water of the sea is still chilled with masses of unmelted ice, the great steppes behind the mountains are covered with vegetation and warm with almost perpetual sunshine, and the direction of the wind is consequently reversed.  This valley of the Viliga, therefore, may be regarded as a great natural breathing-hole, through which the interior steppes respire once a year.  At no other point does the Stanavoi range afford an opening through which the air can pass back and forth between the steppes and the sea, and as a natural consequence this ravine is swept by one almost uninterrupted storm.  While the weather everywhere else is calm and still, the wind blows through the Viliga in a perfect hurricane, tearing up great clouds of snow from the mountain sides and carrying them far out to sea.  For this reason it is dreaded by all natives who are compelled to pass that way, and is famous throughout north-eastern Siberia as “the stormy gorge of the Viliga!”

On the fifth day after leaving Gizhiga, our small party, increased by a Russian postilion and three or four sledges carrying the annual Kamchatkan mail, drew near the foot of the dreaded Viliga Mountains.  Owing to deep snow our progress had not been so rapid as we had anticipated, and we were only able to reach on the fifth night a small yurt built to shelter travellers, near the mouth of a river called the Topolofka, thirty versts from the Viliga.  Here we camped, drank tea, and stretched ourselves out on the rough plank floor to sleep, knowing that a hard day’s work awaited us on the morrow.