Excuse me, is this the way to the Tundra?

The 65th parallel crosses the Russian shores next time at an interesting point. There is a small bay just north of the outlets of rivers Mudyuga and Kad. Over eons the rivers have created mud deposits in front of the bay, which now is relatively shallow.

The screen shot above, taken from Google Maps shows the bay of Kad and the orange line depicting the 65th parallel. The inland landscape looks very familiar. There are forests mottled with swamps like those seen in Karelia. Pretty soon we notice a crucial difference: the forests are clearly new. Huge, freshly cut areas are more common here. There are also roads which seem to go nowhere at all. Majority of them are of course forestry roads, but there are also destinations which are clearly leisure related. Summer cottages on lake shores, and hunting shelters on more remote places.

Above photo (by Aleksey Golovastikov) shows a hunters' or fowlers' hut near the village of Kad. The next, exceptionally beautiful image shows a wilderness lake with mirror like surface (photo by Artem Bagaev).

The northwestern part of Russia is probably quite accessible for the people living in western Russian metropoles. It is reflected by the amount of stored photos in Panoramio. Next I found a group of recreational fishers trying their luck on river Polta, which again follows the 65th parallel for quite a long time. Image by Andrey Mitkin.

The Polta River discharges to a bigger river called Kuloy. After that we cannot follow any waterways so consequently all imagery for Panoramio is absent. About 100 km of swampy forests before there is another river and this is now a major stream, the Mezen River. The river has been an important transport route for hunters and merchants, especially fur traders. Its banks have many small villages and our latitude 65 N crosses the river just north of the twin villages of Nisogora.

When I first saw the snowy image (by Sergey Klepikov), my attention was fixed on the strange structure near the top of the hill. A bear cache maybe?? Bear caches have been a common necessity in northern settlements where you have to store your food in places which are inaccessible for wildlife. Typically you see them in nomadic seasonal villages, where the construction of actual houses is not very sturdy. Also the shape of the cabin is too high for a bear cache. Theory busted.

So maybe by adding some extra features to the structure you could use it as a windmill. This one has obviously lost its blades as well as the ladder needed for the entry. After a brief image search with Google I found the following:

You could argue that the drawing was created from exactly the same windmill or conversely that the windmill builder had used this design plan. However the drawing comes from a windmill in California, USA by US architects Page & Turnbull. How can this be? The surprising explanation is that the Fort Ross settlement, north-west from San Francisco had Russian immigration in early 19th century and they had built two similar windmills. The drawing is from a new mill constructed in Russia and donated to the Fort Ross museum in 2012.

Unfortunately the Mezen river turns east a bit more to the south, that I do not feel it justified to follow the river anymore. Therefore only forests and swamps are seen for another 200 kilometers as we cross the border of the autonomic republic of Kom. Right after the border a great body of water can be seen. It is the lake Yamozero, which is really very strange looking - like a meteorite crater filled with water. 

Its diameter is roughly six kilometers and the shores slope gently to reveal ancient shorelines up to 15 meters over the current surface level. The lake has been a subject to many studies, because its detailed history has been clarified to preglacial times about 90000 years back. The lake is also very clean. There is no human settlement for tens of kilometers around, so it really takes dedication and effort to visit the lake and none of the Panoramio users have given enough of those to get images posted.

While reading the above mentioned history study, I found many important pieces of information which explain much of the appearance of current landscape not just around the lake but in the entire northern and north-eastern Europe. Even the reason why we haven't seen any tundra (yet).