Lake Lama

A sacred lake and lost bronze-age worlds

Although the Putorana is part of the Putorana Nature Reserve and lies in a region where visitor access has long been tightly controlled, Lama has never really been empty land. The Evenki, Nganasan and Dolgan are regarded as its indigenous peoples, and the far eastern end of the lake has been treated since time immemorial as a powerful sacred place; wooden Evenk idols have been found on its shores, and legend holds that the last surviving Evenk female shaman lived here into the late 1930s. Even today, Northern ethnic groups consider it a place where wishes can be made, and esoteric travellers come specifically for that reputation.↗↗

Archaeology deepens the mystique. Soviet archaeologist Leonid Khlobystin, who surveyed the plateau's rivers and lakes in the mid-1970s, found evidence that the Putorana was inhabited 3,000–4,000 years ago by people already working tin bronze — the earliest bronze finds in the Arctic, dating to around the 18th century BC and cast from native copper from the Norilsk deposits. Why those settlements vanished is still a mystery, and the trail of an older, little-understood civilization is one of the things that gives Lama its magnetic pull for romantics.↗

More recent history left its own darker marks. In the post-war years a camp for political prisoners, including leaders of the Baltic republics, operated on the lake's shores; the site is now a campground with a memorial sign built by the prisoners themselves. And on the rugged Bunisyak tourist hostel shore, its founder Oleg Krashevsky — who helped establish the Putorana Reserve and is honoured by the Nganasan as a "White Shaman" — assembled a private ethnographic museum of more than a thousand exhibits of the northern peoples' costumes, tools and ceremonial objects.↗↗↗

What to see and do

Lama is the most tourist-accessible lake on the plateau, and most visits are built around its shores and the waterfalls spilling down the surrounding escarpments. The classic trek is to the South Neralakh waterfall, whose roar you hear long before you see it: the approach crosses a couple of hundred metres of steep, loose scree that locals call *kurumnik*, where you learn to step only on moss-anchored boulders. Guides point out the extraordinary number of rainbows that form in the spray, attributed to the lake's sharp temperature swings and magnetic anomalies in the rock.↗↗

Day excursions typically combine a boat hop across the lake with hikes to cascades such as those on the Vitaminika river and ascents onto the plateau rim — for instance up Festival Mountain — for the signature view of headless, flat-topped mountains mirrored in the still water. The quietest reward of all is simply being on the lake at dusk, when a wind-flat surface throws back a blazing Arctic sunset before a thick fog rolls in.↗↗

Fishing is a major reason people come. The cold, clear water is rich in northern delicacies — the prized Putorana char, Arctic grayling, muksun, nelma and pike in weedy bays — and a pot of *ukha* made from the day's catch is a ritual of almost every trip. Grayling take flies and spinners at the rapids and stream mouths; the landlocked char responds to spoons and wobblers off rocky points.↗↗

Because Lama sits inside the Putorana Reserve, fishing and travel are regulated: you generally fish only with a licensed tour operator, land your catch within set quotas, and keep to registered routes and permitted campsites, with no nets or illegal gear. Independent expeditions are possible but tough — there are no marked trails, no mobile signal, and overland approaches can take a week across trackless terrain, so the overwhelming majority of visitors travel by water or air with a guide.↗

For the bolder, the lake opens deeper into the plateau: routes run onward through narrow fjord inlets to the wilder lakes Keta and Kutaramakan, while winter programs trade the boat for snow vehicles, offering heli-ski, ski touring and excursions to the vividly coloured Krasnye Kameny (Red Stones) rock formations.↗↗

Getting there and where to stay

Every journey to Lama begins in Norilsk, the subarctic mining city about 120 kilometres away, which you can only reach by air — regular flights run from Moscow and other hubs to Alykel Airport. There are no roads to the lake, so the second leg is by water or helicopter. The budget-favourite option is a boat from the small Valyok pier on the Norilskaya (Norilka) river, riding the chain of lake-and-river channels out to Lama in roughly four to seven hours; small passenger boats run as little as once a week in season, and faster hovercraft, KS-100 speedboats and motor launches cover the same route for organised groups.↗↗↗↗↗

The most dramatic and most expensive way in is a helicopter from Norilsk — a flight of roughly half an hour that lets you see the canyons and waterfalls from the air, though poor visibility can ground it for a day or more. Tour operators typically arrange the airport meet, road transfer to the pier and the boat or air run as a single package.↗↗

On the lake, accommodation ranges from spartan to surprisingly comfortable. There are several small tourist bases, reserve cordons and equipped tent camps with boardwalks and wind-sheltered kitchens, usually with wood-stove cabins and generator power on a schedule; groups in camps cook their own food and boil stream or lake water to drink. At the comfortable end sits the glamping-style Neralah park-hotel, billed as the only full-service hotel on Lama's shore, with cedar-bath houses, a restaurant of northern cuisine and organised transfers — book well ahead, as summer fills up fast.↗↗

A note for international visitors: Norilsk and the surrounding Arctic zone are not like ordinary Russian travel, and entry to the protected Putorana Reserve requires permits and registration of your route, which licensed operators help arrange.↗↗↗

When to go and how to prepare

The visiting season is brief — essentially mid-June to September, when the ice is gone and the lake is navigable. July is the warmest month, with daytime air around 16–18°C and the longest, brightest light of the polar day, but it is also the peak of mosquitoes and biting midges, so the insect protection you pack matters as much as the warm layers. August brings golden and crimson autumn colour, fewer insects and clearer, calmer conditions that many consider the best for hiking and photography; by early September the first frosts and even snow can arrive without warning. Nights are cold year-round, the water never warms, and weather on the fjord can flip from sun to fog and storm within hours.↗↗

Pack for changeable Arctic conditions: wind- and waterproof outer layers, thermals, fleece and a light down jacket, sturdy trekking boots, sun and insect protection, a head torch, spare batteries and a basic first-aid kit. Expect no mobile signal, plan around satellite comms or the base's connection, and respect that you are inside a strict nature reserve — stay on approved routes, keep camp impacts minimal and let your guide, who knows the weather windows and the safe approaches to slippery basalt cliffs and waterfalls, set the pace.↗↗↗

The short version: Lake Lama is not a place you wander into casually. It is a serious, logistically demanding expedition destination — and for those willing to make the effort, a rare chance to stand on a wall of black rock above a mile-deep Arctic fjord, eat fish you caught that morning, and feel the deep, strange quiet that has made people call these waters sacred for thousands of years.↗↗