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I had the opportunity to travel a lot. Travel around Russia, near and far abroad, but I especially fell in love with Buryatia — “taiga, lake, steppe.” Every time I returned from a trip, I brought stones with me. Then, rearranging them, I again experienced the nagging feeling of the romance of long roads.

Here, for example, is a green stone with silvery layers — chrysotile-asbestos — from the Nogoon-Ula mountain in Tunkinsky Goltsy, a bright yellow piece of sulfur picked up on the slope of an extinct Mendeleev volcano when visiting the Kuril Islands, a weighty heavy mineral — copper-nickel ore from the polar mine “Medvezhiy!”, which is near Norilsk. Nearby is a quartz stone from the top of the highest mountain in Khamar-Daban. Where does this green stone, slippery to the touch, come from? And the difficult mountain route in the Eastern Sayan and the clear river with the lyrical name Sagan-Sair, which translated means “white pebbles,” come to mind.

Main part

We walked along the river, and at the passes we threw our backpacks off our shoulders and fell to our knees to find something unusual among the scattering of multi-colored pebbles. And for a long time there was an amazing picture in my eyes, painted with all the colors of the rainbow. Near the Zmeevikovy stream there is a whole deposit of serpentine, an ornamental stone that is slippery to the touch. The stone (near the confluence of the stream into Sagan-Sair) has added to my personal collection.

It would be fair to say about Buryatia as a place “where gold is dug in the mountains.” One day I gathered a tourist group of 11 people, and we headed to Vitim to look at our Ugryum River. Here we walked past old abandoned and active mines every day. And here’s what’s interesting: when we saw the ancient dumps of former prospecting pits next to the horse trail, we involuntarily stopped and, throwing off our backpacks, began to dig up the dumps, hoping that suddenly luck would roll in and a gold nugget would glisten in our hands.

The feeling was extremely strong. But there was nothing except a rusty tool. We didn’t get gold, but it seemed like it was so close. Soon we left the shores of Vitim and the memorable promising spit, the name of which sounded like thanksgiving and hope.