The government of Russia recognizes such spectacular fragility with that categorical zapovednik, connoting roughly this: "a restricted zone, set aside for the study and protection of flora and fauna and geology; tourism limited or forbidden; thanks for your interest, but go away." It's a farsighted sort of statutory designation, bravely and judiciously antidemocratic in a country where antidemocracy has a long, brutal history. Scientists are permitted to enter zapovedniks, though only for research and under stringent conditions. Kronotsky is one of 101 such reserves in Russia, by the latest count, and was among the first, decreed in 1934. Before that it had been a sable refuge, established in 1882 at the prompting of local people, hunters and trappers who valued the forests surrounding Kronotskoye Lake as prime habitat for Martes zibellina, the sable. The Kamchatka Peninsula is very distant from Moscow (as distant, in fact, as Moscow is from Boston), and to Joseph Stalin's Soviet government in the mid-1930s (with much else on its agenda) the opportunity costs of putting a modest chunk of that wilderness within protective boundaries probably didn't seem high. In 1941 a second kind of asset revealed itself within the reserve, when a hydrologist named Tatiana I. Ustinova discovered geysers there.

In the cold springtime of that year, Ustinova and her guide were exploring the headwaters of the Shumnaya River by dogsled. They paused near a confluence point and happened to notice, at some distance along the water's edge, a large outburst of steam. With hungry dogs and other urgencies pulling her away, Ustinova wasn't able to see much more, not then, but she returned several months later to map and study what proved to be a whole complex of geothermal features, including about 40 geysers. She named her first geyser Pervenets, meaning "firstborn." The tributary she ascended is now called the Geysernaya River, and above one of its bends is a slope known as Vitrazh, or stained glass, for its multicolored residue from a score of large and small vents. Kronotsky's Dolina Geyserov (Valley of Geysers) took its place as one of the world's major geyser areas, in a league with Yellowstone, El Tatio in Chile, Waiotapu on New Zealand's North Island, and Iceland.

Geysers are generally associated with volcanic activity, and that's certainly the case in Kronotsky. Kamchatka as a whole is abundantly pustulated with volcanoes, of which about two dozen, including some inactive ones, lie within the zapovednik or along its borders. Kronotsky Volcano is the tallest, a perfect cone rising to 11,552 feet. Krasheninnikov Volcano (named for Stepan Petrovich Krasheninnikov, a hardy naturalist who explored Kamchatka in the early 18th century) is its nonidentical twin, lying just southwestward across the Kronotskaya River. Still farther southwest is what would be, but no longer is, the third in a huge three-peak sequence. Instead of a high cone, it's a broad, low bowl, up to eight miles in diameter, filled with fumaroles and hot springs and sulfurous lakes, blueberry-and-heather tundra, forest patches of birch and Siberian dwarf pine, all rimmed by a circular ridge left behind when a vast volcano blasted itself open about 40,000 years ago. The bowl is called Uzon Caldera. Its name comes from the kindly spirit Uzon, a powerful figure in the legends of the native Koryak people. The exploration and study of Uzon Caldera by scientists, as well as Ustinova's finding of the Valley of Geysers, gave additional purpose to the zapovednik: protecting geological wonders as well as biological ones.