The story told by Koryaks about Uzon and his caldera has the ring of a parable. He was a friend to humanity, quieting earth tremors, stifling volcanic eruptions with his hands, doing other good deeds; but he endured a lonely existence, living secre­tively atop his own mountain so that evil spirits wouldn't come and destroy the place. Then he fell in love. She was a human—a beautiful girl named Nayun, with eyes like stars, lips like cranberries, eyebrows as dark and glossy as two sables. She loved Uzon in return, and he took her away to his mountain. So far, so good. But after some years of marital bliss and isolation, Nayun began to pine for her human relatives. Couldn't she have a visit with them somehow? Uzon, wanting to please her, made a desperate and tragic mistake: He spread the mountains with his mighty arms and created a road. People came, curious and disruptive. Now everybody knew Uzon's secret hideaway, including those evil spirits. "The earth yawned with a horrible crash having absorbed a huge mountain," in one telling of this tale, by G. A. Karpov, "and mighty Uzon turned into stone forever." You can see him there even today, petrified into a high peak on the northwestern perimeter of the caldera, his head bowed, his arms stretched around to form the rim.

If you do see him, you'll be among the few. The ban against tourism has been relaxed, but not much, for Kronotsky. About 3,000 nonscientific visitors now enter each year, and of those, only half make a stop in Uzon Caldera. Regulations limit the number, but so do logistics, lack of infrastructure, and cost. For starters, there is no road into Kronotsky Zapovednik from the more settled parts (which are not very settled) of Kamchatka. No roads within the reserve either, notwithstanding the legend of Uzon. The in-and-out transport consists mainly of Mi-8 helicopters, thunderously powerful machines such as once ferried troops for the Soviet Army. Sitting in an Mi-8 as it powers up for takeoff, strapped into a rickety seat beside a porthole window, you feel as you would in a crowded school bus with a sizable sawmill bolted to its roof—until the whole thing levitates. Tourist flights leave from a heliport 20 miles from Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka's capital, and are permitted to land only on helipads in the caldera and the Valley of Geysers. Neither place offers overnight accommodation for tourists, so a visit to the reserve constitutes a very pricey ($700) day trip with lunch. The customer traffic seems mostly made up of wealthy Russians, Europeans on adventuresome holidays, and the occasional American. Five hours in Kronotsky isn't something that ordinary families in Petropavlovsk could normally afford; it's not like loading the kids into the van for a summer trip that includes an ice cream cone at Old Faithful. Choppering in to see geysers and volcanoes and maybe a few brown bears (fleeing across the tundra as your pilot hazes them at low elevation to provide a good look) is nature appreciation for the affluent, sedentary elite. It's dramatic and thrilling and privileged and rude. It makes me dyspeptic, but … how would I know that if I hadn't been there and done it myself?