I love to run. Most people I interact with find this out quickly because I don’t shut up about it. This is why, when we arrived in the small village of Ust-Barguzin on the eastern shore of Lake Baikal, and more specifically the Barguzin Bay, I wasted no time donning my running clothes and shooting out of the guest house we were staying in. After all, this was our fifth day in Buryatia, and our busy schedule had barred me from running in the first four days of our stay. Moreover, we’d just finished a six- or seven-hour bus ride from Ulan-Ude on rocky, somewhat treacherous roads (once again, I have to thank Ruslan, our bus driver, for keeping us in one piece). The views were simply superb, but I’d taken a beating sitting in the very back of the bus. It was time to get my legs moving.

Rada, our outstanding guide, told us before we got settled that Baikal wasn’t very far away, and because we had some free time before dinner, she suggested a walk to the shore. So, upon exiting the guest house, I turned up the dirt road we were on and approached a boxy school from which elementary-aged students had been walking when we first rolled into Ust-Barguzin. I hung a left and saw a wall of trees in the distance through a row of wooden houses, flanking another dirt road. Beyond the small forest, Baikal was waiting.

After being briefly chased by a barking, grimy dog, I slipped into the woods and ran along an old, gently rolling path. All I could hear was the wind passing through the trees and a solitary bird loudly cawing somewhere to my left. As I crept closer and closer to the lake, I could hear its waves beating against the beach, the sound growing louder every second. Before long I could see Baikal’s blue water hiding behind a line of worn trunks. My feet finally found sand, and the trees suddenly disappeared behind me. Despite the fact that my body was being whipped by the biting wind, I was in a trance. But that was quickly broken by a car speeding along the beach, which caught me off guard. I watched it move further down the shore before rescanning the horizon and attempting to grasp my environs.

I stood facing the water, looking to the west. To the north I could see the jagged, snowy peaks lining Святой нос, or Sacred Nose, which is a peninsula that juts out into Baikal and helps form the Barguzin Bay, the largest of Baikal’s bays. Swiveling my head to the left, I took in more gentle mountains running along the shore. I knew the town of Maksimikha was somewhere over there. Not long before we got to Baikal, I’d read about some of the environmental problems unfolding there, including “black sludge” found close to the shore, as a result of increased tourist activity. Luckily for us and Baikal, in the same article, the authors explained that on the opposite side of the bay, closer to where we were, the water was virtually pristine thanks to a distinct lack of tourism. The following day, I even dipped my water bottle into Baikal and enjoyed a refreshing liter of Baikal’s best.

After admiring the view for a minute, I kept running north right along the water, dodging the flowing and ebbing tide. Once, I wasn’t quite quick enough, and the water sloshed onto my left shoe. It was soaked. I wasn’t worried, though; this was some of the cleanest water on our planet. It probably made my shoe look cleaner and smell better. Before long, what looked like some kind of white container came into view up ahead, several feet from the water. I slowed down, took a closer look, and what I saw shocked me. It was the corpse of a seal. I’d heard and read so much about the nerpa, endemic to Baikal, the only freshwater seal in the world, and here was my first encounter in person. A rotting corpse. I felt sick. I’d also read about the threat seals are facing in the form of poachers. A gaping hole in the side of the seal gave me reason to believe the nerpa hadn’t died of natural causes.

I stood bewildered and still shocked for several minutes before continuing up the shore, but I couldn’t shake the image of the corpse. Soon I came upon the Barguzin River emptying into the bay, and I stopped again at the edge of the water. This time I gazed at the mountains of Sacred Nose, looking so wild, beautiful, and untamable. Almost immediately, this made me feel better. Humans have clearly been making their presence felt more and more in recent decades on Baikal, but the Sacred Sea is still hidden deep in the Siberian interior, difficult to get to and navigate. I’d really expected to see a lot more tourists in the area, but as far as I knew, there were essentially next to none. Apparently the seal population is somewhere just above 100,000, so the threat level as of now is relatively low; there’s plenty of time to ensure that Baikal’s seals remain protected, even when hunters take aim, as they have for thousands of years, and as global temperatures continue to rise, something the Baikal region is experiencing acutely. Without a doubt, there’s so much more to say on this topic, but I’ll end here: whether it’s Baikal’s unmatched beauty or the mystical aura surrounding the area, there’s something about Lake Baikal that really, really gets you thinking.

Having taken in my fill of the crisp air, the mountains, and, of course, the water, I headed back the exact same way, along the beach, through the woods, and another disheveled stray tailed me through the damp streets for a bit. All in good fun. I can say with confidence that it was one of the best runs of my life.