Mayachnaya Mountain

Mayachnaya Mountain (Гора Маячная) is a landscape and geological-geomorphological nature monument in the Belyaevsky District of Orenburg Region, near the village of Verkhneozyornoye. It stands on the right bank of the Ural River: the mountain's absolute height is 284.8 meters, and it rises 158.2 meters above the Ural's channel. By origin it is an erosional outlier hill — a highland that survived after the surrounding, once higher, rock was weathered and worn away.

Nature

The southern slope is built of red-colored polymictic Lower Triassic boulder conglomerates interbedded with sandstones. These rocks formed back in the Early Triassic, more than 240 million years ago, and give the slopes their characteristic reddish-brown color, which makes Mayachnaya easy to tell apart from the neighboring hills.

The slopes preserve reference vegetation of shrubby and rocky steppe: feather grass, steppe cherry, shrubby caragana, crenate spirea, dog rose, dwarf almond and Tatarian honeysuckle. It is largely for the sake of protecting this steppe and shrub community that the mountain received its nature-monument status. A colony of marmots lives on the northern side and at the summit. At the foot of Mayachnaya lie the Tatarskiye (Tatar) Lakes — oxbows and backwaters in the Ural floodplain, overgrown with reed and cattail.

History

The mountain served as an observation point and a site of watch posts during the Pugachev Rebellion: detachments of Yemelyan Pugachev used it to watch the surrounding area. Its height and closeness to the Ural gave a good view of the approaches to the fortresses of the Orenburg fortified line, which likely explains the mountain's name (from the Russian "маяк", beacon). The mountain is mentioned in the "Chronicle" of the Orenburg local historian Pyotr Rychkov, as well as in the notes of contemporaries of the rebellion, I. I. Osipov and M. N. Pekarsky.

Legends

According to local legend, Pugachev's rebels fired on a besieged fortress from Mayachnaya Mountain but were never able to take it — one of the local legends tied to the Pugachev Rebellion and preserved in the local-history literature of Belyaevsky District.

How to get there

The nearest settlement is the village of Verkhneozyornoye in Belyaevsky District, Orenburg Region: it is about 1 kilometer on foot from the village to the mountain. The village stands on the right bank of the Ural, and the road to Mayachnaya runs along the floodplain past the Tatarskiye Lakes.