Rob Smurr walks past a hunting camp,Ukraine.

The next day we crossed a green plateau broken up by limestone benches, then dropped into a thick deciduous forest where ferns and mushrooms sprang from the ground and springs bubbled up into stone troughs. We rappelled into a chilly cavern in which ice clung to the walls all year. We came across a series of seldom-visited war memorials engraved with the hammer and sickle, honoring Stalin’s troops who resisted the Nazis in World War II. Sergei had done this route more times than he could count, and he breezed from trail to road to doubletrack without ever consulting a map or even, that I could tell, stopping to figure out where we were.

Rob,Mark,and Valiery.

As we traversed the mountains we ran into only a handful of other hikers, all of them Russian or Ukrainian. Sergei told us that a pair of Canadians did one of his Crimean treks, but as far as he knew we were the first Americans. Indeed, eco-tourism has made little headway here. We came across two young soldiers dozing in the afternoon shade of a lone cypress tree on the side of a narrow jeep road, purporting to monitor some clunky tin boxes sprouting antennae that looked like leftovers from World War II. They said that artillery practice was underway and advised us not to walk on the road. So Sergei led us through the grass about 100 yards away from the road, which didn’t strike me as much safer.
Despite all the cultural gaps, a few days in the woods brought out some essential similarities between us and our hosts. On our final night in the mountains Valiery built a big fire; once it had burned down to coals he erected a small grill and covered it with skewers of cubed pork. “There are three things a man can watch forever,” he said, grinning. “River running, fire burning, and another man working.”

He sat on a stump by the fire and meticulously drizzled the shashlik with a vinegar marinade. (Earlier he had tried one of the folding camp chairs and immediately crushed it. “But they’re guaranteed to 90 kilos,” said Gia. “Ha!” said Valiery. “I weigh 120.”) The grilled pork was tender and tangy. After dinner we sat around the fire with a guitar, swapping cowboy laments and Russian folk songs. Valiery broke out a bottle of honey vodka and we all took shots, chasing them with small slabs of salo, a Ukrainian delicacy that is essentially raw bacon fat. When Valiery produced a second bottle I crawled off to my tent. When I awoke hours later with a bad headache, I could hear the others still laughing and drinking and telling stories.

Rob seems continually surprised at just where life has delivered him, or what it has delivered him from. One evening we stood in the wind watching the sunlight dance across the sea. Piñon and juniper trees clung to the rocky slopes. “Just think: Turkey is only 150 miles away,” Rob said. “Another 200 miles, and you’re in Iraq.”
If things had turned out differently, Rob might have been on the far side of Turkey. With his background in military intelligence, he was one of a precious few army reservists who spoke four languages, let alone held a Ph.D., but with the war in Iraq spreading the armed forces thin, he would have been just another grunt with a gun. He thought the war was a blunder, but that wasn’t the worst of it. “I knew that some kid who would probably flunk my class would have the legal authority to order me to charge a machine gun nest,” he told me. “No, thanks.” So 2005 he quit the army after 22 years and continued teaching history at Washington’s Evergreen State College.

Today the Black Sea is clearly more peaceful than the Persian Gulf, but in fact it’s been fought over for more than 200 years. In 1788 Catherine the Great hired naval hero John Paul Jones to help defend her newly acquired Crimean beachfront from the Turks. Between 1854 and 1856 the Russians faced off against an alliance of British, French, and Turkish forces. More than 200,000 were killed but no territory traded hands, and in the end there was no decisive victor. The Crimean War may have been forgotten altogether if not for its famous literary spawn. On the British side Tennyson immortalized the bloodshed in The Charge of the Light Brigade; Russians learned about the full atrocities of the war largely from a little-known aristocrat whose battlefield writings gave him the reputation as the first war correspondent. “I failed to become a general in the army,” Leo Tolstoy later said, “but I became one in literature.”
During World War II blood flowed again in Crimea as the Russians repelled the Nazis in a series of furious battles. Sevastopol’ became the headquarters of the Soviet navy, and Yalta gained fame for the 1945 Big Three Conference between Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin. Crimea’s hills have been peaceful for the past six decades; the only reminder of its bloody past are the war memorials.
Although Ukraine as a whole swells with nationalist pride, Crimea remains a pro-Russian outpost. Many Crimeans winced in 1954 when Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev transferred Crimea from Russia to Ukraine. Since all Soviet republics were ruled by Moscow, the transfer was largely symbolic, but now that Ukraine is independent there’s some bitterness in Crimea about being part of Ukraine. The peninsula even keeps a separate parliament. Our crew all considered themselves Russian, no matter what their passports said. But so far Crimea showed no signs of becoming another Chechnya.