by CKR
I've been in Kamchatka for the past two weeks in a group tour. I have mixed feelings about tours; I've taken only four in my entire life. I take tours when they offer something I'd be unlikely to manage for myself. That bar has raised as I travel more and more. But I don't speak Russian much, and I retain some apprehensions from my Cold War history. The nice side of tours is that someone else does all the work for you, and I needed something like that to get back into traveling after the upset of moving my home.
The Russians refer to Kamchatka as their Far East. Petropavlovsk, Kamchatka's largest city, is a four-to-five-hour flight from Anchorage. As usual, you can click on the photos for larger versions.
There's lots I intend to say about the trip in later posts. Places that are very different from one's usual surroundings help to refocus one's attention, and I felt that I was getting much too emotional about what's been going on in the US. 
Internet and some English tv news (NHK, Japan) is available in Petropavlovsk, but we stayed there only the last night of the tour.
I'm going to post a few flower photos today. I see that there are some complexities I have to deal with in transferring my photos from my digital camera; this is my first trip with it. But there will be lots of photos in later posts. This first photo is of a Chocolate Lily (Fritillaria camtschatcensis).
Kamchatka has 29 active volcanoes. As a result of the continuing eruptions, its flora keeps getting wiped out, leaving only 1500 species of plants for the entire peninsula. One might expect something more like the tens of thousands in an area the size of Kamchatka at its latitude (about 50-60 North). These are Arctic poppies (Papaver radicatum) recolonizing the 1975-76 ash eruption area at Tobalchik Volcano.
This is a Dactylorhiza aristata. There were similar orchids without the spots on the leaves, too. We visited a wide variety of environments, from deciduous forest to tundra and taiga, from winter to summer.
Just outside of winter, the golden rhododendrons (Rhododendron aureum) were beginning to bloom. 
The entire plant is maybe ten centimeters tall, in an alpine environment. They'd be blooming not fifty meters from a snowfield. Short summers mean that the plants have to move quickly.
And here's Kamchatka's signature flower: the Kamchatka lily.
Yes, it's as big as you think, and this photo gets the color right. The leaves are dusty because it hadn't rained recently, and we were close to an unpaved road.
More about roads and conveyances later. I'll ask Viktor Yakovlevich and Lyudmjla Efremova to add to and correct my identifications as necessary. Also more flowers to come.