Nov/20

Cape Dezhnev – the only place in Russia with the US in sight

No comments · Posted by Sergei Rzhevsky in Nature, Regions, Travel

Cape Dezhnev is the extreme eastern point of the Chukotka Peninsula, mainland Russia and all of Eurasia.

It is an isolated flat-topped mountain range up to 740 m high, which drops abruptly to the sea and is located in the Bering Strait, which connects the Arctic Ocean (Chukchi Sea) with the Pacific Ocean (Bering Sea). Cape Dezhnev on Google Maps. Photos by: Slava Stepanov.

This place was first reached by the Russian expedition of Semyon Dezhnev in the fall of 1648. For the first time in history, having passed the Bering Strait (actually opening it) and circling the Chukchi Peninsula, Dezhnev solved an important geographical problem.

He found evidence that America was a separate continent and proved the possibility of travel from Europe to China along the northern seas around Siberia.

However, due to the lack of information about this discovery in European countries, the priority of the discoverer went to Vitus Bering, after whom the strait began to be called. In 1778, the English navigator James Cook mapped this cape under the name Cape East.

In 1879, the Swedish polar explorer Nordenskjold sailed the northeastern passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific Ocean for the first time. He proposed to call Cape East by the name of the discoverer – Cape Dezhnev. This was done in 1898.

In 1955, a lighthouse-monument to Semyon Dezhnev was erected on the cape in the form of a four-sided obelisk at an altitude of about 100 meters above sea level.

The distance from Cape Dezhnev to Cape Prince of Wales (Alaska), the extreme western mainland point of North America, is 86 km.

Until 2018, due to the proximity of the US border, Chukotka had the status of a border zone. Today, it is a territory with a regulated rule for visiting by foreign citizens.