Nizhneudinsk caves

The entrance to the Big Cave is oval in shape and not more than a meter in diameter. Located at an altitude of about 280 meters above the level of the River Uda and facing north-northeast. From the entrance, a narrow, 1.5-meter-wide, winding corridor over 100 meters long leads to a large, gloomy dungeon divided into two blocks of limestone with arches and walls of strange shapes, pillars of stalagmites and stalactites , some of which reach two meters in length. The length of the central hall is 160 meters, width is from 12 to 16 meters, the domed ceiling of the cave is located at a height of 10-15 meters ^[3] .

The central hall is connected by an arch with a smaller hall, from them corridors having different lengths, widths and heights diverge in different directions. The most prominent among them is the Creeping Corridor of the southern direction, 25 meters long, 4–5 meters wide, up to 1 meter high, and the Maryin Corridor of the western direction, about 18 meters long, up to 4 meters wide and 5-6 meters high, at the end of which there is an accumulation of ice formed by water that has fallen through the cracks at a sufficiently low cave temperature of 1.5 ° C. In one of the remote corridors there is a frozen waterfall ^[3] .

According to the well-known geologist Ivan Dementievich Chersky , who visited the Great Nizhneudinsk cave in 1875, the total length of all its passages was more than 500 meters, the air in it was clean and dry ^[4] . The inscription made by the scientist ^{[5] is} preserved on the wall of the cave.

At 100 meters northeast of the Big Cave there is the Small Nizhneudinskaya cave, the entrance to it is 5 meters wide and about 6 meters high. The air is initially relatively warm and humid, but as it moves deeper into the cave, the temperature drops sharply. Ice stalactites and stalagmites in it of various shapes and sizes. The corridor of the cave, 100 meters long and 3-4 meters wide, stretches in a southeast direction. On its left side, there is a slit-like, winding passage about 60 meters long, 1 meter wide and 1.5 meters high, called the Cursed Hole. Perhaps in the past the caves had a message, but as a result of the landslides, the course between them was filled with rubble ^[6] .

Above the cave there is an entrance with a width of 1 meter and a height of about 0.8 meters, from which a narrow corridor leads into a long winding gap-like passage. From the top of the mountain a panorama opens to the Uda valley and the chains of the Eastern Sayan ^[7] .

Both caves are of scientific interest in the field of paleontology . In 1875, ID D. Chersky discovered remains of extinct Quaternary animals of Pribaikalye , preserved in tens of thousands of years ago, preserved in the bottom layers of caves (most in the Small Cave) at a depth of 1.5-2 meters: bones and pieces of Siberian skin long-haired rhino ; the bones of a fossil cave bear , superior in size to its modern brown relative ; bones of reindeer , saiga , mountain goat , wild boar , roe deer , arctic fox , bear . Part of the fauna belongs to the last glacial epoch or to the beginning of the post-glacial one ^[5] .

On some of the bones of the animals, the damage caused, according to the archeologist M. M. Gerasimov , by a man of the ancient stone age, although his remains, as well as the tools of labor, were not found. In the sediments of caves at the beginning of the 20th century, the wooden tip of a harpoon with hedgehog needles tied to it was found wrapped in birch bark ^{[5] [8]} .

Among the exhibits of the Irkutsk Museum of Local History, there is a well-preserved jackal humerus discovered in a cave in 1910. The results of excavations in the Nizhneudinsk caves were summarized in the work of geologist and paleontologist V. S. Slodkevich ^[8] .

• Good N. N. In the caves of the Baikal region. - Irkutsk: Irkutsk book publishing house, 1955. - 72 p.