Miass is a southern Urals city set in a wide valley between the Ilmen mountains and the long ridge of the Urals, and it is famous in Russia for two reasons: gold and trucks. Gold was found in the river sands here in the 1770s, and in the 1840s one of the largest nuggets ever found in Russia, known as the Big Triangle, was dug up near the town. It weighed about thirty-six kilograms and is now kept in the Diamond Fund in Moscow. Today the city's best-known product is the Ural truck, built at a factory that was moved here from Moscow in 1941, and the heavy trucks have crossed the roughest roads of the Soviet Union.
The landscape is the real attraction. To the south of the city lies the Ilmen Nature Reserve, created in 1920 as the first mineralogical reserve in the world, an area of low granite hills, lakes and pine forest that contains an extraordinary range of minerals, many of them found nowhere else. Geologists and mineral collectors have come here for two centuries, and a museum in the town displays some of the finds. To the west, Lake Turgoyak, about twelve kilometers from the city, is a deep, clear lake surrounded by pine-covered rocks, sometimes called the Little Baikal for its transparency and depth.
For riders, the roads around Miass are some of the best in the region. The route to Zlatoust, over the Ural ridge, climbs through forest with bends and views, and the road from Kyshtym and Karabash passes through landscapes shaped by the mining industry, some of them bleak and some stunning. The surface is a mix of good and poor, and traffic is moderate. The weather is changeable, with warm summer days and thunderstorms, a beautiful golden autumn and a long, snowy winter. The best months are June to September.
Services are very good. With about a hundred and sixty thousand people, Miass has fuel stations, shops, cafes and several hotels, and Turgoyak has small guesthouses and cafes in summer. It is the place to stock up before heading into the hills.
Swim in Turgoyak if the weather allows. The water is cold and astonishingly clear, and the pines on the shore are thick with resin.