White rock is the first thing you notice around Satka. The town sits on the Ai River in the Southern Urals, and the hills nearby are quarried for magnesite, a pale mineral used to make heat-resistant bricks for furnaces and steelworks, so the slopes above the roofs look as though someone has been at them with a knife and a bucket of whitewash. The Satka magnesite works, one of the biggest of its kind in Russia, have been the town's main employer for generations, and the dust and the pits are part of the landscape.
The place began as an ironworks in the 1750s, founded on the river by merchants who recognised the value of the local ore and forest, and for a century the Satka furnaces made iron in the old Ural way, with a dam, a pond and a village of wooden houses. A good deal of that character survives in the older streets, though most of the housing is Soviet. About fifty thousand people live here, and there is a local museum with a decent collection about the region's industry, minerals and the Bashkir people who lived here before the ironworkers came.
The surrounding hills are the real draw for riders. This is the Western flank of the Southern Urals, a region of rounded ridges, spruce and fir forest and clear, cold rivers, and the roads that thread through it have a pleasing, unhurried rhythm: long gentle climbs, forested saddles, and sudden views over wooded valleys. The main road from Chelyabinsk passes nearby, with moderate traffic, and the surface is generally fair, though frost damage is common, and some side roads are gravel. Rain can arrive suddenly, and in the high ground the fog is thick. Summer is short, so the best months are June to September, and autumn colour in the birch and aspen is glorious.
Satka is a good place to restock, since it has several petrol stations, supermarkets and cafés, and a hotel or two. Beyond it, to the south and west, villages are small and services thin, so fill up here. Bakal, about eighteen kilometres off, is another old mining town, built on siderite iron ore, with a faded Soviet feel.
Further up the road lies the national park around Lake Zyuratkul, and the mountains get taller and wilder. If the weather is kind, take the road in the evening, when the ridges glow.