Sakhalin's history reads like a territorial dispute that never quite resolved. The Ainu and Nivkh peoples inhabited the island for millennia before Russian and Japanese interests collided here in the nineteenth century. Russia used southern Sakhalin as a penal colony -- Anton Chekhov visited in 1890 and wrote a devastating account of the conditions he found. Japan gained the southern half after the Russo-Japanese War in 1905, governed it as Karafuto Prefecture, and lost it again when the Soviet Union invaded in August 1945. The Cold War cemented Russian control, and the collapse of the Soviet Union brought oil companies instead of settlers. Today, the island's roughly 500,000 residents live under Russian administration, but the Japanese legacy survives in architecture, railway routes, and the memories of families separated by the postwar chaos.

At more than 70,000 square kilometers, Sakhalin dwarfs most islands people have heard of. Two low mountain ranges run parallel down its length, separated by a valley tract that gives the interior a sense of sheltered enclosure even as the coastlines batter against the open sea. The south is forested and relatively mild -- at least by Sakhalin standards. The north dissolves into arctic tundra where summer temperatures can drop sharply without warning, especially after sunset. Rivers cut through the landscape in braided channels, and the La Perouse Strait, only 40 kilometers wide, separates the island's southern tip from Hokkaido. On a clear day, you can see Japan. On most days, you cannot see much at all through the fog.

Sakhalin's modern economy runs on hydrocarbons. Massive offshore oil and gas projects -- Sakhalin-I and Sakhalin-II among the largest -- have drawn international investment and transformed the island's infrastructure. Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, the capital, has hotels and restaurants catering to foreign energy workers that would be unthinkable in a Russian city of comparable size and remoteness. The oil town of Okha in the north anchors the opposite end of the island's economic geography. Between them, the railway built by Japanese engineers a century ago still carries freight, though the gauge has been converted from Japanese narrow to Russian broad. The energy money has not, however, penetrated far beyond the main cities. Drive an hour outside Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk and the roads deteriorate into tracks that demand a four-wheel-drive vehicle and the willingness to ford rivers.

The Nivkh are Sakhalin's most significant remaining indigenous group, with roughly 5,000 people living primarily in the northern taiga. The village of Nekrasovska near Okha is the largest remaining Nivkh community. They are traditionally semi-nomadic, spending summers on the coast and winters inland along streams and rivers. The Ainu and Orok peoples, who once shared the island, are largely gone -- displaced by successive waves of Russian and Japanese colonization and postwar deportation. The Sakhalin Ainu language went extinct in 1994. What survives is a landscape layered with place names from multiple cultures, each reflecting a different relationship to the same mountains, rivers, and coastline.

Reaching Sakhalin requires either flying into Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk -- which has surprisingly good connections to mainland Russian cities and flights to Japan and South Korea -- or taking the ferry from Vanino on the mainland to Kholmsk on the island's western coast. Stalin once attempted to build a tunnel under the Tatar Strait with forced labor from the gulags, but the project was abandoned after a few kilometers. Plans to finish it resurface periodically, and periodically sink again for lack of funding. Once on the island, public transport connects the main towns, but reaching Sakhalin's genuine wilderness -- the volcanic hot springs, the salmon-choked rivers, the coastal cliffs where sea eagles nest -- demands either a chartered vehicle or a tolerance for uncertainty that most itineraries cannot accommodate.