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Raised in the eastern half of the U.S., I didn’t see the Pacific Ocean until I was 26, and I had to fly all the way around the world to get to it. And then I walked on it.

It was my first trip to Sakhalin Island, in January 1991, a visit which was more of a lark than anything else. I was working in Moscow at the time, and three colleagues and I decided to spend 18 hours on an airplane for a frigid three-day weekend on Sakhalin. I desperately wanted to see the ocean, and so we arranged to drive from the capital city of Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk to a fishing town called Dolinsk.

When we got out of the car to take pictures, we were amazed to see that the ice, battered and buckled by the wind, extended as far eastward into the ocean as we could see. Later that day, after watching an extensive fishing operation consisting of casting large nets under the ice of the Dolinsk River, I saw some of the steepest snow banks and felt some of the fiercest wind of my life.

Anton Chekhov called this island “hell” after a visit in 1890, and he wasn’t referring to torturously high temperatures, to be sure. The island’s southernmost coast (visible on a clear day from the northern tip of Japan), barely gets warm enough for a chilly late summer dip. By contrast, the northern half of the island can only be described appropriately as arctic. What Chekhov saw on the island was a different kind of hell: The island served as a penal colony for criminal and political prisoners for 30 years at the end of the 19th century. But the turn of the century brought great change to Sakhalin, most notably in the form of invasion in 1905 by the Japanese, who held and administered the lower half of the island through the end of World War II.

Natural resources like timber, coal and fish fueled the Sakhalin economy through the second half of the 20th century, but these days the island’s oil reserves are grabbing all the headlines. The biggest opportunities lie offshore on the “shelf,” a climatic and seismic challenge of considerable enormity, even for the most well-endowed oil corporations. As the biggies wonder whether to sink billions of dollars into the construction of specialized offshore drilling equipment and a pipeline to the southern port of Korsakov, most of Sakhalin’s population remains skeptical about the future. But seasoned expatriate oil men think that Sakhalin is going to witness a boom to rival Alaska’s.

This bodes well for the flailing economy of this thin, 500-mile-long, ice-encased tract of land, and it promises to make the start of the next century as dramatic for the island as the beginning of this century was.