Like many built in Soviet times, it consists of a series of large, featureless apartment blocks built with utility, not beauty, in mind, and has little to distinguish it from a thousand others in Russia. Russian cities are like that. But Nizhnevartovsk is easy to escape. Wilderness starts on the doorstep in Siberia. Sparse, sturdy pine trees stand out against the snow.
Lakes abound, and are identifiable in winter only by an absence of trees on the snow.
Not that that is considered cold. Below that operations switch to standby mode, with only limited maintenance carried out. Oilmen prefer winter. Even in the Siberian winter, glorious days are known. Ob, one of the great rivers of Siberia which rises in the Altai mountains near the border with China and flows north across Siberia to the Arctic Ocean.