YAKUTSK, December 7. /TASS/. The Lena Pillars Nature Park, a World Heritage Site in Yakutia, is planning to welcome tourists all the year round from 2018, the park’s deputy director told TASS on Thursday.

"In 2017, we launched pilot winter tours to the Lena Pillars," Alexander Dyachkovsky said, adding that 4,500 people came to the park in the off-season.

According to him, the Lena Pillars are a very popular tourist site in the high season when the site was visited by some 14,500 tourists.

"Summer tourism is well developed and our task is to develop winter tourism," Dyachkovsky said.

According to him, the peak of the tourist flow to the nature parks is observed from mid-February to April.

"We are ready to receive extreme tourists in the colder months when temperatures plunge to minus 40-50 degrees Celsius," Dyachkovsky said.

The pillars are natural rock formations stretching for 524 kilometers along the banks of the Lena River in Yakutia. The pillars are 150-300 meters high, and were formed in some of the Cambrian period sea-basins. A prehistoric camp was unearthed in this area in the mid-1980s.

The most popular site in the natural park are Labydia rocks with an observational platform. From 2014 the number of visitors to Labydia doubled to some 13,000.