The article focuses on regeneration of the soil and vegetation cover in hummocky tundra with unsorted circles in a mountainous area of Chukotka after a fire. The morphology, soils, and vegetation prior to the fire are analyzed in detail, and analyses of the situation 3 and 7 years after the fire are presented. Recovery was found to be significantly slower than in closed tundra, the vegetation cover recovering less than half as fast and the soil profile only one‐tenth as fast.