Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road-trip: Syagannakh to Deputatsky.

You know the drill already: a new day on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition means another early rise, another quick breakfast, and minutes later piling back into our cars and setting off again on our way. On this day we had around 300km ahead of us taking us from Syagannakh to Deputatsky…

All the road signs seem to make up the road workers’ store of them from which they pick and choose depending on the changing needs throughout the year.

Mountains appear on the horizon – where we were headed…

First smooth lake surface; then the inevitable rough section of winter road away from a lake. Rinse, repeat – all day…

Back onto a lake, and it’s time for some drone action ->

The lake/off-lake contrast:

Between Syagannakh and Deputatsky there’s a winter road, but Russia’s own Yandex Maps doesn’t recognize it – yet ->

Deputatsky on a larger-scale map:

// Absurdly, Russia’s Yandex Maps doesn’t give Deputatsky’s name; it just states ~”town-like village”. America’s Google Maps, however, does indicate the name. What?!

And here’s our live route on KMZ View:

The going was mostly rough – until the winter road took to the Uyandina river ->

First – snow covered smoothness; later – naked ice as smooth as silk! ->

Naleds here are the reason for the naked ice – not the wind: water from warmer streams flowing into the river under the ice, and eventually rising up to the surface. And these are the resulting scenes:

Stopping for a walk upon the ice – mandatory!

Alas, the naled-ice here isn’t as super-smooth as on Lake Baikal. The whisky bottle hardly moved! ->

Like I say, across Baikal it skated a dream – all on its own ->

An invigorating walk given the -30°C temperature!…

Walkabout, photos, then back on the “road”…

Back to snow cover ->

We stop only occasionally for bathroom breaks – and a few photos of the surrounding scenes while waiting – and then onward for another hundred kilometers or so…

Suddenly, broken up ice – what we feared encountering the most. It occurs when the water’s very deep where there are naleds. And it can mean major delays to winter-road-trippers as ourselves – like a day or two or three – while the moist naleds (which vehicles can sink into and get stranded in) freeze over. To our delight – they’d already frozen! Hurray! The only issue for us was that the big trucks that had risked driving over not-fully frozen naleds had broken up the ice to give large big blocks of the stuff: not easy terrain for us in our much smaller vehicles…

Encountering big blocks of ice, you need to go round them “on tiptoes” so you don’t damage the suspension or blow out a tire.

After the rough patch, smoothness again; our speed increases – hurtling us ever nearer the mountains on the horizon…

Suddenly – we meet an oncoming jeep. We stop to ask the driver what the winter road’s like up ahead…

“Back there – all clear; you’re good to go!” So go (on), we did…

The mountains nearer and nearer…

This, it turns out, is a real road – not a temporary, winter one. Properly cleared and smooth: nice.

We enter the village of Deputatsky…

And we made it in record time.

A sun halo! ->

They mined tin here in Soviet times, but since tin never increased in price the mine was closed as it couldn’t turn a profit.

The day’s stats:

Overall trip stats:

Putting these pics and words into this here blogpost series, I’m already nostalgizing. It’s been just several months since our road-trip, but already I want a repeat one – if not taking this route, at least one similarly white and extreme and extremely cold (I wonder if the unusually hot July this year in Moscow has anything to do with that?!).

The rest of the photos from our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition are here.