Frozen Siberia road-trip 2026: preview.

Longtime inhabitants of this cozy corner of the internet will remember that if ever one of my posts begins with a photo of the Magadan restaurant in Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport (SVO), it’s done for a reason, and also means that that and upcoming posts sure won’t be boring…

And the reason for my relative radio silence of late? You guessed it: we’re back on the road again – literally; and a very cold road at that. See, we’d had our fill of sun in South America; next, we wanted just the opposite. So, as you do, we headed deep into wintry Siberia. Yes: we wanted another go at a road-trip across endless winter expanses of the mind-blowingly vast and beautiful country that goes by the name of Russia…

As per tradition on trips like these, detailed reports on, and copious quantities of photos of our adventures will come later, once I’m back in the office. In the meantime – just short notes… if there’s both the time and energy, and if I’m not too sleepy after another few hundred kilometers through the tough Siberian wilderness.

I’ve mentioned how it all started at SVO. From there it was a six-hour flight to icy Irkutsk:

Today, briefly – the where, how, why, what, and in what. The latter:

Where? There! ->

They’ve built this beautiful stretch of road heading west from Irkutsk! Last time (in 2021) its construction hadn’t even begun. So – great start. The mood: very positive…

In the town of Tulun, we turned off said new road (the A331) to the north – onto another road that’s not bad either:

Not that the nice new road goes all the way from Yakutsk to Tulun yet. Most of it still doesn’t exist – still under construction, which means in some stretches you can only drive on the winter roads (temporary “roads” built upon ice, including frozen rivers). And when those are closed in summer, it’s all just impassable swamp. But the sections that are finished are really pretty good ->

The weather kept changing, from -25 to +0°C, and from clear blue skies to pre-blizzard whiteouts ->

We dropped in on Bratsk…

…Specifically – its hydroelectric power plant, which was once the most powerful in the world and is now the third most powerful in Russia, where we were lucky enough to get an absolutely excellent tour, for which a huge thank-you ->

And a short video:

Next, we crossed over to the opposite bank of the Angara (the road goes right along the dam – and there’s no other option) and then it was 320km to Ust‑Kut…

The weather was very snowy, the traffic was heavy, and visibility at times was close to zero. After a short night in Ust‑Kut we got back on the same highway and raced onward…

Our pick-ups/jeeps had been specially prepared for Arctic conditions. No chances taken in the Arctic!…

This is what it’s like on a very good stretch:

Winter road:

Winter road at night:

Over the entire 840km of this winter road there’s just one (1!) settlement: the village of Nepa. There and in other places in the region you come across “pickets” – what they call roadside cafes that only operate in winter‑road season; afterward there’s usually nobody there. Here’s the wall in one such picket, from fellow traveler AI:

It’s impossible to cover the 800+ kilometers in a day at an average speed of 40-50 km/h, so we spent the night in the vehicles:

Why not in a 5* hotel? Or in fact in just any kind of regular hotel, or, at the very least, a guesthouse? They simply don’t exist here. At all! But sleeping in the vehicles wasn’t so bad: after 16 (!) hours of driving, we were so tired we were out like lights…

Breakfast was at the “Siberia” café: