Irkutsk > Yakutsk > Magadan > Yakutsk: why and how?

We’re all different. Some folks have a pedigree dog and a whole houseful of kids and grandkids. Others keep two or three cats – each with its own personality. Some even keep exotic tropical cockroaches and snakes. Some get hooked on online games; others prefer the real world. Some head to the beach in summer for the sun and sea; others make for the mountains – the higher the better. We’re all different – me included. For me – here’s how: my face is usually tanned from trips to the tropics, yet I’ve also developed a serious fondness of Siberian winters and frosty landscapes – those of the meditative-contemplative kind…

For Siberian frosts (especially those in Yakutia) really do invite contemplation – particularly when you’re driving long distances through the wilderness. Like this season…

Not that we got a proper cold snap this year, while the bleached winter scenery really does depend on the uniquely Siberian deep frosts. But I’ll save that topic for another post; for now…

Siberia: ice, snow, impassable roads, permafrost – yes, all of that. Plus sudden water overflows onto the ice known as naleds:

This year’s trip had various objectives – a full five of them! ->

(i) To get some closure: to return to the town of Mirny from the opposite direction to our first time and somehow reverse whatever portal we accidentally opened on February 24, 2022.

(ii) To drive a regular (albeit specially prepared) car along the impassable Old Kolyma Road. Unfortunately, abnormal snowfall this winter made that impossible.

(iii) To reach Jack London Lake – but in the end we didn’t even try: the snow wasn’t quite waist-deep, but certainly above the knee.

(iv) To drive along the Indigirka Tube – and we did it! And incredible it was too!

(v) To get drone footage of the Yakutian volcanoes (yes, there are such a things – who knew?!) – done!

And of course there’s always the obvious, omnipresent objective of taking in the scenery and being awed by the impossibly white landscapes. Thousands and thousands of kilometers of them!…

Now – about the trip itself. The adventure began in Irkutsk – a city that deserves serious respect:

The food here isn’t quite on the level of Russia’s gastronomic capital – Krasnoyarsk (the home of “punitive cuisine”), but it’s still excellent.

Sadly, our culinary indulgence in Irkutsk was short-lived as we were there for just one night, and set off on our expedition the following morning. A couple of days later, we were on a real Siberian winter road. I’ve explained what a winter road is before, but here’s a quick refresher.

A winter road – zimnik in Russian – isn’t a regular paved, graded, or dirt road. It’s something else entirely – something fascinating…

Winter roads only work for two or three months a year; then they melt and become impassable. There are no bridges over the rivers (you just drive on the ice), and who knows when there will be…

And here we are, back in Mirny.

We passed through the portal, but not with the result we’d hoped for. The world’s gone mad, spinning off its axis. But what can you do? We press on…

Kolyma – straight ahead…

The Old Kolyma Road is utterly impassable for a regular car: over 200 kilometers of it looks roughly like this:

Which is why attempting it in winter is appealing: it’s potentially doable with a properly equipped vehicle. But this season it wasn’t meant to be…

At first we were flying along ->

But the snow just kept getting deeper and deeper:

We tried going in the opposite direction, but it was the same story: abnormal snow, even avalanches.

Driving on river ice turned out to be pretty dicey too, even following TREKOL tracks.

So we shelved those plans for a colder, less snowy year.

Along the way, we visited three industrial sites: 1) the Bratsk Hydroelectric Power Station (I’ve lost count of how many hydro-plants I’ve seen – around eight now, I think); 2) the Natalka open-pit gold mine and processing plant (the name has an interesting backstory); and 3) the construction site of the long-awaited Lena Bridge near Yakutsk – a cable-stayed crossing of the Lena River near Yakutsk…

These are the beasts that work the Far Eastern deposits – and more and more of them are Chinese-made.

A new Chinese excavator, painted with the Russian tricolor right at the factory. As they say, every cloud has a silver lining: when the previous supplier left, the Chinese replacement turned out to be more reliable and user-friendly!

Gold ore processing is its own complex topic. I’ll try to cover it later, if I can remember anything…

Pouring the final product.

And here are the bars – 80% gold content. They get shipped off for further refining.

We didn’t accomplish everything we’d planned; this February was unusually warm, and the views were a bit… hazy. But these vast open spaces still have a grip on me, and they’re not letting go; accordingly, more road trips are already in the works!…

High-resolution photos from our Irkutsk–Yakutsk–Magadan–Yakutsk (winter) road trip are here.