800 kilometers of ice road!

One morning – not too early, but still dark out – we piled into our vehicles and rolled out of Ust-Kut toward the ice road, heading for the town of Mirny (here)…

The weather was treating us well – a balmy -22°C for this time of year. We sure didn’t expect that!

Morning scene: the parking lot where we spent the night ->

We weren’t planning on following him anyway (the sticker was on some serious off-road vehicle). We were going by road; well – a winter road, but still a road. And for the first ~150km from Ust-Kut, it’s a totally decent year-round highway. Gravel, not asphalt, but smooth, cleared, and signs where they should be. The road crews really do do solid work out here!

The road turns off toward the last settlement on the year-round route – we’re heading north!…

For another ~15km it’s still a pretty good (real) road, and only after that do we transition onto the winter road…

To the nearest settlement (the village of Nepa) – 260km…

A Siberian winter road! Let’s go!…

At first the road’s totally drivable, probably year-round too:

Makes sense, since there are gas-production fields out here:

Map of the winter road showing the plan for our adventures over the next two days. The poster’s seen better days…

Surprisingly, there aren’t any maps of Far Eastern winter roads online. You can find fragments, but a complete, up-to-date one? Nope! Not good. So we had to fix that… done!…

Check this out! Exclusive! Here’s a map of Far Eastern (+ Irkutsk Oblast) winter roads. The blue lines mark the regular every-year winter roads; the orange ones – irregular or not officially maintained. Most of the marked winter roads are drawn from tracks or from Yandex Maps, while some are just straight lines since their routes shift year to year:

The map was put together with Alexander Elikov, who’s commanded our motor convoy more than once and is a real expert on Arctic routes. In total we plotted roughly 10,500km of regular winter roads (give or take, since the routes tend to vary somewhat from season to season), and about 2,700km of irregular ones – though that number is even more approximate since some winter roads are drawn as a straight line from point to point.

If anyone has any additions or corrections, please drop them in the comments – we’ll update accordingly.

Meanwhile (between Ust-Kut and Mirny), we were taking the Tas-Yuryakh–Verkhnemarkovo winter road (in the reverse direction):

Beautiful!

I’ll say it again: the southern part of this winter road is totally decent – you can cruise at 50–60 km/h.

We passed oncoming heavy trucks with zero problems:

But that’s temporary. Once the gas-production sites end, the quality of the winter road gradually deteriorates. It gets narrower and ruts appear. As a consequence our speed dropped to 30–40 km/h…

Oh! A 2000km sign – that’s how far we’ve got left to Yakutsk :) ->

An originally Czech truck-trailer sits abandoned and rusting on the shoulder. Did it ever know this fate was waiting for it?!…

First stop – near the village of Nepa. We just chill by the roadside; the village is off to the side of the winter road, but there’s nothing to see there anyway.

But we did fly the drone – check out the winter road from above. In one direction it runs along an almost perfectly straight clearing:

In the other direction it crosses the Lower Tunguska River (near where the Tunguska event occurred) – then winds along and disappears into infinity:

Great shot:

Alright, time to leave the roadside by Nepa (by the way, it’s the only settlement along the entire 800km of the winter road!). Onward!…

I’ve said it already, but I’ll repeat it: traffic density here depends on the region’s economic activity. If something big is being built, there’s more freight and deeper ruts. If not, you can drive for an hour or two without seeing anyone. Then suddenly convoys of oncoming and same-direction traffic appear. It also matters which way the truck traffic is headed. Northbound? Loaded to the max – heavy and clumsy. Southbound? Empty – light and cheerful :)

Sometimes they just tear along, but they still slow down for oncoming traffic:

Either way, we’re “guests” here. This winter road is made for freight transport, not us little guys. So we yield to oncoming vehicles as much as possible:

Overtaking happens regularly too, but all the trucks behave pretty decently: when they notice us and the road is straight and wide enough, they move over and let us pass. Sometimes they even stop.

Night overtaking happens too (though most drivers sleep at night), and it all takes place without incident:

Nightfall approaching, we stopped for dinner at another roadside café (called “pickets” here), and then it was back on the road. Well, why not? There’s nothing else to do. Taiga, snow, and trees all around. And the winter road isn’t going to drive itself!…

Then we stopped for the night and had a great night’s sleep right in our cars! You sleep like a baby after a day like that: we drove a full 730km (probably 550+ of that on the seasonal winter road), and were on the move for 17 hours!

In the morning, breakfast at the local picket – and back on the road…

Just 4km from where we spent the night (at the “Sibir” picket) – the border between Irkutsk Oblast and Yakutia:

Not long after that, the weather took a serious turn for the worse. The previous day the sun was shining; on this day – some kind of snowy hell broke loose.

Just the occasional sunny spell…

In 2022 this road had been wrecked by heavy traffic – seeing us doing just 20–30–40 km/h. Now it’s smooth, and we were speeding at up to nearly 60+ km/h.

Wow! It’s basically a “winter-autobahn” out here.

We were doing sometimes 65 km/h! Awesome!

Yes, this year it was smooth sailing out here.

At one point the winter road split into two lanes – one for our direction and one for oncoming traffic. Ours went through a birch grove like this:

That’s it, the finish. Winter road: done!

Trucks are parked in the lot: some have already come off the winter road, others are just about to head onto it.

Eight hundred kilometers impassable in summer – and on a less-shabby map too ) ->

And that was that: we’d reached a year-round, regularly maintained highway. But it didn’t get any easier – snow squalls started up again: driving behind another car you couldn’t see anything at all. Driving on the left-side, oncoming lane? Much more comfortable :). Luckily there was almost no oncoming traffic (or even same-direction traffic).

And finally we were in Mirny! Hooray!

The best hi-res photos from our Irkutsk–Yakutsk–Magadan–Yakutsk road-trip are here.