Taking the (more) scenic route to Magadan.

If you ever need to dash from Yakutsk to Magadan (or Magadan to Yakutsk) by car – you need to take the only road that exists between the two cities. And that road is the Kolyma Highway: 2000+ kilometers with the route Yakutsk – Khandyga – Ust-Nera – Susuman – Magadan. And it’s an absolutely mind-blowingly beautiful road in January or February!…

I’ve already driven it along four (4!) times in the winter. And something tells me I’ll be back for more deep-frozen far-eastern road-trip tourism – and more than once.

Near Susuman, the highway splits into two branches: the main route, and an alternative route – 100km shorter, but trickier. This alternative road, marked 44N-4 (also known as the Tenkinskaya Highway), may be less comfortable for crossing the vast Kolyma region, but it’s far more scenic – at least in the dead of winter. So we hang a right off the main Kolyma road – and off we pop!…

But, why does the main road take a detour rather than going straight through? Well, because the landscape of the “straight through” bit looks like this. While the shortcut road barrels straight through these decidedly unfriendly conditions:

So why build a road there at all? It’s all tied up with gold mining – but more on that later. For now, we just drove on and soaked up the glorious scenery. I was at the wheel the whole time, so most of the photos here were taken by DZ. In places the roads take in mountain passes ->

While down in the lowlands, it can twist and turn aplenty:

The road isn’t asphalted; it’s made of packed gravel. It’s regularly cleared of snow, and has safety barriers and signs all where they should be. Here’s one of the road crews doing the clearing:

There’s just one problem: sometimes those road crews work a little too hard. They scrape the snow right off the sharply dropping roadside edges. So what looks like a nice flat shoulder is really just loose snow on top of… nothing! That’s how I got caught out once during an overtake. There was a “barrel” up ahead (a fuel tanker truck), crawling along heavily loaded and not leaving me much room, so I edged slightly left and… my left wheels went on to the shoulder. Mid-overtake! But I kept moving! After a bit, I managed to get back onto the road, finish overtaking, and bask in the well-earned applause from my fellow passengers. Sadly there’s no video, since this unplanned maneuver kicked up that much snow that the dashcams in the cars behind caught nothing of the action.

So yeah, on Siberian roads you absolutely cannot trust the shoulders. They may look flat, but they’re always deceptive. In short, overtaking out here can be seriously tricky. The truck driver ahead can see you (he’s sitting up high and has plenty of mirrors), but there’s often simply nowhere for him to pull over and let the “little guy” through. So on the passes you can end up crawling behind a trucker for ages.

Though sometimes it’s easier:

By the way, isn’t that the same “barrel” I overtook while half-buried in snow? :)

So yes: never a dull moment on this road.

The most beautiful sections of road out here are, without a doubt, the mountain passes. It’s usually colder up there, and windier too, and as a result everything ends up frozen solid. In the deepest cold, it all gets covered from every angle in hoarfrost. Yeah, this season wasn’t quite as brutally cold, so the passes lost some of their charm, but what can you do? We still had to drive!

And yes, naturally, the passes can be dangerous. This time we didn’t see any overturned semis or trucks lying on their sides, but there were definitely traces of vehicles having been dug out and recovered after sliding off the road. And right at the very top of passes it can get extremely slippery – we had to crawl along in second gear.