NOTES, COMMENT AND BUZZ FROM EUGENE KASPERSKY – OFFICIAL BLOG
October 11, 2024
After Oymyakon, we decided we needed to check out the local disused airport – in the village called… Airport (in Russian – Aeroport)! ->
In WWII it was used as a back-up airport for ALSIB Lend-Lease aircraft. After the war it became a civilian airport, and now – as you can see – it’s well and truly abandoned:
October 9, 2024
I left you in the previous post with our leaving Oymyakon heading in the direction of the original Kolyma highway. All righty – let’s go!…
The Old Kolymsky Tract is the highway road the R504 replaced. You might think it’d be abandoned by now, but you’d be wrong – kinda. A long stretch of it is fully serviced and regularly cleared of snow and has the odd small village alongside it. In places – near Tomtor – it even has street lighting ->
October 8, 2024
Still with plenty of time to spare on the return leg of our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition, what else could we check out along the way? Answering that was easy: Oymyakon – for the third time in as many years!…
October 7, 2024
Intro
Luck was on our side when heading back south on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition: we’d narrowly missed being stranded for several days in Tiksi, and were way ahead of schedule. And it was this latter spot of luck that permitted us to spend plenty of time examining and enjoying a very special feature of the North – which I’ll be writing a lot about and showing a great many photos of in this here mega-long post. And as the title to the post indicates – the special feature is… the Indigirka Tube ->
So, what is the Indigirka Tube?…
September 26, 2024
What with several business trips the world over since the spring, plus a few Kamchatka-2024 posts already sneaking onto these here blog pages of mine, you might think that my tales from the extreme-north side (our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk road expedition) could be over. How wrong you’d be!…
But even I admit that it’s been a while since my last Tiksi-post. Accordingly, quick rewind to where I left you months ago…
I left you with our having left Tiksi heading back in the direction of Yakutsk just before Tiksi was cut off completely for over a week due to a particularly intense arctic blizzard, and our realizing that we were waaaay ahead of schedule – as in: we’d be back in Yakutsk in half the time we’d planned; yes – a full 10 days earlier!
So what were we to do? Arrive back earlier and that was that? Of course not. No, instead, we decided to head back toward Ust-Nera and investigate much more closely Indigirskaya Truba – the Indigirka Tube. Well why not? After all, we’d plenty of time, and – more importantly – the naleds there were fully frozen, thus posing no danger…
// What’s the Indigirka Tube? Find out here.
So – back to Ust-Nera it was. Not that it felt much like our second time in as many weeks on this expedition, since the snowstorm had changed how the landscape looked so much. Here it is two weeks earlier ->
And here’s the exact (see the same road signs?!) same spot after the storm:
Onward – through the only-barely-cleared road – the Kolyma Highway…
August 29, 2024
Today’s portion of Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition took us from Topolínoye on the winter road to the Kolyma Highway, and along the latter for a short stretch until our next overnight stay – in the village of Tyoply Klyuch (Warm Springs). The road was smooth and wide, the views – exceptional:
August 21, 2024
Ahead of us – taking the incredibly picturesque (permanent, but not asphalted) road from the village of Topolinoye roughly south all the way to the Kolyma Highway, and then hanging a right (westward) and back to Yakutsk. That was the plan, anyway…
August 20, 2024
After Verkhoyansk and then the Batagaika crater, we continued on our way on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition southward…
Next up was probably the trickiest – and certainly the most tedious – segment of the expedition. You’ll probably be able to guess the reasons by now: yep – bumpy road, and later on – bad weather…
August 16, 2024
The town of Verkhoyansk is one of extremes. First and foremost, it’s considered to be one of the coldest places on the planet – a Pole of Cold. It also happens to be the northernmost town in Yakutia (so – not including villages), and it’s also the town (again – not village) with the smallest population in Russia. Wait – there’s more: back to the climate theme, it’s in the Guinness Book of Records for having the greatest range of temperatures – a whopping 105.8°C between the coldest and warmest!
Here’s the sign at the village’s town’s gates as you enter it ->
The town of Verkhoyansk – the Pole of Cold
August 13, 2024
In the previous post, I left you with us leaving Tiksi earlier than planned. We left earlier to avoid the coming storm, which could have seen us stranded in Tiksi for more than a week. Now, Tiksi is a wonderful place, but staying there for a week+ sure wasn’t in our plans. We all agreed: “Let’s get the hell out of here!” And that’s just what we did – on the winter road back the way we came…
We left at 4pm – just in time for the sunset:
