Tag Archives: tiksi-2024

I love railroads. And since there’s a fairly new one that starts/ends at Nizhny Bestyakh – on the opposite bank of the Lena River from Yakutsk – we just had to investigate (after arriving back in Yakutsk on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition)…

Opened in 2011, it runs a full 808km (!) in length in total – all across permafrost (how’s that even possible?!) ->

…And we even got a ride on it – in this here “general’s” wagon. Huge thanks to the guys who made it happen! ->

Read on …

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:

Read on…

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 ->

Read on…

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!…

Read on…

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?…

Read on …

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…

Read on…

The time has finally come to lift the curtain on something I’ve only been mentioning in passing while writing these here Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition posts: the where-we-stayed situation up inside the Arctic Circle and in just-as-cold other areas of Yakutia…

In the smallest of nutshells, the situation is as follows:

• There are places to stay – but often they’re nothing like hotels or guesthouses
• A hot shower isn’t guaranteed
• A toilet is guaranteed – and it’s not always outside!
• The range of comfort levels couldn’t be broader – from dossing down on floors of town-halls or school sports halls, or sleeping in our vehicles (ugh), to the relative (for permafrosted locations) luxury of decent hotel in a city; like the Tygin Darkhan in Yakutsk ->

Tiny nutshell – done. The rest of this post: details…

Read on…

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:

Read on…

In my previous post, I left you with us in the middle of nowhere on the Yana Highway (on our Yakutsk-Tiksi-Yakutsk expedition)…

So why did we stop here? Because we wanted another look at a place we’d seen here back in 2021 – among the last few remains of what was once a Gulag forced-labor camp – a barrack surrounded by two barbed-wire fences, plus a watchtower. It’s a symbol of a dark chapter of history of the country – one that needs to be known and remembered. I think the place should be preserved and protected until one day it becomes a valuable artifact of history and a museum of the Gulag.

Read on…

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…

Read on…