Winter Roads of Siberia

It was a calculated risk. During three years of preparation for an attempt at driving across Russia, Gary and Monika Westcott had heard rumors of an ice road up the frozen Lena river, from Yakutsk to Ust Kut some 1,200 miles away. However, when they arrived in Yakutsk (see Russian Life, March, 1996), 1,340 miles west of their starting point in Magadan, no one seemed to know about the road. The only way to find out for sure was to get on the ice and drive.

And hope not to get mired in the muck of the Spring thaw.

By Gary Wescott. Photos by Gary & Monika Wescott.

As we nosed our truck down the embankment and onto the river just west of Ulakhan-An, the white Siberian snow sparkled under a brilliantly blue winter sky. Our main concern now was the ice. This was the beginning of April, and we had been told that break-up could begin as early as April 15th. Maybe we were pushing it a little.

“The Great Mother River of Siberia” stretched out in front of us — 2,734 miles from its source in the Baikalsky Mountains near Lake Baikal to the Laptev Sea in the Arctic Ocean. The Lena is the ninth longest river in the World, and the largest of Siberia’s 53,000 rivers and streams.

It seemed logical to us that the numerous villages along its banks would have some way of local travel during the five months a year the river was frozen. It was our plan to link these obscure backroads together, with time to visit small hamlets to gain a feeling for the Russian people of Siberia.

While it didn’t seem likely this time of year, an Arctic storm — they call them purgas — could find its way up the Lena. A week before, we had tried to reach the native Evenk village of Siyegen Kyugel to attend the annual Spring Reindeer Festival, but a purga from the North had blown down through the Chochumsky mountains, leaving four-foot snow drifts across the road. Now, we basked in the sun and welcomed temperatures of -20°F, which kept the ice in a safe and frozen state.

Travel on the river varied greatly from one mile to the next. At times, the narrow track was pocked with holes and ridges of wind-packed snow, reducing our speed to 10 or 15 mph. Side slopes along the bank were treacherously icy, requiring chains on all four traction tires to keep from sliding into deep snow. A few sections were of wide fast blue ice as smooth as a skating rink. Four wheel drive was always mandatory, and locking differentials was often a help when backing out of the one-lane ruts into three-foot snow berms to let the occasional oncoming truck get by. Turn-outs were few and far between.

VILLAGE LIFE

Our first “village” experience would influence the remainder of our journey. We had stopped at dusk near Tit-Ary. There was no possibility of parking in town. Narrow streets were not plowed and most traffic was by horse drawn sleigh. We parked below the village on the frozen Lena at a crossroad running over to the small island hamlet of Ebe-Ise. We had just finished dinner when we heard the motorcycle with sidecar stop. The three man-boys could barely stand up, and all of them wanted to come into the warm camper. They were obnoxiously drunk, and dangerously belligerent. Monika grabbed a can of pepper spray and stood back while I physically pushed one of them out of the camper. He wasn’t very happy about it. We left them staggering in the snow as we drove away.

The next night, we stopped in the friendly village of Sangyyakhtakh. Looking for safe place to park, we asked a very German-looking gentleman. He led us to a truck parking area on the river a mile out of town, explaining with a tap of the finger on his throat that it was too dangerous in town. Too many drunks!

Following these experiences, we seldom camped within sight of a village, and the few times we did, we invariably paid for it with vandalism on the truck by children who, it was becoming increasingly apparent, had no respect for the property of others, or with similar problems with drunks. It was disappointing that contact with locals would be so difficult, but the lesson was relearned a dozen times. Unless we were invited in by an individual and could park inside a fenced yard, the situation was impossible.

The trail snaked from one side of the river to the other and back, following the straightest line, connecting local villages and avoiding dangerous ice flows at the mouths of tributaries. We were surrounded by spectacular scenery. Sometimes interesting cliffs and rock formations were miles away on the far bank, and other times, they towered over our heads. Stopping in the middle of one of the largest rivers on earth for lunch and walking around in the sun was a unique experience. At high noon, we could peer down through the translucent blue-green surface for several feet. From a distance, sections of ice where all snow had been blown away took on an inky blackness, which could (alarmingly) be mistaken for open water at first glance. Small fissures in the surface filled with snow and became patterns of lacy cobwebs.

The camper’s water storage tank, pump and filter system could not be used without the danger of freezing. We took water each day from the river where villagers had chopped holes through the ice. Often sharing these with cows and horses, we pumped directly from the river with our PUR Explorer triiodine resin filter into Nalgene 1-liter bottles. In this dry cold climate, it was important to drink plenty of liquids.

Some villages along the river had been abandoned. Others were thriving little agricultural and logging communities. Typical homes consisted of a two or three room log cabin with a corral and several outbuildings for farm animals. No one had running water. Almost all heating and cooking was done with wood. This time of year, with trails into the forest still frozen, locals were kept busy dragging out logs for building and firewood, and hauling the last of their winter hay from islands or distant meadows. These people were “peasants” by any definition, and their self-sufficient lives greatly resembled those of the pioneers who settled the American West.

ICE DRIVING

As we had been warned, there were holes and cracks in the river’s surface, but we could generally see these in advance, giving them a wide berth. Crossing the glacial blisters of small streams, we had no way of knowing how thick the multiple layers of ice were. Testing for thin ice by walking on it is something like checking the level of fuel in your gas tank with a lighted match.

As we reached each difficult crossing, we would scan the horizon in search of oncoming trucks — guinea pigs we could watch before venturing out on the thin ice ourselves. With no traffic in sight, we would grow impatient, and after an anxious inspection on foot, we would surge across a 100-yard cap of eerie, aqua-blue ice in a white-knuckled plunge of apprehensive determination, wheels spinning and the sound of cracking ice and water filling our ears. Then silence, as our hearts resumed their normal rate. We had gambled again and won. We had to keep moving. In these marginal conditions, a day could make a difference.

Lensk was a dirty gray mud hole of slush and Spring-melt. The trash and garbage of an ugly river port lay bare, robbed of its Winter mask and worsened by nine months of soot and grime from belching coal-fired chimneys, diesel trucks, and half a dozen saw mills. The frozen highway up the Lena apparently ended here. Narrow sections above Lensk were reportedly impassable because of cracks and upheaves. We stopped to fill our fuel tanks, and we were convinced by several truck drivers that the only safe route to Ust Kut was southwest, on winter roads to a town called Markovo. Most of this route did not show on any of our detailed  U.S. Defense Agency maps, but we had gained confidence in traveling Russia’s backroads alone.

We headed north toward Mirny and turned west at an unmarked junction.  After forty mi-les, we came to an ominous military check-point with a barrier across the road, the kind you see in old war movies. The “guards” were all inside a strange tundra vehicle which looked like a submarine on wheels. They were busy watching a porn video, but the arrival of our Ford F-350 was clearly the most interesting thing to happen in weeks. After checking our papers, they advised us that the road was very bad, and cautioned us about unmarked turns.

Now we drove through an endless tunnel of trees, a forest so dense that a man would have trouble walking, even if he could stumble through the four-foot blanket of snow. There was no wind, not even a breeze. Delicate flakes of dry powder floated gently down and lightly settled themselves, undisturbed, layer upon layer, wrapping around the dead-fall like giant snakes, sagging from the limbs of trees which leaned into each other looking for a place to rest. The reddish-brown trunks of Siberian Scotch Pine intertwined with the white of birch and the gray bark of larch and aspen. This was a “winter road” across the wilderness of the Russian “Taiga”, and its usable life depended entirely on temperatures remaining below freezing. We could feel the warm breath of Spring on our necks.

MELTING, MELTING...

As we climbed in and out of valleys to cross frozen streams, we began to encounter a new problem. Nighttime temperatures had been down to -11°F, but when the warmth of the sun struck the slopes with southern exposure, the compacted ice in the ruts cracked and melted into three inches of black mud which acted like a layer of grease on the frozen earth beneath. Our Mud-Terrain tires flung this muck into the wheel wells, and with daytime air temperatures still down in the mid-twenties, it froze as it dripped, creating a build-up which we had to chip out every few hours to keep the tires from rubbing. Our fenders were hung with ten-inch mudcicles!

The village of Nepa was the only settlement on this wilderness route. People were very poor, perhaps because of their isolation six months a year when the winter road turned into a bog. On the Nepa river we were able to fill our water bottles from a hole in the ice. Locals came with horse and sleigh to carry water to their homes. Again there was a fever of firewood cutting, for in a week or two, the snow would soften, and extracting logs from the forest would become a major task.

On April 10, we saw the mercury rise above freezing for the first time since leaving Seattle on January 30! Thirty-seven degrees seemed tropical! We melted snow with our R&M Hot Water Shower and washed our hair. Oncoming traffic had almost completely ceased, and it worried us a little. Had the road closed?

Warmer temperatures meant more mud. Trucks had broken through the ice on the Bovaninka River. We drove around the holes, not knowing how deep the water might be. Problem sections of the road had been patched with log corduroy. The crust of snow had turned to corn overnight. The road, like some Escher painting, was melting before our eyes, and we were still at least 150 miles short of Ust Kut!

The sticky mud made slicks out of traction tires. Truckers were starting to put chains on to get up the hills. On a long climb out of Malaya Tira River valley, we got behind a semi, bogged in a foot of snow-saturated slop. We winched ourselves out of the ruts and managed to get around him. Since leaving Yakutsk, truck drivers had been our only companions. They were a good lot, and surely appreciated the challenge and danger of the roads we were sharing.

Detouring off the main route to the town of Markovo, we continued across the rotting ice of the Lena to a small hamlet where we had noticed an old abandoned church, one of the few we had seen in Siberia. A man and his wife were cutting firewood in front of their little log house and we stopped to take pictures. We were the first foreigners they had ever seen, and they invited us in for a cup of tea.

We had candy and balloons for the kids, and we took Polaroid snapshots of the family. Soon we were preparing a feast of Russian and American food. They had no running water, but like many Russian homes, they had a banya, a Russian style wood-heated sauna which usually doubles as a laundry room. We spent two relaxing days learning a little about how they lived and watching them care for their menagerie of chickens, ducks, geese, cows, and pigs. They were poor, but remarkably self-sufficient. The modern world had passed them by a hundred years ago.

Six hundred and sixty-one miles from Lensk, we bumped onto pavement and unlocked the hubs for the first time since we had pulled out of the container in the port of Magadan, 2,660 miles away.

Driving through Ust Kut and Bratsk, we headed south to Irkutsk. The roads were terrible; broken pavement, dirt, mud, gravel, cracked cement slabs... but they were roads! There were gas stations and stores! Fields were being plowed and the buds of Spring were starting to appear. On April 21, we pulled into a parking area near the Angara River and walked out over the frozen expanse of Lake Baikal, one fifth of all the fresh water on earth still locked in Winter’s grip under our feet.

Next month: Exploring Lake Baikal

and its environs...