The Road of Bones

The Kingdom of Ice: Chapter II

Text and Photography: Dhari Alfawzan

We crossed the Lena River not fully comprehending what awaited us on the other bank. A thousand kilometers across a gruesome peninsula, a thousand kilometers on one of the most dangerous roads ever built by mankind. The infamous Kolyma highway “R504”, also known as the Road of Bones. A two-lane highway cutting deep into the hearts of the Siberian frontier and the only lifeline that connects the major settlements scattered across the far northeast. This road of death spans 2,031 kilometers, connecting Yakutsk all the way to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk.

Our first introduction to this infamous tarmac was on the eastern banks of the Lena by the town of Nizhniy Bestyakh. From there, we must travel northeast to reach the village of Oymyakon, where it’s rumored that the pole of cold resides.

A road Sign that reads “Magadan 1504 Kilometers Away” as we have just reached the Verkhoyansk Mountain Range Pass. A road Sign that reads “Magadan 1504 Kilometers Away” as we have just reached the Verkhoyansk Mountain Range Pass.

R504

 

The path that lay ahead of us was not an easy one to journey, or so I thought. It’s been a while since we have left Nizhniy Bestyakh, and with each mileage marker we crossed, all those ominous warnings and haunting tales that we have heard so much about have started to fade to the point where I questioned everything. The road was in pristine conditions, given the environment it was subjected to. It was a winter road, nothing more and nothing less, with scattered villages and service stations every few kilometers down the road.

What’s so dangerous about this road, I thought?

 

It’s midday, and the sun is barely caressing the tops of the surrounding taiga. We stopped at a service station in the village of Tyungyulyu to refuel and have lunch. With these roadhouses, the food is always drenched in oil and bland on the tongue, but you’re stuck with what you have, for choices out here are limited. 

Still ahead of us are 330 kilometers to reach Khandyga, our first stopover along this frozen highway.

Peering out through my frost-laden windows, I saw a landscape stuck in repeat. No distinctive features, just small snow-covered mounds surrounded by the dense taiga on all sides, but every once in a while, the taiga would open up to scattered frozen lakes.

What caught my eye was a small frozen pond with neatly cut holes, with cattle marching over the ice, making their way to these watering holes. The cow’s udders were covered in a thick layer of felt, for the cold will solidify the milk inside their bodies in an instant.

t must be quite hard to be a rancher in these parts, waking up every morning to chop away the ice for your cattle to quill their thirst. And with how cold it is outside, maintaining those openings seems like a never-ending task, as does trying to keep myself awake on this road.

Although the distance to Khandyga is not very far, the road compels us to drive slowly, with the speedometer fluctuating between 60 and 80 km/hr. The sound of the tires contacting the forested over tarmac and the dismal landscape kept me in a strange state of numbness where all I wanted to do was close my eyes shut.

It was already nightfall when we reached the banks of the Aldan River, our first hurdle. We crossed cautiously as we heard the rippling echoes of the water beneath our wheels, till it was disturbed by a loud thump, followed by the vehicle jerking violently. Crossing this ice road almost cost us our journey, for we struck a sharp sinkhole and lost one of the tires. Changing a flat tire in the open when it’s well below -40 °C is a fate tat I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. Just a couple of kilometers down the road from the crossing, we spotted lights. There it was, the town of Khandyga.

 

It was hardly a welcoming sight, an eerie fog covered the road into town with the dimly lit streets and old soviet Khrushchevkas standing guard. A grim sight in this Kingdom of Ice. This town is a large refueling and supply depot for the road. We stopped at a small cafeteria at the town’s entrance. The place is packed with miners and ice-road truckers trying to escape the cold. This town lives off the road and the surrounding coal mine on the outskirts of town. We found our way to a small apartment that we have rented for the night. The owner was waiting for us by the front door; her gentle smile and welcoming spirit gave us some warmth in these gloomy halls of the Khrushchevka. While looking out the windows overlooking the dark snowy streets, a sudden wave of somberness filled 

me. A strange, pensive melancholy that hallowed my soul. I don’t know if it was my own feeling that I carried that night or someone else’s. All I know is that there is something eerie about this town.

 

Khandyga wasn’t always a supply station for the road. In a different era, this town was one of the administrative centers for the Dalstroy “Far Northern Construction Trust”, a brutal organization that ran the upper Kolyma region forced labor camps, infamously known as the “Gulags”. The town itself came

to be as a direct result of the gulag system. When it first came to be in 1939, it was here, just by the banks of the Aldan river, tens of thousands of poor souls were herded away into the death camps of Siberia to never be seen again.

The Great Terror

Under the brutal rule of Joseph Stalin, the NKVD "Soviet secret police", sent Millions of prisoners into the gulags. In many cases, the punishment didn’t always match the crime. Simply stealing a loaf of bread could send you to the death camps to serve for seven years or more.

 

Article 58 was the worst punishment of them all. It was the iron rod that the NKVD used to imprison millions for the crime of “anti-revolutionary activities”. The article’s vague wording made it easy for NKVD officers to characterize anything anti-revolutionary, something as simple as telling a lighthearted jest about the government, and you will find yourself in a train cart off to the slave camps. Anything and everything you do can be used against you. The years 1937 to 1938 were the worst period of the political repressions, the years of the purges. According to Robert Conquest, it’s estimated that 1.5 million people were arrested and tried in many cases under fabricated charges. From which 690 thousand prisoners were shot and executed. As for those who have survived the hangman's noose, it was the cattle carts that awaited to take them to the death camps of Siberia.

The period of the Great Terror, they called it. No one was out of reach from the iron rod, even Sergei Korolev, the father of the Soviet space program, the legendary aerospace engineer who put the first man and woman in space. He was also a victim of the gulags, where he suffered for many years till he was released in 1944.

The Great Terror didn’t discriminate; men and women, young and old, all those who were found guilty were condemned to a life in the camps.

Between the 13th of November 1931, when the gulag decree was first published, and the mass releases of 1954 after Stalin's death. It is estimated that around two million prisoners died in the camps. It wasn't till the 25th of January 1960, when the gulag administration was officially dismantled, that horrors ceased.

 

By then, somewhere between 14 and 18 million prisoners passed through the camps. Life in the camps was brutal, “It’s a good thing that tears have no odor” Varlam Shalamov.

These words by Varlam mirror the horrors the camps inflict upon the soul. The wooden fences and the barbed wire are only for aesthetics, for the real prison was the land itself.

For those lucky enough to escape the camps, they are met with a far worse fate: the endless wilderness in all directions. Villages are like scattered atolls in the vast ocean of the Siberian taiga; there is nowhere close enough to escape to, at least nowhere close enough to make it alive. Some people are even chosen as “food can,” a term prisoner give to the first person to be eaten.

 

For those who have lost hope, giving in to the cold can always snuff out the evil in the world. “We understood death was no worse than life and we feared neither” Verlam Shalamov.

 

It wasn’t till the fall of the Soviet Union in 1990 that we came to know and hear those haunting tales about the gulags. The Iron Wall shielded the outside world from the horrors it had created while subjecting its inhabitants to the same evil it had promised to eradicate.

 

To this day, we don’t have all the answers to what really transpired here. Rotten wood posts and rusted barbed wire are all that remain, a testament to a sinister past that once plagued these lands.

 

Lives destroyed, families never to be reunited, the nameless, the forgotten, and the misfortunate. That was the fate for those who had fallen from grace.

 

Visiting the gulag museum in the village of Tyoply Klych exposed me to these stories. Before that, I didn’t know anything about the gulags aside from how they were betrayed in “The Long Walk”.

 

The reality is, no matter how awful you think it was, it was actually far worse. The caretaker, Maria Krestyaninova was ever so enthusiastic to show us around the small museum; it had been a while since she had any visitors. Many pass through here without ever taking a second glance.

 

There is so much more to explore about this dark history, so many untold stories. Georgiy Zhzhonov writes, " man is the most resilient creature on earth, he survived every adversity, famine, cold, illness, loneliness, beast dies, man lives. Especially the Russian man." A testament of human suffering and resolve.

I wanted to explore this history more, but unfortunately, my path leads me somewhere else. Upon the road that connects it all, the Kolyma Highway.

 

Gravel and Bones

It's not only gravel and tar that lay the foundations of this road, it’s also the crushed bones of those who had fallen from grace. That's how Kolyma Highway coined its infamous name “The Road of Bones”. It took close to 21 years to finish constructing this road, and the price was paid in blood and bones, literally.

The ground here is very hard due to the permafrost, so it was easier to cover the dead with gravel and pour the tar over them than to dig a grave. Many simply collapsed and died as they worked. Scurvy was widespread due to malnutrition, and the bitter cold was the last nail in the coffin.

Though the Kolyma highway starts from Nizhniy Bestyakh on the eastern banks of the Lena River. The original road of bones that was built during the gulag days starts here from Khandyga and connects all the way to Magadan on the Sea of Okhotsk. As you leave Khandyga heading east, you will stumble upon an old wooden marker commemorating the start of the road; it's quite easy to miss.

 

Construction of the road started simultaneously from Magadan in the far east and Khandyga in the heart of Kolyma.

 

According to historians, the number of those who perished while constructing this road can be anywhere between 80 and 100 thousand. Historians with their numbers, that's when it dawned on me. What’s wrong with us humans always trying to convert things into statistics? What is this obsession?

 

There is a quote that is said to be attributed to Stalin, “One death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic,” though there is no evidence that he actually said that. It’s the underlying truth in what the quote embodies that speaks volumes. It's how numb we can be to the brutalities and the atrocities that man can inflict upon others as it increases in magnitude. The weak suffer while the increasing numbers snuff out their cries.

Mile Marker one

The white snow covers the painful memories of the past very well, like a fine blanket; it masks all. Restocked and refueled with 600 kilometers remaining, we drove east in our trusted Toyota van.

 

Sasha twisted his body towards me and said, "It will take us 13-16 hours of driving to reach Oymyakon," while crossing his fingers. At first, I thought he was joking. Oh no, he was dead serious.

Ever since we left Khandyga, I noticed that the road was narrower and more rugged. Time stood idle for us, and I lost track of time. Though this land might seem gloomy, there are moments of pure ethereal grace.

As the sun climbed across the horizon, it casted its long golden shadow across the taiga.

At that instance, all the pine trees were caught in a flash of amber; it was as if the entire forest was set on fire. Though it didn’t last for long, soon enough the orange sun turned into a pale grey silhouette arching across the horizon. It has been some time since we saw any signs of human settlements, ever since we left the village of Tyoply Klych. There were no service stations, nothing. We were completely cut off.

Not long after, we crossed into the Oymyakon district.

It’s in a different time zone from where we came from.

As the road twisted and curved, I glimpsed some strange features across the horizon. It was the Verkhoyansk mountain range. Stripped from any vegetation, these bare mountains were the only recognizable landscape we had seen since we started our journey. It is here that we found ourselves on the most dangerous stretch of the road, the mountain passes of the Verkhoyansk Range.

 

Battled by the centuries, these mountains have tested the resolve of many who have made the pass. One should not tread lightly here, for even the best of drivers have met their end on these slopes. At the beginning of the mountain pass in Tomporukskij there is a cross commemorating the Romanian prisoners who built this section of the road during World War II.

The Black Pass

Our oil-run furnace in the car can barely keep up. The vehicle’s digital thermometer reads “Error". This means the outside temperature is lower than -45°C, the lowest temperature the gauge can read.

 

The truckers have a name for this stretch of the road; they call it the “Black Narrow Pass”. A Steep incline that twists around sharp rocky cliffs into a bottomless hollow. Many truckers have lost their lives here, especially those who lost control while driving downhill.

 

I witnessed a couple of trucks hanging off the side of the mountain, covered by snow and deformed beyond recognition; with also more at the bottom of the ravine. To truckers, icy gradients are their worst fear.

 

There is nothing that can stop the momentous force of those 18-wheelers when they come down crashing. There are no runaway truck ramps and no guard rails, just the sharp rocky ledges and the bottomless gorge.

 

After making it through the pass, the mountain opens up into a valley. Away in the distance, across the horizon, I noticed a thin layer of mist covering the valley floor, which means there is a flowing river there. In these temperatures, it must be a geothermal source. It was quite a relief to know that we had parted ways with the most challenging part of the road.

 

As we drove deeper into the valley, that thin layer of mist turned into a thick fog. And soon enough, we found out that we weren’t alone in these woods. Turned out that the geothermal spring that we saw was actually adjacent to the road, and truckers use this location as a resting point. No server station, no roadside facilities, just a small pavilion next to a flowing creek "Śaman Creek”. Hidden behind the pavilion was a post covered in many colorful ribbons; it’s a Shaman's tree post. A place to ask the spirits of the valley for a blessing according to local belief.

 

 These wooden posts have a deep-rooted connection with Yakutian culture. Weary travelers stop over, tie a colorful ribbon on the post, and place their offerings in hopes of gaining favor with the spirits that dwell within these woods. Though I doubt any spirits will be able to survive this kingdom of frost. This road is filled with superstitions. One strange superstition I encountered was that if you dropped something on the road, your wallet, for example. You cannot simply pick it back up; you must trade it for something: a coin, a cigarette, a piece of candy, anything. “It belongs to the dead now,” one of the truckers told me.

Those ice road truckers haul a heavy load and carry a heavy burden. It's a hard life that they have chosen for themselves. Just on the side of the road by the creek bed, I met some truckers carrying some mechanical work on their truck. They came from the gold mines deeper north, a place called “Nezhdaninskoye”. One of the leaf springs carrying the front axle snapped and sheared the bolts right off.

 

They have no choice but to fix it here in the cold; the attitude they displayed was quite cheerful, in spite of the circumstances they were in. Truckers usually help each other if they can. They move in caravans and stick together, but occasionally you will witness a lone wolf taking on the road alone.

 

The highway does not forgive mistakes; recovering a broken down truck can be as high as 7000$, for the closest town from here is Khandyga, which is 250 kilometers away.

 

Here, something as simple as unknowingly refueling your truck with knocked-off arctic diesel mixed with the summer surplus diesel can seal your fate. We said our goodbyes as Sasha tightened a red ribbon on the wooden post.

Lost Between the Markers, is the Fate of the Forgotten

We stopped for lunch at a roadhouse managed by hunters. As we arrived, we saw a couple of them coming out of the woods with their rifles strapped to their back. They hunt for snow sheep, elk, musk deer and wild reindeer. Unfortunately, today they must return empty-handed. It was here for the first time that we genuinely enjoyed the food; the meat was soft and perfectly seasoned. These men knew how to please their tummies.

Over lunch, Sasha shared with us some of the many stories about travelers who were claimed by this road. Seven years ago, a family of four, a husband and his wife with their two young children, got stranded on this road and froze to death. And a more recent story was about two young men, Sergey Ustinov and his friend, Vladislav Istomin, who lost their way.

 

The two buddies from Magadan got stranded in Kolyma some 3-4 years ago, not far away from Oymyakon. It was December, they flew to Vladivostok to buy a car for one of them, for he had just gotten his license. Lacking any experience, they packed up the car and headed towards Magadan.

 

Their fatal mistake was that they relied upon Google Maps, and it took them through the old summer road that goes past Tomotor. This stretch of the road is part of the original road of bones, and nobody travels on it in winter; it's old and unmaintained.

 

Everybody who follows local maps knows that you must take the R504 towards Ust'-Nera to reach Magadan. That was where their inexperience preordained their grim future.

 

Their newly acquired vehicle broke down, leaving them stranded on a densely snow-packed road. It took rescuers a week to find them, but it was too late.

Sergey was found frozen to death, while Vladislav was found suffering from severe frostbite that resulted in the amputation of all his limbs. The sole reason that they were able to find them was because of one of the boys' grandmother. She was expecting them on a specific date based on the time it takes, since they left Yakutsk. Once they missed their arrival window, she knew something was off; she resorted to local enforcement in Magadan, but that proved to be fruitless.

 

Thus, she did the only thing she could, which was to resort to social media. In an Instant, pictures of the boys and their car flooded telegram channels. And soon after, a man from Tomotor responded to having seen them passing through here a couple of days back. They were found 70-90 kilometers east of Tomtor,  close to the village of Orte- Balaganm.

 

This incident pushed Google Maps to change its policies and update its maps accordingly. Sasha mentioned that it is technically illegal not to stop for stranded drivers on this side of the road during winter.

 

Though the article is mentioned in the criminal codex. It is quite difficult to charge people with it, given that in many cases there is only a single witness, and in some cases it is hard to receive testimony from a frozen body. "In all my years traveling on this road since 1991, I have never heard that the article was enforced and someone was punished," Sasha.

In the end, it's all left to the moral obligations of the passing traveler: will he provide aid to the stranded or simply drive past them?

Sasha shared one last story, a haunting tale, and the reason behind the law of the stranded. 20 years ago, a man traveling on the highway near the Vilyuy River was found frozen to death. Next to his body were some written words on the snow. The man used a wooden stick to write the number of cars that passed by him without stopping for him. When wanderers drifting along this road find themselves stranded, they can only pray that someone with a kindhearted soul passes through here soon.

The Final Stretch

We reached a small wooden bridge spanning the Agayakon River. As we crossed it, we saw a truck on our flank gliding over the frozen river bed. The wooden bridge can not support these giant 18-wheelers, so they have to use the frozen rivers to cross over. During the summer, these roads become inaccessible to trucks, which is why they bring everything during the wintertime. That's how communities restock for the ummer. Because unless you want something important, you must drive all the way to Ust'-Nera. The closed town is some 430 kilometers away.

Our small van could barely handle the demanding toll this road inflicts on its strained mechanical parts. Forcing us to drive slowly at around 60 km/h. It’s been hours since we have seen anyone on the road with us. But that calmness was suddenly disturbed by an abandoned vehicle dead on the side of the road, with a small, ashy smoke rising from the side of the road's shoulder. As we got closer, we imagined the worst and prayed for the best.

There was no sign of anyone here. The snow-covered windshields and the squared-off tires, due to the grueling temperatures, suggested that it must have broken down overnight. All that was left was the car and the smoke plume that hung in the surrounding air. The smoke was from a makeshift fire on the side of the road just next to the treeline.

Whoever did this was no novice; they knew exactly what to do and how to survive the night. They took the spare tire and started a fire next to some dwarf cedar trees. When rubber burns, it burns hot and long, generating a thick column of black smoke that can be seen from miles away.

As for the inhaled nasty smoke, it is a worry for tomorrow; for tonight, it's do or die. It would seem like they were recently picked up by passing drivers; they were one of the lucky ones.

Next to the fire was a dwarf cedar tree. These trees lie dormant on their sides with first snow, and when it starts to thaw and gets warm, they rise from their long slumber, a testament to the resilience needed to survive here. I have traveled in the past on the Dalton Highway in the Alaskan Arctic Circle back in the winter of 2018. Compared to the Kolyma Highway, the Dalton Highway cannot even begin to compare. After being on the road for some time now, I started recalling my initial thought of how I first viewed this road. I was naive and quick to judge.

Just minutes before midnight, we finally made it to Oymakom, where the pole cold resides, or does it?

Thank you Dhari for sharing your adventure and photos with us. Follow him on :