Kolyma Highway 27/06/2016, 19:25

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The Russian Federal Highway (M56 Kolyma Highway) connects Magadan and Yakutsk
– actually, Nizhny Bestyakh on the eastern bank of Lena River at Yakutsk-, where the
coldest temperature ever recorded outside Antarctica was recorded. It crosses forests,
mountains, deserts, and everything in between. Much of it is unpaved and certainly not
ideal for a casual Sunday drive.

Yakutsk is also the largest city built on continuous permafrost. Most houses are built on
concrete piles because of the frozen ground. The length of the original road via Tomtor
is about 1900km or 1180 miles. Locally, the road is known simply as Trassa ("The

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Kolyma Highway 27/06/2016, 19:25

Route"), or Kolymskaya trassa ("The Kolyma Route"), since it is literally the only road in
the area and therefore needs no special name to distinguish it from other roads. This
road is extremely dangerous during the winter, which is ten months long, because the
heavy snow, the ice, and an extremely reduced visibility. But in summers, the conditions
of the road become extreme. On July and August, the mud is the worst enemy. Because
of the permafrost there is no asphalt, creating a mud induced traffic jam every time the
summer rains swing in the area.

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This road is the only route available to arrive to Yakutsk City. There’s no choice. After
the rain, it can take five hours rather than a few days to drive it. The road gets paralysed
and it’s a chaos, with cars being stuck in a 100-km long car line-ups. The last 600 miles
of the Russian Federal Highway from Moscow city to the Siberian city of Yakutsk is
called the Lena Highway. This bizarre road runs parallel to the River Lena on the final
leg to Yakutsk. It’s known as ‘Bone’s road’. It was constructed in the Stalin era of the Highest mountain The h
USSR by Dalstroy construction directorate. The first stretch was built by the inmates of passes in the world in Eur
the Sevvostlag labor camp in 1932. The construction continued (by inmates of gulag
camps) until 1953. The road is treated as a memorial, because the bones of the people
who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road.

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Kolyma Highway 27/06/2016, 19:25

Driving on the Kolyma highway

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passes of Colorado balco
The road is extremely dangerous during rainy spells, when the usual clay covering of
the road turns into impassable mud blanket, swallowing trucks and tractors alike. The
road is in a state of disrepair and is not traversable by standard road vehicles because
of washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams. The keys on the road
are the extreme temperatures, heavy snow, ice and reduced visibility, excessive mud in
the summer months make it almost impossible to navigate and the ‘Mud Pirates’. It also
remains one of the most desolate, with few travellers knowing of the world’s most frozen
road – or its tragic history. Another nickname for the highway, “the road of bones”,
Most hairpinned The w
speaks to its tragic history: it was built by the hundreds of thousands of political
prisoners who were exiled to the region’s gulags under the Stalin regime from the 1930s roads in the world coas
to the 1950s. Thousands were shot for not working hard enough, while others died from
the gulags’ brutal conditions. The cold was another killer: with temperatures recorded as
low as some -70C, the Kolyma is located in the world’s coldest inhabited area. Many of
the dead simply were buried beneath the road’s foundations

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