Expedition Across Frozen Siberian Frontier

By ⋅ January 28, 2013 ⋅ Post a comment
Traveling By Reindeer In -50 Siberia (Photo: Mikael Strandberg)

Traveling By Reindeer In -50 Siberia (Photo: Mikael Strandberg)

Monday’s Geo Quiz is cold, cold, cold.

We’re looking for the name of a cold Siberian city. It’s the capital of the Russian republic of Sakha.

It has on average the coldest winter temperatures for any city in the world.

This capital city is also the starting point of a venture nicknamed “Expedition Extreme Cold.”

In the weeks ahead, a small team of explorers, reindeer herders, and a filmmaker will trek several hundred miles across a Siberian forest where temperatures get down to minus 75 F.

So what’s the temperature outside there today?

“Well its actually a heat wave passing through here so I think its no more than 38 or 40 below zero,” says Swedish explorer Mikael Strandberg.

A sense of humor comes in handy when it gets that cold.

Can you name the city?

Snapshots of traveling by reindeer (Photos: Mikael Strandberg)

Snapshots of traveling by reindeer (Photos: Mikael Strandberg)

The answer to Monday’s Geo Quiz is Yakutsk, the capital of the Russian republic of Sakha. It’s the starting point for an expedition led by Swedish explorer Mikael Strandberg who’s trekking across Siberia to document the traditional way of life of the reindeer people of Siberia.

In the coming weeks, he’ll travel several hundred miles across an extremely cold and remote region of Siberia.

Here’s a partial list of the equipment he’s packing for the trek (see the complete list at his blog):

We are 8 people, 16 sleds (8 sleds for people, 8 sleds for equipment) and it is based on 40 days of food
Flour 25 kg
Tea 3 kg
Suger 25 kg
Pasta 25 kg
Rice 25 kg
Cooking oil 10 liters
Milk sweet 20 cans
Spam 40 cans
Biffar 10 kg
Salt 5 kg
Buck wheat 25 kg
Cookies 5 kg
Candy
Fresh Fish 25 kg
Fresh Cow meat 25 kg
Coffee 5 burkar
Butter
Loaves of bread 40
Fast boiling macaroni 100 bags
Petrol 80 liters
Petrol generator Honda
Emergency medicine
Cigarettes for reindeer herders 200 packets
Tent 2
Wood stoves 2
1 axe
Eating utensils, teapots, cooking ware for the group
Rope
Skins to sit on whilst travelling
Skins to cover the kit
2 spades
1 chain saw
Thin lead cable for reparations
5 jerry cans to carry 120 liters of petrol
3 thermos flasks

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Discussion

3 comments for “Expedition Across Frozen Siberian Frontier”

  • Butch Roberts

    Interesting place, to say the least.  I’ve had Yakutsk on my phone weather app as one of the locations I look at on a daily basis to see how temperatures around the northern hemisphere are doing.  According to the app, the temperature there now (it’s nighttime there and 4 pm here on the US east coast) is -42 degrees F.  That’s 64 degrees colder than our balmy by comparison local +22 degrees F.    

  • johngrahamreid

    Amazing, Amazing.   I would so love to go.  I have been planning for years to get some reindeer and learn how to keep them, and ride them if I can find the right ones. 
    I would love to go reindeer-packing in the adirondack mountains where I grew up, hiking in the summers and telimark skiing on the 46 peaks in the winters.I alos have had Samoyed dogs all my life, and feel I have some kind of connection between them and Reindeer.Small issue of a new job, but once I have earned a bit of time off, I want to go to both Siberia as well as norther Mongolia to visit the Reindeer people and learn what I can.

  • http://twitter.com/geoquiz The World’s Geo Quiz

    This update from Mikael Strandberg’s blog: 

    -50 degrees below zero this morning in the village of Yuchyugei!

    Since you last heard from us, we have traveled 900 km:s east from Yakutsk to this village, where our 4 members of the team, the reindeer herders have been staying. The camp is a few kilometers away where the 25 reindeer await us. And, a surprise to me, is that the herders have demanded that we bring one of their wives as a cook! 

    http://www.humanedgetech.com/expedition/outwild/