On 21 February 2022, 35-year-old Charlie Walker flew into Yakutsk in the Russian Far East, ready to ski hundreds of miles up the frozen River Lena, pulling his gear on a sledge. He was heading to the Laptev Sea, a large peripheral bay of the Arctic Ocean. A neighbour at home in London had wished him luck. ‘Frostbite I can handle,’ Walker replied. ‘Let’s just hope Russia doesn’t start a war while I’m there.’
But it did.
Walker writes: ‘That Special Military Operation changed everything: for me, for Ukraine and for the world.’ Obliged to change plans, he flew north-east to Batagay over the Verkhoyansk Mountains, and from there set out over the Yana and Omoloy rivers. Large plastic letters in the car-park of Batagay airport announce the ‘Pole of Cold’: an exiled dissident had logged a record low of -67.8°C.
The chained ghosts of Gulag workers stalk these pages. I fancy they are mocking the ‘adventurers’ among us
The author’s journey pierces the taiga, that five-million-square-mile boreal forest that lives in the Russian imagination as a primordial hinterland and refuge of mythic spirits. Walker artfully modulates the tension as he hauls his 85kg sled along the fabled zimniki, the seasonal roads cleared on river ice that are strong enough to carry lorries. He interleaves practicalities with lightly conveyed historical and scientific information, the latter including the vagaries of climate change. The route skirts the world’s largest ‘thermokarst’ sinkhole, where melting permafrost collapses in on itself. Meanwhile the author, by now frozen himself, finds wolf tracks round his tent.
