Looking back: Frozen Frontier 2013
January 2013. The whole family sets off to one of the coldest inhabited cities in the world, Yakutsk. Dana is only 6 months old, this is Evas second visit to Yakutia, for Pam too, but I have been there a few times already. First time returning home from the Siberian Expedition in 2005. This time, I am here to travel with a group of reindeer herders from Arkah and their team of reindeers during at least a month together with Egor Maklarov who has put the journey together, and who´s idea it was, film maker Yura Breznyev who is going to film the journey for OutwildTV and translator Bolot Bochkarev. There´s press conferences, we have sponsors and it is damn cold too. -46 degrees Celsius. Yakutsk is a wonderfully interesting city! Read more at www.outwildtv.com/expeditions/frozen-frontier
Pole Of Cold 2013. The start of the Frozen Frontier Expedition and first time I meet Slava, Yura, Tonya and Vika. The greatest and most delicate of people. They asked for an advance to buy goodies for the planned one month to their hometown of Arkah. After that we all went to our starting place, just south of the village of Uchugay, a camp in the taiga. It was -58 degrees, really cold and everyone was eager to leave. I had no idea what to except, but remembered the trial run a year early with Misha and Kasha near Oymyakon and it had been extremely cold, painful and I feared this, but this time I had much better clothes. I knew it was a unique trip, something Egor had dreamt about doing for years. Youra, the film maker felt already like we would become the best of friends. great guy. Bolot was translating. We had a film to do. Eventually the reindeer was hearded in and things getting ready to leave, taking down camp. It was just half year since I crossed parts of the Al Mahra desert with Tanja Holm. My family was now consisting of two daughters. Mum died same day. I had no idea what was waiting. Read the dispatches at http://www.outwildtv.com/expeditions/frozen-frontier/
-58 degrees C. We set off in the darkness, full speed straight into the dense taiga and I am relly, really cold sitting at the back of my sledge driven at high speed by Slava. My -100 degrees modern boots turns out useless, so I change for the fur boots which works great. It is an almost unreal trip of the greatest beauty of an unseen landscape. My photos from this trip will stand strong in the future. Yura films. Without gloves. How is it possible? The only sound is heavily breathing reindeers and we shoot full speed south. In the first few days we meet wolf hunters, we loose one reindeer, we get gifted a new, we have bought a tent in Yakutsuk and a stove which ain´t good enough, so our tent is way too cold. But I love it, though sitting at the back of a sledge, fat and unmoveable, isn´t really my cup of tea. I don´t like others do the job I can do myself. Including flming. But Yura is one of a kind -no gloves- and becomes one of my best friends during this trip. Reindeers are the best to travel together with in these circumstances. It needs no petrol like a snowmobile, no food like dogs, it finds its own food everywhere below the snow. Our Eveny friends, we get closer to each other by the day. Great people. What an adventure!
-50 degrees, a bit of wind. I felt the cold scratching my skeleton and I was using all my energy to keep it away. I pressed my muscles together. Those parts of my face oncovered by the facemask was biting badly. Yura the Eveny did get a bad coldsore this day. One of the most beautiful days in my life. We were heading for a mountain pass and some kind of a border between the Sakha region and Khabarovsk region, we left the taiga, came up on to plain mountain plateau, a completely frozen down fence waited and…stunning beautiful. Probably the most beautiful day in my life. We stopped briefly, took a couple of shots and moved on. I took my best photos ever this day! February 2013. The Frozen Frontier Expedition! Read more at www.outwildtv.com/expeditions/frozen-frontier
