Good evening, members! I’m thinking of heading out again in a 4x4 this time, going Russia/Mongolia/Russia all the way to Magadan and back. Leaving mid-April 2026. Anyone else setting off?
In the third week of June 2024, I traveled the Magadan-Yakutsk route. It was a unique opportunity. An old friend from Murmansk and his buddy planned to buy a car in Magadan and drive back to Murmansk with a detour through Mongolia. Once in Murmansk, they’d sell the car. They invited me to join them. I flew to Magadan the day after they arrived. We stayed a few days in a rental apartment. While I wandered around, they checked out car ads.
They bought a Toyota Venza, a "crossover"—higher off the ground than a sedan but not quite a Subaru Forester.
No need for a 4x4 on the main road, but it’s required for secondary routes. That’s what decided whether we’d take the detour through Tomtor and Oymyakon—an off-road vehicle was a must.
Just past Magadan’s Sokol airport, the road turns to gravel until about Shurapcha, a town roughly an hour’s drive before Yakutsk. Out of the ~1,700/1,800 km of gravel, but in June 2024, the road was in great shape. In the Kolyma Mountains, it had been redone, with grading and gravel work finishing just before reaching the Yakut tundra. From there to the Lena River, where we took a ferry across to the city, the road was actually a mess—partly waterlogged. The route follows the Tatta River, a tributary of the Aldan, which we crossed by ferry earlier. It’s a region of small lakes and puddles, so it gets muddy fast. We drove at 50 km/h, counting ourselves lucky it hadn’t rained. Thankfully, it was only a short stretch.
The bridge over the Kolyma River, before Debin. It’s paved, but the road is gravel. The remains of the old bridge are next to it:
Before leaving Magadan, we wanted to load two spare tires, but there wasn’t enough trunk space, so we took just one. We got a flat a little after that bridge, changed the tire, and once we reached Yagodnoye, we had the flat repaired. In the mechanic’s yard, there was an old Japanese car rigged up as a local off-roader 🙂
Public service vehicles in the region are Ural trucks.
In Susuman, they’ve kept an old Tatra truck as a monument:
We were really lucky with the weather—clear blue skies all week. If it’s overcast, it can get cold fast. The slopes above Magadan still had patches of old snow:
After the first flat, getting the tire repaired before Yagodnoye turned out to be crucial because we got a second flat. Over the 1,500 km of Kolyma’s mountainous valleys, we only passed four cars in three days.
I left my buddies in Yakutsk, took a flight to Moscow, and they continued on. They mentioned that the long stretch between Yakutsk and Chita is now paved.
