Tending One’s Herd at 58 Below Zero : East Siberia: Permafrost, Haute Rabbit

A sign at the tiny snow-covered airstrip reads, “Welcome to the Pole of Cold.” Nearby stands an actual pole, a monument to the 96 below zero temperatures that put Oymyakon on the map.

It is not always so cold. On this sunny, cloudless Siberian afternoon, it is a relatively mild 58 below.

But the local officials who meet foreign guests in their VIP transport--a van fitted out with armchairs and a fan-heater--are proud of the extreme temperatures that can crack metal and freeze fuel to give them the distinction of inhabiting the coldest permanent settlement on earth.

Keepers of Animals

To most of Oymyakon’s 4,000 people, tending their herds of reindeer, horses, dairy cows in heated barns and cages of silver foxes that are prized for their furs, such a record means little.

In a log cabin on the edge of the taiga, the forest outside the settlement, three short, fur-clad Yakuts sit smoking pipes preparing to feed their 3,500 Siberian horses that roam the region, returning unfailingly to any sure source of food.

One proudly displays the fruits of his spare-time hunting--ermines that he traps and sells their pelts to the state.

The horses’ shaggy hide is made into warm shoes, while their tasty meat, served cold with onions, is a local delicacy--along with other exotica such as reindeer tongues and chokhon, cubes made of a frozen mixture of butter and milk.

Natural Freezer

The hunters also make stews from Arctic rabbits, collected ready-frozen from snares and left sitting, uncannily lifelike outside the hut in the natural fresh-air freezer, until needed.

The Yakuts settled in the Oymyakon region more than 500 years ago. While their language is distantly related to Turkish, they are in appearance closer to the people of Japan or Korea.

The settlement, lying in a depression among hills that trap the colder-than-ice air, was already old when the first Russian fur trappers arrived in the mid-17th Century.

Reindeer breeders from Oymyakon are now transported by helicopter to their herds--in total about 20,000 animals. The breeders stay with the animals for six months at a time.

Once, their women would have joined in the nomadic life. Now they stay behind in their one-story homes, built of concrete flown from the Pacific port of Magadan and heated with wood-burning stoves.

Ethnic Mix

The 340,000 Yakuts make up more than a third of the population of the enormous tract of northeast Siberia known as Yakutia. Most of the rest are ethnic Russians, living mainly in the few cities. Some are descended from exiled convicts; others are great-great grandchildren of Cossack frontiersmen.

Most are “new Siberians” come to reap the vast hidden harvest of gold, diamonds, oil and gas. Some stay, developing a liking for the extreme climate and the more relaxed, if tougher, way of life. Others come for fixed-term contracts.

Gera, met at Yakutsk airport with stubble on his chin and a dog-skin hat, looked like an archetypal pioneer. In fact, he was a piano teacher from sunny Stavropol in south Russia, now teaching the children of tin miners in the Arctic town of Deputatsky.

“Why, here you make money,” he explained. Wages in Siberia are as high as four times the national average.

In summer, eastern Siberian temperatures can soar to 93; the frozen rivers turn into gushing torrents, and the quiet, snow-covered forests buzz with innumerable mosquitoes as the thin soil on top of the permafrost melts into swamp.

2 Months of Summer

The season is short. “June’s too soon, July too late for summer,” locals joke. In fact, it lasts little over two months.

Fresh vegetables and citrus fruit are rare, but necessities such as cheap, warm Russian felt boots are plentiful.

Yakuts prefer their own traditional footwear--knee-high boots of reindeer hide decorated with beads that are hard to come by and much prized as high fashion by Muscovite women.

For those living in the taiga, on new industrial or ancient agricultural settlements, Yakutsk is the big city.

In one of the three beer bars serving this city of 200,000, men in sheepskin leggings, fur hats and bristling beards knock back frothing tankards before being sent out into the freezing smog by a hefty barmaid.