The Coldest Town in the World

A Winter Journey to Verkhoyansk, Siberia

A Journey to One of the Coldest Towns on Earth

Verkhoyansk lies in the Sakha Republic in northeastern Russia, a region famous for some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded in the Northern Hemisphere. I wanted to know what life was actually like there in winter.
There was little tourist information and no simple way to get there.
So I went to find out.

February–March 2016 | Sakha Republic (Yakutia)

Verkhoyansk is a small town in the Sakha Republic of Russia, deep in northeastern Siberia. It is famous for its extreme winter cold and is one of the coldest permanently inhabited places on Earth.

I decided to visit Verkhoyansk in the middle of winter.
There was almost no tourist information available. There was no straightforward public transportation to get there, and I had no experience of travelling in temperatures approaching −50°C.

So the first questions were very basic:

How could I get there?
What would I need to survive the cold?
And what would life actually be like in such an extreme place?

This is the story of my journey to Verkhoyansk — and of the people I met in one of the coldest inhabited regions of the world.

Verkhoyansk

Verkhoyansk lies north of the Arctic Circle in the Sakha Republic (Yakutia). Winters are exceptionally severe, with temperatures below −50°C possible.

For me, however, the most memorable part of the journey was not simply the temperature.

It was meeting the people who live there.

Although Verkhoyansk is little known in Japan and rarely visited by Japanese travellers, I received an extraordinarily warm welcome from the local community.

This journey became an opportunity not only to experience the extreme Siberian winter, but also to discover the everyday life and culture of the Sakha people in Russia’s Far North.