Vasily Mitrofanov

Providence Bay

What is it like to live in the Arctic and cut through the tundra on a snowmobile

– Sometimes I don’t have enough communication, I just want to talk to someone. There are very few people in Chukotka. You can ride a motorcycle all day and not meet anyone. In principle, this suits me, I'm used to traveling alone. Sometimes you don’t say a word for several days of a trip, and I don’t like talking to myself.

I have been living in Chukotka since I was two years old, one might say, all my life, and I was born in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, on the Taimyr Peninsula. This is also the Far North. In general, I have lived in the Arctic all my life. Perhaps that is why my place of residence seems ideal to me. For example, when I am on vacation, in big cities I feel uncomfortable from all this fuss around. I want to return home to Chukotka as soon as possible.

You will hardly meet non-locals at home. There are tourists, of course, but mostly foreigners come on cruise ships: they wander in crowds around the village for several hours and then sail further. I think it is very problematic for an ordinary tourist to get to the territory of Chukotka. Firstly, it is a border zone, and secondly, it is very expensive. Airplane is not the cheapest mode of transport. They fly here from Anadyr: once a month in winter and once a week in summer.

My main hobby is riding a motorcycle. I like to climb mountains, walk alone on the tundra and visit abandoned, dead towns, which we have had since the days of the Iron Curtain. On our side of the bay is the village of Provideniya, and on the opposite side is Ureliki, a dead and abandoned military town. I go there often, just wandering through the empty streets, looking into the gaping, broken windows of buildings.

This autumn I visited the local school, the building is in a very deplorable state, even though you can shoot a horror movie: broken glass is everywhere, water is dripping from the ceiling, the wind is walking along the corridors. I know some graduates of this school, they are already adults, sometimes they come to their school, but they can’t even get together in their own class. They sit in the yard, fry kebabs and complain that the meeting of graduates now has to be held on the street, since only walls remain from their native school.

Before, I was not afraid to wander through abandoned buildings, but now I feel fear. It seems as if there is something alive in these houses, so I completely stopped going into dark rooms: basements, long corridors and rooms without windows. But I am attracted to these houses, I like to wander around places that have no future: to visit old hunting and fishing houses.

It is always interesting for me when traveling to suddenly find an old house of geologists in the tundra. I love reading graffiti on the walls. For example: “Andrey Smirnov. Chukotka. Summer 1973". Questions immediately arise in my head: “Who was this Andrey? What did he do in Chukotka in 1973? further fate Where is he now?" And so on. It all excites and interests me madly.

Active construction of the village began in 1937. A caravan of ships from the Providenstroy enterprise arrived here. The first step was to build a port. At the end of 1945, the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution on the creation of a workers' settlement of Provideniya in the Chukotka region. The settlement continued to develop rapidly, military units were relocated here. The first public building, the canteen, was built only in 1947.

From the memoirs of Lyudmila Adiatullina, Perm:

- My father, Vasily Andreevich Borodin, reached Prague during the war years. Then part of it was loaded onto trains and sent across Russia to the Far East to Providence Bay, where he served for another five years.

It was very difficult, for two years they lived in six-bladed tents, among rocky stone hills. Nars were made of stones, deer moss was placed on top. Four slept, and the fifth drowned the potbelly stove. In the morning, sometimes the hair froze to the tent. This tent city was covered with snow, people dug each other out, made catering units, officers' houses, defensive structures and even roads out of logs.

In the second year, little fuel was brought in, and in order not to freeze, the military looked for dwarf birch trees, uprooted them; they chipped bricks and soaked stones in barrels of kerosene. This has already stoked the stoves. It is good that the Chukchi suggested that there were coal mines developed by the Americans not far from the location of the unit. When they were asked to leave from there in 1925, they blew everything up and covered it with earth. The soldiers re-developed these mines in a primitive way, carried coal 30 km away in backpacks, on skis. And yet they survived.

Later we rode dogs and reindeer and rented them from the Chukchi. They sawed snow with saws, carried it on sledges and made water out of it. Only in the third year did they begin to build soldiers' barracks from wooden blocks. The barracks were large, for a division. There were no builders among the soldiers, but life taught everything. In 1950, in September, everyone was demobilized. For seven years they were not at home: two years in the war and five years in Chukotka.

The village of Providence itself is an ordinary northern port town with monuments of the devastation of the nineties, bad roads and kind, sympathetic people. Some come here just to earn a "northern" pension and get out. They do not understand the beauty of the North, it is for visitors - cold, snow and stones. Someone, on the contrary, is crazy about mountains, northern lights, whales, and other romance. I am just one of those people.

All the most interesting things are located outside our village: the base of sea hunters, the whale cemetery, the remains of military facilities, ancient Eskimo camps, hot underground springs. In the summer I go to the ocean on a motorcycle all the time, I like to go everywhere, climb the hills, wander through uncharted places.

And what kind of animals can you stumble upon! I saw: whales, seals, wolves, brown and polar bears, fox, arctic fox, wolverine, hare, eurage, ermine, lemming and a bunch of different birds. Only bears and wolves are dangerous to humans. A gun, I think, of course, is not a superfluous thing in the tundra, and just in the wild, but it just so happened that I managed without it all my life. Maybe I was lucky, just if I ran into bears, I was always on a transport, on a snowmobile or a motorcycle. But if you travel on foot, then it is better to take a gun or at least a rocket launcher: some kind of firecrackers to scare away predators.

One day I came across the wreckage of an airplane. Once I was driving along the shore of the lake and saw something on the slope of the hill. I climbed in - it turned out that it was an LI-2 aircraft. He crashed here in the seventies. At the bottom I saw a commemorative plaque and a sign. Many more aircraft wreckage can be found on the territory of military facilities. All this remains from the time of the Soviet army.

Providence Bay - a bay in the Gulf of Anadyr Bering Sea, off the southeastern coast of the Chukotka Peninsula. The entrance to Provideniya Bay is limited by Cape Lysaya Golova in the east and Cape Lesovsky in the west. The width of Provideniya Bay is about 8 km at the beginning. Length - 34 km (measured along the midline).

The width of the bay in the part below Emma harbor is about 4 km, and above Emma harbor - about 2.5 km. The steep banks and hills of the bay have an average height of about 600-800 meters. From May to October it is completely or partially ice-free. At the entrance to the bay, the depth is about 35 m. The maximum depth is about 150 meters. There are several smaller bays inside Provideniya Bay: Komsomolskaya Bay (Emma Harbor), Slavyanka Bay, Head Bay, Horseman and Cash Bays. An ancient legend says: in August 1660, the boyar son Kurbat Ivanov, the successor of Semyon Dezhnev, undertook a fishing expedition to the north and reached the modern cape of Chukotsky. This is evidenced by the navigator's reply to the Yakut governor of Ladynezh. The legend informs that it was Kurbat Ivanov and his comrades who were one of the newcomers who visited Providence Bay. Occupying a comfortable geographical position the deep-water bay has long attracted sailors. But for almost 200 years it was nameless. The bay received its romantic name from the sailors of the English sailing ship Plover, commanded by Thomas Moore. In 1848 - 1849, during the harsh winter, Plover's team was in distress and was forced to spend the winter here. In commemoration of a successful wintering, Captain Moore named the happy place Saint Providence Bay. Subsequently, the bay was visited by American, Norwegian, Japanese whalers, Russian and American merchants, Russian military hydrographic vessels and fishing expeditions. The bay becomes a convenient base in the extreme northeast for refueling ships with fuel and water. The history of the Chelyuskin epic and the development of the northern sea route showed the need to build a seaport in the bay. In February 1937, the head of the main northern sea route, Otto Yulievich Schmit, approved the port construction project. And in the summer of 1940, the ships were already unloading at the wall of the first berth. With the creation of a seaport in Providence, the settlements Ureliki (Plover). By 1941 in Providence there were construction offices "Providenstroy", promartel "Polyarnaya zvezda", post office, bank, hydrography, airport, Plover machine-field station. There was also a radio station, a hospital and an elementary school. The number of inhabitants by that time reached seven hundred people. The workers' settlement of Provideniya was formed in the Chukotka region according to the Decree of the Presidium of the Supreme Soviet of the RSFSR of May 10, 1946. Time passed, the number of enterprises in the village increased, the number of its inhabitants grew. On April 25, 1957, the Providensky District was formed. It included the villages of Enmelen, Nunlingran, Sireniki, Chaplino, Yanrakinot. Providence Bay is one of the most beautiful places in Chukotka. For the last three or four years, tourists and fans of rare sports have been increasingly attracted here. Every year the inhabitants of the village become witnesses and even participants in the winter dog sled races. In the summer, the seers invite lovers of water tourism from all over the world to make an exciting trip in kayaks along the ancient routes of the pioneers.

Used photographs from the sites: www.esosedi.ru; pckd.ru; ic.pics.livejournal.com; cont.ws; mediasubs.ru

"Head Bay and Other Anglicisms"
The name of Providence Bay was given by the English navigator Thomas Moore in 1848, when his ship, having fallen into a severe storm in the Bering Sea, accidentally discovered a calm harbor, in which he spent the winter in 1848-1849. Providence Bay is a fjord with several bays: Plover, Emma (Komsomolskaya), Flower, Head, Markovo, Horseman. The village of Providence itself is located in Emma Bay, named after the daughter of Captain Moore. There is a legend according to which Emma could not stand the long winter and died of scurvy. She was buried on one of the hills. A wooden cross was installed on the grave, which was seen back in the 70s of the 20th century. Whether this was the grave of Captain Moore's daughter is not known for certain, but it is known that navigators visited the bay long before Thomas Moore. The right of the European opening of the bay most likely belongs to the boyar son Kurbat Ivanov in 1660. In the first third of the 18th century, the ships of the Great Northern Expedition of Vitus Bering visited the bay. James Cook also visited the calm waters of Providence Bay during his Northern Expedition. American whalers also came here in the 19th century. In the second half of the 19th century, the Russian government, concerned about the penetration of American industrialists into the territorial waters of the Russian Empire, issues a circular on border patrols of Russian northern waters. Every year, military clippers and schooners were sent to the shores of Chukotka, which, along with border functions, were engaged in research work. This page of Russian military history is reflected on the map of the North-East of Russia: Rider Bay, named after the clipper Rider, Senyavin Strait - in honor of Admiral Senyavin, Cape Chaplin - in honor of midshipman Pyotr Chaplin, member of the expedition V. Bering, Cape Puzino - in honor of Rear Admiral O.P. Puzino, etc. Arriving in Providence, I did not have a clear plan of action where I would like to go. I knew one thing for sure, that in the village itself I would like to spend as little time as possible. And a day later I had the opportunity to go fishing in Head Bay. The bay got its name from the English word “Head” - the head, which was similar to the top of one of the hills. This peak is no longer there. The Eskimos called this bay Nanylkuk - the final bay.
It was the usual Providence weather - low fog, the air was saturated with the smallest particles of moisture, almost complete calm. Head Bay is a little over 15 km from Providence, 10 of them along the road. Leaving the Ural motorcycle near the road and loading bags with a rubber boat, nets and food, we walked along the shore of the bay. The absence of a road is explained by the presence of rocks in several places, which rest directly on the bay. In Soviet times, the military periodically blew up the rocks and at low tide, in trucks, it was possible to pass here. At present, nature has taken its toll and scree from the nearest hill completely cut off the path of vehicles.
Having reached the bay, we decided that it was not rational to drag a boat on ourselves if it was possible to sail on it. One of us must cross the bay (a little less than a kilometer wide) by boat, and the other will go around it along the coast. I turned out to be different. As a child, I walked in these places without the slightest fear, leaving with a friend for a few days in the tundra without a gun. Now, before leaving, my father told a couple of parting stories about how many bears they had recently divorced. To my request for a gun, my father asked in some surprise: “Why do you need it?” And really, why, after such stories? In general, I walked around the bay, peering intently at the bushes and barrels, which, my imagination deftly turned into bears. “It’s good for Vadik, there’s nothing to be afraid of on a boat,” I thought, accelerating my pace. We reached the gully on the opposite bank almost at the same time. I was also surprised how famously Vadik wields oars, like an Olympic reserve. Vadik, having jumped out of the boat, silently smoked 2 cigarettes for a minute before the filter, and only then said: “I will go back along the coast.” It turns out that while I was walking along the shore and was “afraid” of bears, he was quietly sailing on a boat, when suddenly: “Something began to snort to the left. I turn my head and see a herd of walruses about 20 meters from me. Mustache in! And they look at me. And they snort. And it’s not clear what they have in mind.” The third cigarette was launched.
After a snack, we set up the grid and went to look around. Rather, I wanted to reach the right entrance cape to the bay. I have not been on this side. There was another reason as well. In the 1950s-1970s, there was a base for nuclear-powered submarines in this bay. They say that the question of building a submarine base here was even considered. However, we did not find traces of a naval presence, with the exception of a metal cable. Its end was littered with stones, and he himself went into the water. This cable was 10-12 centimeters thick.
Having reached the right entrance cape, I decided to climb to the top of the hill to take panoramic pictures.
The Eskimos have a belief that people sometimes turn into stones. Climbing the hill in these legends is very easy to believe. The remnant rocks, indeed, in profile, resemble people and pelicans - Chukchi gods.
Fishing in Khed was unsuccessful - 1 char in two days.
Taught by bitter experience, we returned by dry land, that is, around the bay. However, having rounded the bay, they decided not to force their backs and pumped up the boat again. "Let's swim along the shore. So that if something has time to jump ashore. We decided to row one by one. Vadik is rowing again, I'm walking along the shore. The weather is completely calm. And suddenly, as in that cartoon: oh, what did that mutter? About 15 meters from the boat, something hit the water with great force. You should have seen Vadik's face. It seemed to me that from such intensive work with oars his oarlocks would break faster than he would reach the shore. To which it was still a good 50 meters. We didn’t see what mumbled, we only saw splashes. Vadik rows swearing, I'm dying of laughter. Dogreb. Again 2 cigarettes one after the other. We can’t understand what was there: maybe a walrus, maybe a killer whale. My turn to row. I am walking 5 meters from the shore. Everything is quiet. We soon realized what it was. In the wake of 15-20 meters from us, a bearded seal (sea hare), a most curious creature, was swimming. We scared him off and he pirouetted noisily into the water. And now he swam after us and watched.
There were no more adventures, and an hour later we were already entering the village of Providence.

Sometimes I don’t have enough communication, I just want to talk to someone. There are very few people in Chukotka. You can ride a motorcycle all day and not meet anyone. In principle, this suits me, I'm used to traveling alone. Sometimes you don’t say a word for several days of a trip, and I don’t like talking to myself.

I have been living in Chukotka since I was two years old, one might say, all my life, and I was born in the Krasnoyarsk Territory, on the Taimyr Peninsula. This is also the Far North. In general, I have lived in the Arctic all my life. Perhaps that is why my place of residence seems ideal to me. For example, when I am on vacation, in big cities I feel uncomfortable from all this fuss around. I want to return home to Chukotka as soon as possible.

You will hardly meet non-locals at home. There are tourists, of course, but mostly foreigners come on cruise ships: they wander in crowds around the village for several hours and then sail further. I think it is very problematic for an ordinary tourist to get to the territory of Chukotka. Firstly, this is a border zone, and secondly, it is very expensive. Airplane is not the cheapest mode of transport. They fly here from Anadyr: once a month in winter and once a week in summer.

My main hobby is riding a motorcycle. I like to climb mountains, walk alone on the tundra and visit abandoned, dead towns, which we have had since the days of the Iron Curtain. On our side of the bay is the village of Provideniya, and on the opposite side is Ureliki, a dead and abandoned military town. I go there often, just wandering through the empty streets, looking into the gaping, broken windows of buildings.

This autumn I visited the local school, the building is in a very deplorable state, even though you can shoot a horror movie: broken glass is everywhere, water is dripping from the ceiling, the wind is walking along the corridors. I know some graduates of this school, they are already adults, sometimes they come to their school, but they can’t even get together in their own class. They sit in the yard, fry kebabs and complain that the meeting of graduates now has to be held on the street, since only walls remain from their native school.

Before, I was not afraid to wander through abandoned buildings, but now I feel fear. It seems as if there is something alive in these houses, so I completely stopped going into dark rooms: basements, long corridors and rooms without windows. But I am attracted to these houses, I like to wander around places that have no future: to visit old hunting and fishing houses.

It is always interesting for me when traveling to suddenly find an old house of geologists in the tundra. I love reading graffiti on the walls. For example: “Andrey Smirnov. Chukotka. Summer 1973". Questions immediately arise in my head: "Who was this Andrey? What did he do in Chukotka in 1973? How did his fate turn out, where is he now?" And so on. It all excites and interests me madly.

“Active construction of the village began in 1937. A caravan of ships from the Providenstroy enterprise arrived here. The first step was to build a port. At the end of 1945, the Kamchatka Regional Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks adopted a resolution on the creation of a workers' settlement of Provideniya in the Chukotka region. The settlement continued to develop rapidly, military units were relocated here. The first public building, the canteen, was built only in 1947.

From the memoirs of Lyudmila Adiatullina, Perm:

- My father, Vasily Andreevich Borodin, reached Prague during the war years. Then part of it was loaded onto trains and sent across Russia to the Far East to Providence Bay, where he served for another five years.

It was very difficult, for two years they lived in six-bladed tents, among rocky stone hills. Nars were made of stones, deer moss was placed on top. Four slept, and the fifth drowned the potbelly stove. In the morning, sometimes the hair froze to the tent. This tent city was covered with snow, people dug each other out, made catering units, officers' houses, defensive structures and even roads out of logs.

In the second year, little fuel was brought in, and in order not to freeze, the military looked for dwarf birch trees, uprooted them; they chipped bricks and soaked stones in barrels of kerosene. This has already stoked the stoves. It is good that the Chukchi suggested that there were coal mines developed by the Americans not far from the location of the unit. When they were asked to leave from there in 1925, they blew everything up and covered it with earth. The soldiers re-developed these mines in a primitive way, carried coal 30 km away in backpacks, on skis. And yet they survived.

Later we rode dogs and reindeer and rented them from the Chukchi. They sawed snow with saws, carried it on sledges and made water out of it. Only in the third year did they begin to build soldiers' barracks from wooden bars. The barracks were large, for a division. There were no builders among the soldiers, but life taught everything. In 1950, in September, everyone was demobilized. For seven years they were not at home: two years - in the war and five years - in Chukotka.

The village of Providence itself is an ordinary northern port town with monuments of the devastation of the nineties, bad roads and kind, sympathetic people. Some come here just to earn a "northern" pension and get out. They do not understand the beauty of the North, it is for visitors - cold, snow and stones. Someone, on the contrary, is crazy about mountains, northern lights, whales, and other romance. I am just one of those people.

All the most interesting things are located outside our village: the base of sea hunters, the whale cemetery, the remains of military facilities, ancient Eskimo camps, hot underground springs. In the summer I go to the ocean on a motorcycle all the time, I like to go everywhere, climb the hills, wander through uncharted places.

And what kind of animals can you stumble upon! I saw: whales, seals, wolves, brown and polar bears, fox, arctic fox, wolverine, hare, eurage, ermine, lemming and a bunch of different birds. Only bears and wolves are dangerous to humans. A gun, I think, of course, is not a superfluous thing in the tundra, and just in the wild, but it just so happened that I managed without it all my life. Maybe I was lucky, just if I ran into bears, I was always on a transport, on a snowmobile or a motorcycle. But if you travel on foot, then it is better to take a gun or at least a rocket launcher: some kind of firecrackers to scare away predators.

One day I came across the wreckage of an airplane. Once I was driving along the shore of the lake and saw something on the slope of the hill. I climbed in - it turned out that this was an LI-2 aircraft. He crashed here in the seventies. At the bottom I saw a commemorative plaque and a sign. Many more aircraft wreckage can be found on the territory of military facilities. All this remains from the time of the Soviet army.

The mobile phone is here. The Internet, however, is expensive and very slow. That's why everyone is sitting in WhatsApp chats. A megabyte of mobile traffic costs nine rubles.

There is also no work. Power plant, boiler house, border guards, police, sea ​​port and airport.

There are fifteen shops here. Everything is very expensive in them, because the goods are brought in by ships. What was thrown by the plane is even more expensive. Fruits and vegetables can cost 800-1000 rubles per kilogram, and those that were unloaded from ships are twice cheaper. Things - mostly Chinese rubbish from Vladivostok. I don’t buy them here at all, I order everything through online stores or buy on the mainland. So many do.

For children there is a garden, a school, a ski section, a sports complex. In general, you can live. Fans of the north of Providence will like it.