The smell of the Pacific

After having left the radio station Gorkiy we quite soon cross the river Anadyr again. Now it spreads over a vast marsh plain. In the south it makes the final turn to east and flows to the funnel shaped outlet opening to the northernmost part of the Pacific Ocean, called the Bering Sea.

The latitude 65 N cotravels the final kilometers with another river, the Kanchalan. It too has a similar outlet not far from the Anadyr.

This aerial image (by Sergey Krivonosov) shows the mouth of the river Kanchalan. The 65th parallallel crosses invisible the center of the image. It does not become maritime yet, rather than follows the coastline away from the sea. There are not many Panoramio icons but when the first comes, it stops me immediately.

Soviet military jets parked in the middle of the tundra (image by KUZMARO). There is no airfield here - not even any roads. Is this the Soviet equivalent to the Bermuda triangle? I could count at least 8 individual planes. No explanation could be found. Could they have been positioned here for attack practice targets? Definitively they are all destroyed now. Unbelievable!

Just a few tens of kilometers we encounter the last hills on the Anadyr mainland. The appearance reminds me of small volcanoes and on some you can even figure out crater like structures. Since there are no active volcanoes here anymore, these are probably very ancient. A small creek flows from the hills and the next photo (by igorgolova) tells us that salmon season is almost finished.

After spawning most of the salmon die and the carcasses are scattered on the river banks by eagles, gulls and mammals. The salmons are very important for the nitrogen and minerals they supply to the nature. Quickly hereafter the photographic resources run out and our latitude heads out to the sea on the Gulf of Anadyr. A nice coincidence is that we at the same time cross the 180 degrees longitude line and continue on the western hemisphere.

The sea may have drifting ice almost any time of the year, but else there is not much to see. We find dry land pretty soon again and enter the Chukchi Peninsula at about the village of Enmelen (photo by Ryabinin).

Most of the villagers are fishermen but whaling and seal hunting is also important for the people, which are still mostly of eskimo ancestry. The inner parts of the peninsula consist of low mountains and no images are stored from that area. On the shoreline we find the last images.
 

This graveyard of whales (image by kertelhein ) is near the village of Yanrakynnot. The story tells that the whale meat was used for feeding the foxes in the fur farms of 20th century. Actually in this climate the bones are preserved for ages, so they may have accumulated over tens of years.

Before we embark to cross the Bering strait, I must present one final image of the village of Yanrakynnot (photo by nordvoda).

The village proper is far in the background, but the main subject are the parallel bars which could not better suit to finish the Asian part of my journey on the 65th parallel north.