The vehicles of choice for our field excursions were these plain-vanilla-looking vans. They don't look much different from an old VW microbus, except that they are higher off the ground. There's also not much in the way of creature comforts on the inside. But they have four wheel drive, and do pretty well on the rough forest roads, mudholes and all.
The bottom three-quarters of this picture might pass for the Lamoille River floodplain back in Vermont -- occasionally flooded hay fields with strips of deciduous trees. But the top quarter is something else. It looks like it's a lo-o-o-ng way to the other side of the river, and there's an awful lot of open sandbar between here and there.
The Lena is the 7th longest river in the world, over 4400 km from its headwaters in the hills west of Lake Baikal (lower left) to its massive arctic delta on the Laptev Sea in the north. At Yakutsk the floodplain is about 15 km wide.
We took a drive out onto the floodplain near the city --
here looking across one of the smaller channels of the river towards
the city.
We occasionally found these salamanders when we were
looking for beetles. If they hibernate in the soil they must be able to
survive temperatures below -40 degrees (Celsius or Fahrenheit -- that
is the one temperature where they are equal).
Pasha, one of the van drivers, would go out hunting whnever we stopped to look for beetles. This was his one success.