Notes of a Geologist

Scheme of the expedition's work area

Arriving from Yeniseisk, I went to ask for a job with V.A. Rivkina, the head of the Severouralsk expedition. The expedition had excellent performance until 1960, i.e. until it was engaged only in exploration of bauxite deposits. In 1960, during another reorganization, two parties were transferred to its subordination - Karpinskaya and Sosvinskaya, which had previously been managed from the city of Ivdel by the Northern Expedition. The results of these parties' work were not impressive, since they worked in remote taiga areas. And in order to somehow improve their work, the expedition had to provide them with significant assistance - both material and personnel. It should be noted, however, that the personnel from Severouralsk did not stay there and a year later they returned to the prosperous bauxite parties.

I have long noticed that people who come to ask for work "from the street", initiative people, are sent to work in the most difficult and unprestigious places. True, this is not only because the person is "from the street", but to a greater extent because people do not leave good places and there is no personnel shortage there. Vacancies remain only in "bad" places.

In this case, this is what they did with me. Vera Abramovna did not leave me in Severouralsk, but said that I needed to go to "strengthen" the Karpinsky party. The party was based in the settlement of Sosnovka, where loggers lived, but after six months it moved to the settlement of Veselovka, 7 km away. from Karpinsk.

For six months I led a drilling team, and in the spring I asked to work as a mining foreman, and I traveled with a detachment of miners around three districts, digging shafts. The work and life of the people in the party and at the sites was organized well. Compared to Yeniseysk - nothing like it. In winter, everyone lived in warm, well-renovated old houses. The stoves were regularly heated by technicians. Water for drilling was delivered by water trucks from a pre-drilled water well. People worked 4 days, then a shift change. They transported by car. I established good relations with the mining inspection, passed an additional exam and received a "Unified Blasting Book" for open and underground work. I got good practice in obtaining permits for the right to carry out blasting operations, as well as police permits for the right to transport explosives. I practiced a lot myself in shafts during the direct production of blasting operations. I myself received explosives at the Vorontsovsky mine. The knowledge I gained from these jobs turned out to be very useful.

In the fall, soon after my arrival, I bought myself an M1M motorcycle and drove from Severouralsk to Sosnovka several times in the winter, overcoming the off-road conditions in the area of ​​the village of Berezovka. Sometimes I had to drive on the same track as the ZIL-157. In the summer, a group of 3-4 people rode several times on a pioneer car with a motorcycle engine along the narrow-gauge railway from Sosnovka to the upper reaches of the Vagran. True, this event was not at all safe. It was necessary to notice an oncoming train in time, everyone jump off and manually remove the pioneer car from the rails, dragging it to a safe distance.

Once, completely by chance, I heard a program on the radio about the head of the Yamalo-Nenets geological exploration expedition, Vadim Bovanenko. The program was well-structured and I listened to it with great interest. His story was told - how he studied in Moscow, how he played basketball (he was about 1.9 meters tall), how he ended up in the North, in Salekhard, and what he did there. It somehow sank into my soul - after all, the Tyumen region is very close.

In addition, Nikolay Ivanovich Polshchikov worked as a tractor driver for us, still relatively young, but a war veteran. He received his first baptism of fire at the age of 18 in the famous tank battle near Prokhorovka in 1943, where he was a mechanic-driver of a T-34 tank. He joined the Karpinsky Party in 1957, having arrived from the Tolyinsky Party, which at that time was located in the Tyumen Region, but subordinated to the Northern Expedition, the Ural Geological Administration.

When in 1957 N. Khrushchev formed territorial governing bodies - economic councils, then geological organizations located on their territory were transferred to their subordination. Thus, the Tyumen economic council ousted geologists of the Ural Geological Administration in Sverdlovsk from the territory of the Subpolar and Polar Urals (geographically this was the Tyumen region). In my opinion, this was a gross mistake. The Ural Mountains and the territory closely adjacent to them are in fact a single geological province and the search for mineral deposits should have been coordinated from a single Ural center, which Sverdlovsk has always been. In 1958, the Ural Geological Administration partially liquidated and partially transferred to the Tyumen Geological Administration its organizations in those areas - the Polar-Ural Expedition in the Polar Urals, the Nyaksimbol Geophysical and several parties in the Subpolar, including Tolyinskaya and Ust-Maninskaya.

However, let's return to Polshchikov N.I. We often talked about hunting and fishing. He always recalled these things when he lived in Tolye. His stories about the amount of game and fish there, their size, caused, at the very least, surprise, and often mistrust. Reality overturned his stories - he saw only a small part of what was really there.

I knew nothing about the geologists of Tyumen - there was no information anywhere. True, two events from radio and newspaper broadcasts have remained in my memory - the discovery of gas in Berezovo in 1953 and the oil obtained in 1960 at one of the wells of the Shaim expedition. I was again drawn to the North after these stories of Polshchikov and the already mentioned radio broadcast. And I decided to go to Tyumen to the geological department.

For two days off, I asked the party chief for 3 more days and left. Communication with Tyumen was not very convenient - it took 4 days to get there and back. I arrived at the geological department. It was located in the city center next to the regional party committee on Vodoprovodnaya Street, 36. It occupied one entrance of an apartment building - 4 floors. From the personnel department, they sent me to the office of the chief geologist.

There the door was open and a short man with a round face - it was the chief geologist of the department, L.I. Rovnin. - asked me who I was and where I was from, what I did and what I could do. There was another relatively young man in the office with him. As it turned out later, it was the senior geologist for solid minerals, A. I. Podsosov. They consulted for a while and said that they agreed to take me and send me to the disposal of the head of the Polar-Ural expedition, S. G. Karachentsev. It was clear from the name that it was located in the Polar Urals, at the station 106th km of the Seida-Labytnangi railway. I agreed. In the personnel department, they quickly wrote me a letter to Rivkina asking her to let me go and transfer me to Tyumen.

In addition to the pure attraction to the North, I wanted to get some independent section of work, because I felt that I had the strength, knowledge and desire for such work - I had already outgrown the position of an ordinary performer. Of course, I still lacked experience, but it could only be obtained on the job. After several years of work in the Severouralsk expedition, I would have been entrusted with greater responsibility, but I intuitively felt that my knowledge could be in demand now, but only in the North.

The party chief, having learned why I was going, immediately said that if he had learned about this matter earlier, he would not have given me such an opportunity. Rivkina V.A. at first persuaded me to stay, but then, having understood my firm intention to leave, she signed the transfer.

The preparations were short-lived and in early November 1961 I left for Tyumen. I came to the personnel department, and there they told me that I should meet with the head of the newly organized Saranpaul expedition, Chepkasov V.A. I had never heard of such a name or expedition before.

Chepkasov V.A.

We met. He was a relatively young man, somewhere under 35, below average height, but broad-shouldered and stocky, with extremely thick, overhanging eyebrows. They made him look gloomy and taciturn (which was not confirmed later). The manner of his conversation with me was largely evaluative, and the result satisfied him to some extent. He told me that an order had been signed a week ago to organize this new expedition, and he offered me to start working in it as a drilling engineer, though with the prefix acting. Such a prefix gave the manager the right to remove a person from the position at any time without explanation or to fire him. But it also gave the right to frequently transfer a person to other jobs at the discretion of the manager. As it turned out later, all newly hired as heads of geological survey parties, their senior geologists - all young guys, also had the prefix acting. It was a management style, although I still don’t know whose.

A week after my fairly intensive work, the head of the expedition promoted me to senior engineer, but the prefix "acting" remained. My salary was 150 rubles, plus a belt coefficient of 30%, plus field allowance of 3.5 rubles per day. In addition, Saranpaul belonged to the regions equated to the Far North and had the corresponding benefits. When I noticed that at first I was sent to the Polar Urals, Veniamin Aleksandrovich did not react clearly.

Chepkasov V.A. was already an experienced leader. He worked in the North for more than 10 years. He began working at "Dalstroy" in Kolyma, then moved to the Polar Urals, where he held all the positions up to the head of the Polar-Ural expedition.

The second person enrolled in the expedition was the deputy. Chief of General Affairs Ilyashevich Mikhail Vasilyevich. He was quite a colorful figure in many ways. A tall man over 50 years old, with a completely curly head, thick lips and a wide flattened nose. This appearance suggested that he could have African roots in his genealogy. In the early 1950s, he moved from the position of regional prosecutor in Kazakhstan to work as the chief of the Turgai geophysical expedition, after which he was transferred to the position of chief of the Nyaksimbol geophysical expedition as part of the Ural Geological Directorate. Many knew him and told how he always walked around the village with a pistol on his stomach, behind his belt. After the Ural geologists left these places, he came to work for the Tyumen geologists - he was deputy chief of the Sartyninskaya oil exploration expedition, in the Berezovsky district on the Severnaya Sosva River. After Sartinya's lack of prospects became clear, she was demoted to a party, and Ilyashevich was transferred to Saranpaul. In Sverdlovsk, he managed to get an apartment on Gagarin Street, to the left of UPI, towards Pionersky Settlement. Thus, after the chief and his deputy, I was accepted as the third person, i.e., I started work from scratch.

One unusual incident gave impetus to organize a whole new expedition. A geological survey party led by G.G. Efimov dug several pits in the floodplain in the 1961 season in the upper reaches of the Khobeyu River. When washing sand in one of them, N92, they washed out gold by weight, which, when converted to volume, gave a content of about 30 grams per cubic meter of sand. One gold nugget had a decent, oblong size, close to a "cockroach". When the Geological Department learned about this, they ordered the sample to be urgently delivered to Tyumen.

A.I. Podsosov immediately flew to Moscow with it and showed these golden "cockroaches" in many ministerial offices. This made an indelible impression on some. I also noticed later that some, even very high-ranking ministerial officials, took at face value the artist's well-done and colorful pictures, which had nothing in common with reality.

The end of this story looked like this: after the spring flood in 1962, they found this pit and laid 4 new ones on four sides - not one of them showed gold in the samples. Then they gave the order to clear pit N92 and take samples directly at its face - and there was no more gold there. Here is such an unusual story.

Of course, the question of creating a new expedition here had matured even without this incident with gold - the huge region of the Subpolar Urals remained without systematic geological research after 1957.

The expedition was organized with the purpose of expanding the scope of geological surveys on scales of 1:50,000 and 1:200,000, organizing the search and exploration of placer and bedrock gold deposits, building materials, coal, as well as geophysical studies - aeromagnetic and gravity. An aeromagnetic party under the leadership of Latypov A.A. with a base in the village of Nyaksimvol, the already mentioned party of Efimov G.G. and one drilling team for one survey party, for some reason called a drilling party under the leadership of Sidoryak I.M., were already working here. All of them were subordinate to the Salekhard Geological Exploration Expedition. Since November 1961, they have been subordinated to the new leadership of the Saranpaul Complex Geological Exploration Expedition.

The area of ​​work was very large and was located on the territory of the Berezovsky District, Khanty-Mansiysk National Okrug. From south to north - from the borders of the Sverdlovsk Region to the upper reaches of the Khulga River - about 600 km. From the west - from the axial part of the Ural ridge to the east more than 100 km. The entire territory of the expedition's activities in the summer was absolutely impassable for conventional land transport - cars, tractors, tracked tractors. Only 2 special tracked amphibious transporters K-61 along the river bed, which appeared in 1963 - in some places by swimming, and in others on tracks, could reach individual areas of work. In winter, after the swamps, lakes and rivers froze, it was possible to deliver cargo by land transport with high cross-country ability along winter roads. In the mountains, the only transport was pack horses and people. And in general, the entire work area was simply penetrated by countless rivers, streams, lakes, swamps. Forests were located, as a rule, along the rivers.

The main rivers were the Severnaya Sosva and its tributary Lyapin, practically navigable in any summer. Lyapin in the Saranpaul area merged from many rivers - Manya, Khulga, Shchekurya, Polya, Yatriya. Manya was navigable even 60 km higher than Saranpaul. The width of Lyapin is about 400 meters. In addition to the named rivers, there were dozens of smaller ones.

In addition to water transport, aviation was used. From Tyumen to Berezovo there were IL-14s, and from Berezovo to Saranpaul there was an AN-2, and in the summer there was a float version that landed directly on Lyapin. For the AN-2 there were land airfields in Tolye, Nyaksimvol, Ust-Manye and Ivdel. But from Ivdel there were only our special flights, there were no passenger flights.

The first batch of heavy type with the sinking of deep pits in search of placer gold in the valley of the Khobeyu River was supposed to start working in the winter in January 1962 - such was the task set by the Geological Administration. No one cared that at that moment there was no material and technical support. What we were immediately given were tents, axes, picks, shovels, chainsaws and other small things. With this tool it was possible to pass pits up to 3.5 meters deep, and dry ones. But it was necessary to make pits up to 10 meters and with a very decent water inflow. For which powerful pumps were needed, and iron for working with winches - buckets, special hooks, ratchets, winches. For washing the rock mass issued from the pits, valleys and washing trays were needed.

During a discussion with Chepkasov about the problem of drainage during the excavation of pits for placer gold, I told him that the Sosvin party in the Severouralsk expedition uses piston pumps of the "Letestyu" type for this purpose, which are manufactured in the expedition's mechanical workshop, including worm gearboxes RM-250. He showed interest in this matter, but ordered me to go through the entire material base of the department and look for something suitable for these purposes. In the supply department, they offered me hand pumps "Garo" for pumping fuel from a barrel to a tractor tank - they had absolutely no idea what we needed. We needed pumps with an autonomous drive and a capacity of up to 70 cubic meters per hour - this is the usual inflow in gold pits, and it should be on the surface. I also went through all the warehouses and did not find anything close. The thing is that our industry did not produce such pumps.

Then Chepkasov V. told me to get ready for a long journey - first to Severouralsk, on an expedition, to get technical documentation for the pumps there, from there go to Ivdel, to the transfer base. From there, together with Ilyashevich M., fly on a special flight to Saranpaul, get acquainted with the area and return to Tyumen.

Before leaving, I went into a fish store - I wanted to take something with me. At that time, all the stores were literally bursting with fish. Sturgeon cost 2.9 rubles, sterlet 2.6 rubles, muksun 1.6 rubles, cheese 1.1 rubles per 1 kg. All kinds of trash - like pike, crucian carp, chebak - are generally pennies. I saw several hanging golden fish weighing up to 4 kg - these were cold-smoked nelma at 5 rubles per kg. I weighed an 8 kg sturgeon and asked them to put it aside until half an hour before the train departed (otherwise it would have thawed in my hands). The sellers did not undertake to leave it until I arrived. They told me to pick it up right away. I decided to buy a ticket and come again. There was a delay with the ticket because of the queue at the ticket office and I was late for the store.

In the morning I was already in Sverdlovsk. I decided to buy myself a good winter coat. I stopped at the passage - nothing decent. Then I went at random to a second-hand store on Vainer. I saw a magnificent coat, exactly my size - a very expensive dark brown drape and a chic astrakhan collar. Absolutely no signs of wear and expensive - more than 200 rubles. I bought it right away. In the afternoon I went to see my classmates who came to work at NIPIGORMASH. I saw about 6 people. They came out and talked about our graduating class. According to their data, only about 10 people from the entire graduating class remained to work in geological exploration. The rest went to work in various research and design institutes, and the vast majority changed their specialties.

The next day I was already in Severouralsk and showed up at the expedition office. They treated my requests with understanding and promised to prepare sets of drawings of the mechanisms I needed. The next day I went to the Sosvinskaya party, in Pokrovsk-Uralsky. I talked with the head of the party, Krupnov P.A. and senior geologist Ushakov S.A. For me, organizing the excavation of gold pits was a completely new matter, and conversations with them and their advice were extremely valuable to me. They suggested many more details that I had not even suspected. By the way, we continued to contact them on various issues for many years.

The next day, the expedition's technical department printed out all the necessary blueprints for me and I went to Ivdel. There was no direct route there and I had to go first by train to Serov, and from there by another train to Ivdel. Although it is near Severouralsk, I was there for the first time. A small, all-wooden town. I found a pass base, which was located in one of the private houses and was used by Latypov A.A. for the needs of his party. There I met the deputy head of the expedition Ilyashevich M.V., who was already in the house. And looking at my "rich" winter coat, he took me for the chief engineer of the expedition and began to ask me about important topics, although I was a kid half his age compared to him. When I told him that such information was not within my competence, since I was a senior engineer, he calmed down. We spent the night and went to the airfield in the morning. Their plane with aeromagnetic equipment and operators was already there. They loaded up with the accompanying cargo and headed to Saranpaul.

Under the wing there was a fairly diverse landscape. Ribbon pine forests along strongly meandering river beds alternated with marshy undergrowth. Numerous oxbow lakes were clearly visible near large rivers. Residential settlements ended after 20 minutes of flight - this was the north of the Ivdelsky district. Further, no signs of housing were observed for almost 2 hours.

Soon after a two-hour flight, houses of a fairly large village appeared - this was Saranpaul. The plane made a semicircle and landed at the very outskirts, taxied to some house and turned off the engine. The house turned out to be the only one with all its faces - the airport building, the weather station, the chief's residence. We got out and walked to the village - it turned out to be not far from the building of the expedition office. Here is a little background.

Saranpaul is a fairly large village by northern standards and almost everything is stretched along the bank of the navigable Lyapin River. It was conventionally divided into three villages - the first, second and third. Between them there were low-lying areas that were flooded with spring water in high-water springs.

Until recently, Expedition No. 105 of the 6th Main Directorate of the USSR Ministry of Geology was based in Saranpaul, which was engaged in the search, exploration and extraction of piezo-optical raw materials and graphite throughout the country. In general, these expeditions had a very solid material basis everywhere, good labor organization. Yes, apparently, it could not have been otherwise, since these raw materials were of great importance for the country's defense capability. This expedition had 4 mining parties located almost in the axial part of the Ural Mountains, two of them - Neroika and another one on the eastern slope, and Pelingichi and Naroda - on the western. A year ago, the Main Directorate decided to move the expedition base to the Moscow-Vorkuta railway at the Kozhim station - this is the western slope. They assigned it N118. And in Saranpaul they left only part of the warehouses, a small mechanical workshop, transport equipment for supplying their parties on the eastern slope along the winter roads. They put a local cadre - Afanasy Nikanorovich Kanev - in charge of this base. Everything that they did not need, they transferred to our expedition - the office, the Naval warehouse, part of the dormitories. It must be said that at first Kanev helped us as much as he could, especially with spare parts for transport, the manufacture of some iron in his mechanical workshop. He probably expected that someday we would get back on our feet and help him somewhere, but he didn't wait. He soon got tired of our beggary and he came to meet us less often.

The office was located right on the bank of the Lyapin and had a quite decent appearance, both outside and inside. About ten rooms, hot water heating from its own boiler. Stokers worked so as not to freeze the system. Engineering and technical workers were also temporarily housed here. Ilyashevich M., Efimov G.G. were already here, and Latypov and I came up. There were sleeping bags in the rooms. We went to the store and bought something to eat. Everyone sat down at the table, and Ilyashevich M.V. took some dried fish out of the bag. Its size was decent - up to 30 cm in length. I was told that it was called syrok, it was caught in the Lyapin, and all the residents stocked it up for the winter and you could buy a fish for 15-20 kopecks depending on the size. It turned out to be very tasty, especially the large specimens. When you peel it, it glows from the fat that has soaked it.

We drank to our acquaintance, to the good start of the expedition. Efimov, like me, drank very little. After some time, Latypov, for no apparent reason, started a conversation about cockroaches that he allegedly caught in the borscht of a restaurant in Ivdel. Efimov's face suddenly tensed up, his gaze took on an absent expression, and he apologized and said that he had to go out. And he went out. After that, Latypov laughed and said that Grigory Grigoryevich had gone out to puke. It turned out that after all the hardships he had endured in life, Efimov had developed a strong aversion to such stories and events. Fate had treated him very harshly. He is an officer, fought in the active army, but either at the end of the war or immediately after, he was arrested on a denunciation and sentenced under Article 58 to 10 years in the camps. He served almost his entire term in the North - Vorkuta, Salekhard. His fate strongly resembles the fate of Solzhenitsyn A.I., and even outwardly they are very similar. At this meeting, he told only one episode from his camp life - they were given the task of stacking bricks. They did it very quickly, but skillfully left empty spaces inside the stacks, and the volume of the masonry was calculated based on the external measurement. In this case, they earned an extra ration. Of course, he was an interesting, extraordinary person, but fate brought me together with him very rarely in the future, only for the time of random short meetings.

A little later, that same evening, a conversation arose about the air explosion of a powerful thermonuclear charge conducted a month ago over Novaya Zemlya. It turns out that this was a major event in the North. All residents of Salekhard were taken out of their homes, some windows were blown out by the shock wave. In the village of Amderma, windows and doors were blown out. All geologists were taken out of the field from the areas threatened by the shock wave. I think that the shock wave was already dying down, and on October 30 it reached Severouralsk in the form of a strong wind. On that day, a wind blew from the north for several hours with an unprecedented force for these places. It seemed that you could lie on it and it would not let a person fall to the ground. I knew about the air blast, because it was announced on the radio, but it did not even occur to me that its echoes could reach Severouralsk. Later, these events were described by other geologists-surveyors who came to work with us from the Polar Urals. They said that a flash was visible in the distance, but not bright, and a loud hum came.

Ilyashevich M., in addition to solving the expedition's problems, was also busy "knocking out" an order from the department to buy a Volga car for himself. At that time, they still cost 4,000 rubles, but at any moment the price could start to rise, since demand had increased sharply. He received it and drove it to Sverdlovsk somewhere in May of the following year.

A year later, the price for them actually increased.

I met the head of the drilling party, I.M. Sidoryak. Of course, it was not a party at all - one drilling team, and not a full complement. It was engaged in drilling mapping wells at the points of a geological survey at a scale of 1:200,000. He himself had been working in the North for a long time, almost since the post-war times. He was engaged in drilling structural wells under Professor Chochia.

We inspected the houses and dormitory in the village that were given to our expedition. Ilyashevich and I went to the village council to meet the chairman. The chairman of the village council was Ilya Nikolaevich Malyugin, an invalid, he lost his leg somewhere, a man of small stature, but he jumped around the village quite quickly. His salary was 50 rubles, plus northern allowances. The favorite topic of conversation with him during "tea parties" was the question: "Ilya Nikolaevich! Have you seen a steam locomotive?" - And he always answered sharply: "No. Never. I have never left Saranpaul!" The first and last time he had to go to Khanty-Mansiysk was in 1964 for the funeral of his brother, who died among all the passengers of the scheduled AN-24 plane that burned on the runway during landing. His own fate was also tragic - in the late 60s, he froze to death right in the village.

Having finished all my business in Saranpaul, I went to Tyumen. I returned through the village of Berezovo. It was rare to reach Tyumen in one day, because the scheduled An-2 plane arrived in Berezovo after lunch on the return flight and it was already impossible to buy a plane ticket to Tyumen.

I flew there for the first time and went to look for a hotel for the night - I did not know anyone there. I found a hotel in the center of the village. It was a small two-story wooden building, next to the pier. Inside there was a restaurant "Sosva". A place for me was in a room on the second floor, where there were 7-8 beds. By evening, among the hotel guests and restaurant visitors, I saw many aviators - apparently they did not have their own visiting hotel and they used the communal one. The next morning, I flew on an Il-14 to Tyumen, where I arrived after 3 hours of flight.

Upon arrival at the department, I reported to Chepkasov on the results of the trip. He immediately puzzled me with a multitude of matters - it was necessary to place orders somewhere for the manufacture of "Letestyu" pumps, the drawings of which I brought from Severouralsk, and other ironwork for sinking shafts, draw up annual applications for the logistics of the expedition in 1962, and, as people approached the personnel department of the department, select the necessary workers for the expedition. I think that before this he introduced me to the management of the department as one of his authorized representatives on the above-mentioned issues, and I was accepted everywhere without hindrance, right up to the head of the department, Ervie Y.G. Chepkasov himself, V.A. was also overloaded with organizational issues, recruiting engineering and technical personnel, and frequent trips to the district.

The question of where I would live in Tyumen during this period arose - a hotel was expensive and inconvenient. Then he arranged for me to be accommodated in a dormitory for engineering and technical personnel on Kholodilnaya Street - at that time it was already a remote outskirts of Tyumen on the Siberian Highway. The main place there was occupied by a complex of buildings of the vocational school for training drilling personnel and a training drilling rig. There was also a one-story dormitory for engineering and technical personnel. Moreover, between this complex of buildings and structures and the first residential buildings of the city there was a large vacant lot. In the same area, but closer to the city, on Kyiv and Minskaya Streets there were many two-story residential buildings where employees of the geological department lived. I got to work by bus, or if there was no bus for a long time, then I walked for about 25 minutes.

In one of the departments of the department, they gave me a desk and the work went on.

The biggest issue was pumps. I went to the chief mechanic Savin K.I., he looked at the drawings and said that I had to go to the chief engineer of the department. They came. Morozov Nikolay Mihaylovich, in a dazzling white shirt and tie, without a jacket. After my short story about the conditions for driving pits for gold in thawed rocks, he immediately understood the essence of the matter and he did not have the slightest doubt about the need for this equipment. He firmly gave Savin the task of finding the capacity to manufacture them. In my experience, the mechanical workshops of expeditions are always and everywhere overloaded with orders. The issue of making worm gearboxes arose - they could not be made in the mechanical workshops at all due to their increased complexity. By the way, the mechanical workshop of the Severouralsk expedition is much smaller than Tyumen, they were very good at making them. They decided to contact the Tyumen construction machinery plant for their manufacture, but both interlocutors told me that an appeal to this plant was at the level of the head of the department. And in general, they told me to prepare a letter signed by the head of the department with a request to make 2 reducers first, and then - four pumps in full. They decided to make two pumps in the mechanical workshops of the Tyumen expedition at its base in Parfyonovo. I quickly prepared the letter, collected 2 visas from my recent interlocutors and went upstairs to the reception room of the head of the geological department. A small room where the secretary, a middle-aged woman, was sitting, a teletype was clicking nearby by the window. She asked me about my business - she saw me almost for the first time (not counting the visit to Morozov N.M.), and allowed me to enter.

In a medium-sized office (significantly smaller than the offices of some expedition leaders, and not only those subordinate to him), sat a man in a bluish suit, close to 50 years old, with strong gray hair, but with absolutely black thick eyebrows, in thin gold glasses. Under the suit, an absolutely white shirt was also visible. He read the letter, asked me a few small, clarifying questions - it was felt that he was aware of our affairs. He signed the letter without any amendments and told me to take it to the plant myself along with the drawings. This was the famous Yuri Georgievich Ervie in the future - the head of the Tyumen territorial geological administration, in the future First Deputy Minister of Geology of the USSR. Of course, it is necessary to write about him, and not to me, but to people who knew him well, separately, since leaders of the geological service of such thinking and scale of affairs were extremely rare even in those days.

I usually went to the Zarya restaurant at the hotel of the same name for lunch. You could have a very decent lunch there and it was inexpensive. I always had some kind of cold smoked fish appetizer - tesha or sturgeon balyk, Georgian solyanka, a bottle of beer. Sometimes I had fried muksun for a second course. Sometimes a mixed fish solyanka. The quality and variety of good fish in those years was simply amazing - since then I have not seen such variety and abundance anywhere. There was also meat in different forms, and even venison, which was exotic for me.

There were many young geologists living in the hostel, still unmarried. There were some from Sverdlovsk, Saratov and other places. We met many of them in the following years, when we went to our places of work. There, in the dormitory, I first heard tape recordings of V. Vysotsky, brought from Moscow, but they did not make a special impression on me at the time.

However, I liked the tape recorders that the guys used for recording and playback. Soon I went to the store and bought myself a desktop reel-to-reel tape recorder "Dnepr-11" - it was an improved modification of the 10th "Dnepr", which was in the dormitory. It had two speeds - 9 and 4.5. The standard reel was 350 meters, but it also fit 500 meters. At that time, it was a very decent device with 4 speakers and good tone control. It was also not cheap - 145 rubles. I copied a whole reel of rock and rolls performed by Bill Haley's orchestra and some other musicians from the guys. On my next trip to Severouralsk, I took it home. It weighed about 30 kg, and how I dragged it to the station in Tyumen, and how I got it home from the train - only God knows.

One day, remembering Yeniseysk, I decided to try raw sterlet. For some reason, there were no large fish in the store. I had to take small, frozen ones. I thawed it, cut it, salted it. The taste was completely different. Of course, it reminded me of Yenisey sterlet, but I didn't want to eat it raw. I had to boil it.

I brought a small-caliber rifle with me. But my dream remained a 12-gauge double-barreled gun, especially a hammer-action MTs-9. Soon I would be returning to Saranpaul and I needed to buy a gun. I went to the shops. There was no choice at all. Only one of them sold a hammerless 12-gauge IZH-54. I had to take it. I also bought gunpowder, shot, cartridges, a cartridge belt, etc.

But the work continued. For the mining operations, it was necessary to make a number of small ironwork items - buckets, winches, valleys, various hooks, etc. I drew all this in sketches with dimensions, wrote applications with the required quantities, having previously agreed with Chepkasov V.A. the number of mining brigades. With these papers, I went to Morozov N.M. He looked at my sketches and then said to me: "They are very poorly drawn! You are an engineer! You can't belittle your profession like that! If you even make sketches, they should look appropriate too!" He taught me a lesson for life. He took it back. That same day I redid everything and he signed all the documents without any comments. Previously working as a senior drilling foreman, I was used to giving orders to the mechanical workshop on scraps of notebook paper, sometimes in a hurry, not paying attention to the quality of the design, and no one demanded the quality of such papers from me. Here I moved to a completely different level of communication, and I had to learn on the fly and rebuild my psychology

N.M. Morozov himself, according to reviews from people who often encountered him, was a talented engineer and did a lot of useful things in his position as the main one. I felt his special, engineering "nose" when I reported to him about the pumps. He was completely unfamiliar with the technologies of pit drilling and water drainage, but he immediately grasped the main point of the required pumps - high productivity and the ability to pump heavily polluted water. About two years later, he was transferred to the position of head of the Surgut oil exploration expedition.

It took a lot of time to draw up annual applications, since some positions had to be substantiated with calculations. The work was also somewhat new to me. I had to learn - I took annual applications from other expeditions and looked at them there. I often had to go to the deputy head of the department for general issues, Bystritsky A.G. He was already an elderly man with gray hair, short, very active. He conducted conversations with visitors very actively, since most of them always wanted to get a lot from him. He was not one to mince words, he knew the situation well and what he had in the warehouses, and if the opportunity arose he could throw in a "red" word, but he did not abuse it.

This was the same head of the Berezovskaya oil exploration, at whose well in 1953 the unexpected, first in Western Siberia gas fountain hit. He was a real discoverer. I often came to him with requests for obtaining certain materials for the expedition based on radiograms from Chepkasov V., who was in Saranpaul. I often had to go to the warehouses of the administration and look for the things we needed myself.

The entire management treated us well at that time, they understood the difficulties of our formation and tried to help with material resources as much as they could. Of course, they never forgot their main task for a minute - the search for oil and gas. Everything went there first of all - transport equipment, residential buildings, consumables. We got just crumbs for our volume of work. Apparently, this was the right strategy - concentrating all resources on the main direction, and not scattering them on solving secondary and tertiary tasks, which could include work on solid minerals.

The question of hiring workers for the expedition soon arose. Workers often approached the HR department of the department - they called me from there, asking to talk to the next visitor. It was necessary to recruit pit miners, sample washers, turners, carpenters. Those whom I agreed to take were registered at the department, given a small cash advance for the trip and sent to Saranpaul on cargo planes or by scheduled flights.

In general, the category of pit miners on thawed placers is extremely rare - I managed to find only one person. In the Tyumen region, such work was not carried out. They were carried out only in the Urals and the Far East. Miners who worked in hard or frozen rocks using drilling and blasting operations were suitable. Some of them mastered the excavation of shafts in taliks, but most of them failed and retrained for other jobs.

Sample washers were more common, because in the summer season almost all geological survey parties conducted selective concentrate sampling in the beds of rivers and streams. The least skilled went to work as gate operators and other auxiliary jobs. Many of them were beachcombers who went for the season in order to return to the warmth again by winter. However, there were also people who went to earn serious money.

From the first group of people I hired, one stood out - Popik V. He was a local native. Young, tall, a very skilled man. He hired himself out as a miner together with his wife - she was a gate operator. Although he had never done such shafts before, he mastered this business quite well. In addition, he was a good carpenter. He had been through many places and professions. I remember his story about how he served as a warden in the Tobolsk prison. That was the first time I learned and was surprised that some prisoners swallowed their aluminum spoons to get to the infirmary.

My paperwork was slowly coming to an end. Now the most important task was to speed up the production of relatively small pieces of iron for mining operations. I started going to the Tyumen expedition's mechanical workshop almost every day and rushing them to make buckets, cranks, etc. They promised to finish all the small stuff in the first week of January 1962. At the same time, they were making blanks for two "Letestyu" pumps - but they promised to make them only by the end of the first quarter. For the first ten days of January, I ordered a special flight of the AN-2 plane to Saranpaul, estimated the weight of the iron products, and decided to make the rest of the additional cargo with newly hired workers. All the hardware, as promised, was made on time, and having boarded the plane with the workers somewhere in the first ten days of January, 7 hours later we arrived in Saranpaul.

For the time being, I settled into the engineering and technical workers' dormitory. There were three of us in a room - it was an ordinary wooden barracks.

Immediately upon arrival, V.A. Chepkasov told me that the Khobein party had been reorganized to search for and prospect for gold. Its leader had also been appointed, who would fly to Saranpaul after handing over his affairs in the Tyumen expedition. The senior geologist of the party would also arrive here in a few days. He appointed me acting technical leader of the party. In the near future, I had to initially staff the team from the available people, dress them, give them shoes, select tools, necessary consumables, and at the end of the second ten-day period of January, carry out a helicopter drop-off to the site and begin tunneling work. He also designated the starting points for the work. The first line of pits was to be laid at the landing site along the entire width of the river valley, the second - 5 km away. upstream and there it was necessary to cut down a place for a helicopter landing pad. The third line was laid even higher at 5 km - exactly in the area of ​​pit No. 92, which yielded industrial gold. The deadlines were very tight, and besides, it was impossible to miss any detail, since this was an absolutely deserted area and a complete lack of roads to the work site.

We must pay tribute to the expedition leaders - Chepkasov and Ilyashevich, who closely supervised the preparation for the drop-off every day. In order to land about 30 people with the necessary tools, food, etc., 5 flights of the MI-4 helicopter were required. I provided for the order and sequence of loading and dispatch so that the first to arrive had everything necessary for life, with the last flights the mining tool was sent. The distance was about 60 km. During the preparation, I bought myself an excellent fur suit at a warehouse for cash for 84 rubles. It included a short fur jacket and fur pants almost to the chest with straps. Together with my dog ​​fur boots, it turned out to be a great warm ensemble. (By the way, I still wear this jacket sometimes).

On January 16, I flew out on my own with the first helicopter, having previously viewed the future landing site on the tablet. There were no platforms or open spaces on the bank of the Khobei River, so we landed right in the river valley. The helicopter hovered, clouds of snow dust rose, the flight mechanic opened the door and I jumped out right up to my waist in the snow. I wandered a little to the side and waved my hands so that the loads would be thrown out and the people would jump out. All unloading was done with the helicopter hovering in the air - it only slightly touched the snow with its wheels so that the commander could see the edge of the snow cover and not go lower, which threatened an accident with the machine overturning - when the helicopter lands on a soft surface, it tilts and catches the ground with its rotor blades.

When all the cargo was thrown out and the people jumped out, the helicopter immediately rose up and, having made a slight forward tilt, went along the river valley, slowly gaining altitude. We began to trample a path to the shore in very deep snow. We landed in the very foothills, where there is always a lot of snow. From our place to the relatively flat part was about 40 km. Even before finishing transferring the cargo to the shore, we heard the hum of the helicopter. The people quickly left the previous landing site and the machine again hovered over the river. Everything repeated itself again with unloading, and the helicopter immediately went back. They began to quickly transfer the cargo to the shore and store it in one place. In January, at those latitudes, the day is very short and it was necessary to have time to equip the overnight stay in daylight.

We quickly cleared the area of ​​snow and began to set up a 10-person tent with a flannel lining - insulation inside. In the center, we installed an iron stove made from a 200-liter barrel, and along two walls we built common bunks from fresh poles. While we were setting up the tent, daylight quickly ended, and there was still no helicopter. I thought that for some reason the flight was postponed until tomorrow. We continued to settle in - we laid pine branches on the bunks in the tent, sawed and chopped firewood. It quickly got dark, we lit the stove, lit a candle. We also lit a fire outside and the cook cooked food for everyone at once - this was called pot feeding. The food consumption was written off equally for everyone, depending on the days each eater visited the kitchen.

The frosts were not severe - about 30 degrees - after all, this territory was closer to the Gulf Stream than Yeniseisk. Frosts of about 45 degrees happened here too, but not for more than a week. There were 13 of us in a 10-person tent. We had brought a second one with us, but the stove for it was left in Saranpaul. It was cramped, but everyone settled on the bunks. They assigned a night duty officer to constantly heat the stove. Since we were practically settling among the firewood, our duty officer did not spare the latter at all. At first, I fell asleep from the great fatigue of the day, but soon woke up from the unbearable heat, got out of my sleeping bag, asked the duty officer to turn down the heat a little, but still could not fall asleep. The rest of the people slept and snored quite well. I generally didn't tolerate heat well since childhood and only when I got to the steppes of Kazakhstan, I somehow got used to it and sometimes even began to like the hot dry air. I can't stand humid heat at all. In the morning we got up, had breakfast and went to clear a place for building a barracks for housing. We decided to build it without any tricks, from available raw materials, from the forest that stood around us.

We had brought a chainsaw and a barrel of gasoline for it, so the lumberjacks were provided with work. However, the second day was ending, and there was still no helicopter. Radio operator Sergei Borovskikh flew in with us with an RPMS radio, a very young guy who had just finished courses in Tyumen. In the morning, I gave him a man to help install the radio antennas. I allocated him a place in the corner of the tent and told him to urgently establish contact with the expedition. His work was moving briskly and by lunchtime all the antennas were installed, everything he asked for was done for him - there was only one thing missing - communication with the expedition. The first day he told me that there was no radio reception today. I could not help him with this at all. And the second day was ending - no helicopter, no communication.

I began to think with fear about what to do with sleep on the second night. I imagined this heat again! Then I ordered the men to set up a second tent not far from the first one, without making bunks in it. I decided to try sleeping in a cold tent, without a stove. I chopped up some spruce branches and spread them on the frozen ground. I made a double sleeping bag - I stuffed a small tourist one into a large, regular one and lay down in warm Chinese underwear. I fastened all the fasteners and breathed inside this structure. I fell asleep and slept all night.

In the morning I woke up and couldn't move my arms or legs - all my joints had lost their former mobility. I started moving them very slowly. After about 15 minutes they acquired the ability to bend and straighten. I quickly got out of the bag and got dressed. The impression on my body from this night was not very pleasant, but I slept well and rested. Another worker slept in the tent with me, who also couldn't stand the heat. And on the third night he decided to sleep in a cold tent. I, after some thought, decided not to repeat this experiment, considering it dangerous not only for a living organism, but for life in general. Of course, northern peoples sleep this way, even in the snow, but they wear a malitsa, and on top of that a kukul made of reindeer skins, which retain the heat of the human body much better and do not allow such hypothermia of the body as sleeping in a wadded sleeping bag. The guy who came to spend the night in a cold tent the next night also later refused such experiments.

And there was still no helicopter. My daily conversations with the radio operator did not lead to anything positive - there was no connection. He constantly told me about some magnetic storms, pointed to the tuning levers of the radio, said that he was doing everything right, but there was no sense in these conversations. We did not know anything. And this ignorance lasted for about 10 days - no communication, no helicopter.

The situation that developed at that time, as far as I remember, did not worry me much, because we had a place to sleep and food. But now, in retrospect, you understand that a grave mistake was made on the part of the expedition leadership. You never know what could have happened to us during this time - there might have been no food, stove or tents, someone could have been injured. After all, we were counting on 5 helicopter flights and stable communication with the base. But it was mid-January and the frosts could have intensified even more. Ilyashevich M.V., deputy head of the expedition, remained in Saranpaul and in those conditions he not only could, but also should have sent us at least a reindeer team with a musher until stable radio communication with us or a helicopter appeared. Chepkasov V.A. on the day of our drop-off, he flew out on a business trip to Tyumen.

Once we almost lost an insulated tent. In the evening, at dusk, another person and I decided to take a closer look at some detail on the insulation. We took a burning candle in our hands and brought it closer to the wall. At some point, I noticed that a dark spot appeared on the flannel insulation and it began to quickly expand to the sides. We simultaneously realized that the insulation had caught fire from the flame of the candle brought close and began to quickly slam it with nearby rags. Luckily for us, we began to extinguish it in time, but a hole about a square meter had managed to burn out, and mainly under the bunks, where the flame had managed to slip - we managed to quickly slam the one above the bunks. Then I understood the reasons for the fires in tents, which destroyed them in a few minutes - the chances of extinguishing such a fire are always small. Losing the tent with our things could have turned into a real disaster for us.

After 10 days of radio silence, a joyful radio operator suddenly runs to me in the forest and shouts that there is a connection with Saranpaul. I go to the radio, and indeed - there is a radiogram for me, where they say that the helicopter broke down after the second flight to us and flew away for repairs, that in 4 days they expect another plane to arrive. They ask: why did not contact? Is everything okay, are there any products. The products were really running out and I, remembering the breakdowns, asked to send them on the first flight. Why our radio suddenly started working - I still do not know, but I think that the inexperienced radio operator made some technical errors at first. After 10 days, apparently accidentally pressed some necessary toggle switch and went to the correct operating mode and did not make any more failures. He worked with us until the summer, gained some experience and went somewhere further north, to oil exploration.

Exactly 2 weeks after the first landing, 5 more MI-4 flights arrived in 2 days. All the hardware and personnel (except for the management) were transferred. There were about 30 people in total. We set up 2 more tents and began preparatory work for drilling pits and expanding the work.

Geologist Misha Katin, a graduate of MGRI, who had come to Tyumen from Eastern Siberia, arrived with his wife. His wife Nelya, a hydrogeologist technician by education, was a tiny girl and was pregnant.

Misha Katin

One of the next days, Katin, topographer Dudkin and I went out on skis to the area of ​​the second line to determine the pits and the helipad on the ground.

While still in Saranpaul, I bought myself new hunting skis for 30 rubles, lined with elk kamus - this is a very strong skin from the lower part of the legs of elks or deer. They were a little short for me, because the owner, a short Mansi, made them for himself. They were made very well - the kamus skins were glued to the skis with fish glue and the seams were almost invisible. On such skis, I walked ahead, paving the way for my partners, who were using ordinary golitsy skis. I discovered the convenience of these skis when climbing a hill - they did not slide down at all and you could climb them head-on without fear. And they slid down with a little braking compared to ordinary skis.

We walked along the valley of the Khobeyu River, along the left bank. There were already foothills here and the first and second terraces were clearly visible. However, we did not see any game during the entire journey, except for tracks of squirrels and martens. The latter were very rare. Apparently, this was due to the fact that there was very little cedar in these parts, and hence few squirrels, and accordingly the entire food chain was broken. There were many unfrozen places on the river, probably underground springs, and the river flow was quite fast. But the surrounding air was so clean and transparent that you just wanted to "drink" it. The forests around consisted mainly of spruce and fir. Pines were rare.

Road in the Hobeyu Valley

We arrived at the place. Dudkin decided and roughly indicated the location of the pit line. Not far away there was a kind of expanding pocket on the terrace, suitable in size for the construction of a helipad, on which it was later built. All three pit lines were perpendicular to the Sobaka-Lai ridge, which was located along the left bank of the Khobei River, and, according to the geologists, should have poured gold into our pits. Later, these calculations were not confirmed. We went back to our camp. After another 2-3 days, the head and senior geologist of the party arrived.

Kamenev Vilen Mihaylovich, head of the party. Before that, he worked in the Tyumen expedition on the exploration of building materials. Originally from Vinnitsa. Jewish, and raised by his mother alone. He graduated from the Dnepropetrovsk Mining Institute and knew Professor Epstein well, one of the few luminaries in drilling in those years. His real last name was Reznik, for some reason he was embarrassed by it and took his wife's last name - Kamenev - when he got married. His wife, Serafima Nikitichna, worked in the Central Laboratory in Tyumen. They already had two sons. In the summer, she moved to Saranpaul and also worked in the expedition laboratory. He himself was slightly taller than average, a little over 30 years old, with a head that was already starting to go bald. It must be said that despite the fact that he had not previously been involved in placer gold, he was actively involved in both the production process and the study of the geological features of searching for gold placers.

Kalinin Aleksey Semyonovich, senior geologist of the party. The man was already quite old - 65 years old, had long been retired, and had lived in Sochi for many years in his own house. In the early 1930s, he graduated from the Industrial Academy. He studied with Stalin's wife Nadezhda Alliluyeva, Nikita Khrushchev and the future USSR Minister of Geology and then Deputy Minister of Medium Machine Building, P. Antropov. He spent his entire life prospecting and exploring for gold, but only in the even greater North - in Yakutia and Magadan. According to his stories, in the early 1930s, geological parties would go on searches for 2 years at a time in places very far from the base. There was no communication. It often happened that fewer people returned than had left at the beginning - they died on the way from illnesses and accidents. There were no estimates for the work. The party chief would receive money at local post offices along his route and he would receive and spend it at his own discretion. I don't know how he came to us, but I think his friends in the Ministry told him about a new organization for gold prospecting, and he, in his words, always wanted to get to the North again. He even came to us with his old dog sleeping bag - it was a very light and warm product. Such quality bags were no longer produced in 30 years, apparently, it was considered expensive.

We soon realized that life in a tent in winter is not easy, and decided to build a large barracks from the damp wood around. We laid a large one, with solid bunks along both long walls and compartments for married couples.

We began preparations for sinking pits. Geologists agreed on their locations on both banks of the river and a couple of pits were laid in the riverbed itself at a shallow depth. On land, pits were dug in the permafrost first for "burning". The snow was cleared and dry logs were laid along the pit contour, the damp logs were placed on top of them and the lower ones were set on fire. In the morning, a miner would come, remove the unburned remains, loosen the thawed soil with a pick, and throw it out with a shovel. During the cycle, 20 cm would thaw, and it was necessary to lay firewood again. One miner had several pits at work at once. The permafrost layer reached 2 meters or more. After the pit reached a depth of more than 2 meters, a manual winch of the well type was installed over the pit. The miner would put the rock at the face into a bucket, which the winchmen would lift to the surface, pour out in a certain sequence and return the bucket back down.

In river beds, the excavation was carried out using a different technology - "freezing". The method is applicable only in winter in severe frosts. The ice on the river bed along the perimeter of the pit is cleared and its entire depth is excavated, with the exception of 6-7 cm, and left for further freezing. After a day or two (depending on the strength of the frost), the miner again removes the newly frozen layer. The thickness of the pillar is determined by drilling a control hole in the ice, which is then plugged with a wooden dowel. Usually, little was frozen in a day or two, and besides, winter was already coming to an end and there was no chance to finish the pit for freezing. In principle, this method is used. To enhance the freezing effect, axial fans can be used to supply cold outside air to the face and enhance the freezing effect.

But still, the miner's work was not only physically difficult, but also required very specific knowledge and experience. The miners who came to us from the 105th expedition or from other mines, as a rule, rarely mastered the craft we needed. Even out of 10 people, not one remained. We can say that out of 20, one mastered the craft, but this one was already becoming a professional.

Everyone imagined that as the pits deepened and their faces reached the level of the river surface, the problem of drainage would arise. Kalinin and I often discussed this problem. He had a historically formed view on this matter from his practice - no iron pumps! These are all chimeras! One good carpenter is needed and the job will be done. He did not believe in the success of using the "Letestyu" pumps. Having learned that Popik was a good carpenter, he agreed with him to make a wooden pump. He made him a cylinder according to his sketches. But Kalinin refused to pay him. Then Popik took an axe and chopped the pump into pieces. From this story it is clear that Kalinin had no idea at all about the future working conditions, that in thawed soils the water inflow into the pit could reach more than 100 cubic meters per hour. He had previously worked only in permafrost, where water appeared in places, very rarely and in very small quantities. That's where his wooden pump could cope.

Three weeks later, they began to cover the barracks for housing with planks. For the first time here I saw how swing saws are used for manual longitudinal sawing of logs into boards and planks. When organizing geological exploration parties conducting drilling and mining operations, the first mechanisms that appear at the base are a mobile power station and a sawmill. Without these mechanisms it is impossible to build housing and production and utility rooms - machine shops, garages, etc. It is possible to build from round timber, but floorboards, ceilings, roofs, doors, window frames can only be obtained from a sawmill. In our case, when organizing the Khobein party, the matter was complicated by the fact that we could only obtain part of the necessary equipment in July 1962 with the opening of summer navigation to Saranpaul by water transport. Therefore, when starting to build a barrack for housing, we had to use old grandfather's methods of obtaining boards and planks - manual longitudinal sawing of logs with swing saws. For this, a platform was built at a height of about 2 meters, a log edged on both sides was fixed there, one person stood on this platform and pulled the saw up, and the second stood below and pulled the saw down. The saw itself was twice as heavy as a crosscut saw, the teeth were also longer and sharpened specifically for longitudinal sawing. It was the hardest physical labor, something like 'Egyptian'. I myself am not a flimsy build, but I could not work for more than 10 minutes. They covered the ceiling and covered it with frozen moss. Inside, on both long sides, they made common bunks, covered them all with felt. An iron stove was installed one third of the way from the entrance and everyone moved to live in the barracks, including the engineers and technicians. Even the families. They simply fenced off their space with some curtains. Life became much better - there were no such wild temperature drops as in the tent, and there was no particular heat either. True, the first weeks were very damp and humid, since all the material from which they built was frozen and damp. It took a lot of time to dry it out. About two weeks after we moved in, I felt some creatures crawling all over my body - I dug around, looked and found - lice. Kamenev found the same thing. It became clear to everyone that the problem of washing people needed to be solved urgently, i.e. build a bathhouse.

We recently started the construction of a new building - a party office and rooms for housing engineers and technical workers. We had to revise the layout and set aside one edge for a bathhouse and an entryway for it. Again, everything was built from frozen damp wood - only the tow for laying the seams between the logs was dry. In 3 weeks, we finished this building too. We installed an iron stove in the bathhouse, but there was still ice on the floor in the entryway - changing room. And in the bathhouse itself, the floor was cold and in order not to freeze, we had to put our feet up on the shelf. In addition, they brought some preparations for sanitizing the dormitory. Some people went to live in the new building. All these measures together gave the desired effect and our lice were completely eliminated. True, there was a small inconvenience - on days when the bathhouse was open, steam from it got into our office through loose joints in the main wall, but we could put up with it.

The majority of the staff, with the exception of families, ate in a common pot. There was a cook who cooked for everyone. The food consisted mainly of canned borscht or soups, if they ran out, then they cooked from dried vegetables - cabbage, potatoes and onions. They often cooked porridge. Of the fresh products, there was always frozen venison. True, once they sent some very thin and black carcasses. We asked for clarification on the radio. Ilyashevich wrote to us that this was second-grade meat, but did not have a marketable appearance. These explanations did not make it any tastier. There were no fresh vegetables in the diet, since there was practically nowhere to store them. Dishes prepared entirely from dried vegetables were hardly edible and resembled a rare nastiness. Apparently, the technology of drying them in those years completely destroyed their natural taste and smell. True, dried potatoes in plywood drums, cabbage and onions in paper bags were very light and transportable.

After some time, the three of us - Kamenev, Kalinin and I - went on a reconnaissance of the uppermost line, 10 km from the party base. This was already above the mouth of the Parnuk river. We went on skis along the left bank of the Khobeyu. River terraces were clearly visible everywhere, which could be like "traps" for placer gold. Kalinin really liked most of the places in the relief of the river valley and he often said that this was a typical gold mine landscape. His experience in such matters, of course, could not be disputed by us then. Kamenev took up this work very actively, although he had never dealt with gold. He studied the literature that he brought with him. He often consulted with Kalinin. He was interested in mine technologies for sinking pits, although at first I myself was a pure theorist in this matter. We all learned and improved our knowledge as the work progressed, trying not to step on the same rake twice. Sometimes we made mistakes, but we did not shift our responsibility onto anyone. Looking ahead a little, it must be acknowledged that the main contribution to the search and exploration of gold placers on the Khobeyu River and its tributaries in the 60s was made by Kamenev V.M., who began with Khobeyu and ended up as the head of the Saranpaul expedition.

... And summer transport too

A good assistant at that time was the foreman-geologist Misha Kuchukov - either a Buryat or an Altai by nationality. He had a good schooling in seasonal field parties, and knew how to get along with the working class. The closing of all the outfits, basically, fell on him. He also supervised the miners. He suffered greatly from toothache, which is why he died early, having received blood poisoning from teeth.

A considerable responsibility lay on the washers of the concentrate samples. Before washing, the rock layouts had to be thawed with fires, and then washed in wooden trays in the river winter water until the concentrate was gray. Then further finishing was carried out until it was black. Nelya Katina did this, sitting in a small tent over the river ice hole. Her hands were constantly red from the cold river water. I decided to try this myself and collected sand from the ice hole at the bottom of the river in a tray. I washed it to a gray state and counted about 200 gold coins. Apparently, the entire Khobeyu basin was "infected" with small, dusty gold. At the end of March, we were informed that the expedition had received 2 light artillery tracked tractors ATL, which had already arrived in Saranpaul and were preparing to leave for Khobeyu with cargo. They told us to report what to bring to us first. Another instruction was to trace the last 10 km section of the route, which ran directly along the bed of the Khobeyu River, to mark the bypasses of dangerous places with thin ice and ice hanging over the water, to meet the tractors on the shore before they entered the ice of the riverbed. It was a very important matter - it was possible to drown not only the cargo, but also the people. Ice on mountain rivers is very treacherous, of uneven thickness, and in some places it hangs in the air, not resting on the water. Its bearing capacity in such cases drops several times.

Crawler tractor ATL-5

We went together with the topographer Dudkin. We decided to trace the river during the day, mark the route of the tractors, and at night go another kilometer down the river and spend the night there in a hut, and meet them on the bank in the morning. I took a gun with me and on kitty skis - forward. Fortunately, there were not many dangerous places, we made ski detours, but we could only guess approximately where on the bank the tractors would appear. In one place along the right bank we saw fresh entrance tracks of an elk into a small coastal forest grove. We looked closely - and in the distance between the bare aspens we saw the animal - it was leisurely eating twigs.

Having walked a little further down the right bank, we sat down to rest. I had the gun on my knees, and my gaze was directed at the river. We sat quietly, not talking. A little later, out of the corner of my eye, I saw some movement on the left. I turned my head and immediately identified it as a wolverine, although I had only seen it in pictures before.

It was slowly moving towards us along our trail. Its head was level with its back, as if it were sniffing the ski trail. It came to a distance of about 30 meters. I could have managed to shoot it, but both barrels were loaded with medium shot, which, given its size - from a small bear cub, was ineffective. Catching my gaze, directed right at it, it abruptly turned off the ski track to the right and immediately disappeared in large leaps into the coastal forest.

Wolverine

Such "carefree" behavior of the animals indicated that people appeared in these places extremely rarely. Moose, as a rule, do not tolerate close human presence and immediately leave the line of sight even before meeting, and the wolverine is an even more cautious predator. Few, even hunters, can tell about meeting her. It was really a very remote corner even for these places.

About a kilometer later we found a hut on the left bank of the river. It was a fairly large hut, chopped from logs, with a disproportionately small iron stove. Moreover, the stove had already burned out in some places and was shining with holes. We went to chop wood - the nights were still quite cold. We melted it. We cooked porridge with stew in a pot, and then brewed tea. When the hut warmed up a little, or maybe it seemed that way to us, we went to bed and tried to fall asleep. We didn't have sleeping bags, so we had a hard night ahead of us. We put out the candle and fell silent. Then some rustling and squeaking began. It turned out to be mice. They had been waiting for our arrival for a long time and apparently had a party on this occasion. They were making noise near us all night, and the stove quickly burned out and the warmth from the hut began to evaporate. In general, we couldn't really get any sleep. Only before the morning, having lit the stove again, we fell asleep a little. After drinking tea and gnawing on frozen sausage, we set off on our way back.

Having reached the place where we had seen the moose, to our surprise, we discovered the tracks of all-terrain vehicles that had descended from the coastal elevation onto the river bed and were going into the distance. There was a Mansi tent covered with skins and an unfamiliar Mansi man was cutting up the carcass of a freshly killed elk - the same one we had seen the day before in this same grove. It turned out that he was driving his reindeer team along a trail made by tractors in the deep snow. And what was unusual was that despite the roar of the tractor engines passing by, the elk never left this grove.

We went back to the base. Our work was not in vain - the tractors followed our trail exactly, without deviating anywhere. It was more difficult to go up the river, so we arrived at the base somewhere around lunchtime. From afar, we noticed two squat beetles standing on the shore with tarpaulin awnings on the cargo area, a car cabin and tracks instead of wheels. The head of the expedition, V.A. Chepkasov, arrived with them. I came closer to examine this miracle of technology. Despite the lack of a road to us, the tractors covered the distance of 80 km in 10 hours, crossed the Polya River and the Devil-Iz Ridge.

Maslenitsa

ATL is a light artillery tractor, a tracked vehicle weighing about 7 tons and with a lifting capacity of 2 tons. The engine is a two-stroke diesel engine in a forced 135 hp version from the Yaroslavl plant. The drive sprockets are in front, as are the side clutches. As the experience of their further operation has shown, they had a number of major drawbacks, namely: high fuel consumption, cases of the diesel engine running in a "runaway" state, very weak metal of the friction clutch running rollers, poor cross-country ability in winter when climbing hills, rapid wear of the chassis in summer - sprockets and track pins. However, they certainly played a positive role in the further work of the expedition. By the way, one of the ATLs that arrived had already broken down and the driver was disassembling the right clutch. A little later he took out a running roller with completely crushed teeth. Naturally, nothing like this could happen to us and its driver left in another car. The part was brought by plane from Tyumen a few weeks later, the driver flew to us by helicopter, repaired the car and it managed to return to the expedition base on the ice before spring.

Chepkasov inspected the party's base - a residential barracks, an office, a bathhouse and everyone went with him to the work sites. First they inspected here, then went to the second line. He inspected literally all the working objects - the shafts, the work of the washers, the construction of the helipad. Some shafts were already quite deep and water was beginning to ooze out there, which was removed along with the rock by tunneling buckets. Later, when he had finished his business with us, he said that I had to prepare to leave for Saranpaul soon - an avalanche of new matters was starting to accumulate there: registration of permits for storing explosives in the expedition warehouse, a trip to Tyumen to receive two ready-made pumps, receiving and sending explosives, and also it was necessary to look at the affairs of the drilling rig in I.M. Sidoryak's party. Explosives were needed for the field season for the survey parties, which was just around the corner. And the Khobein party needed them for crushing large boulders in the pits. Around the beginning of April, I was summoned to Saranpaul by radiogram.

There were many Pauls in the Berezovsky district - Yanypaul, Nervatpaul, Suevatpaul, Timkapaul, etc. Paul in Mansi means a large village. This is where the name Saranpaul comes from - a Zyryan large village. With a total population of about 3,000 people, more than 70% were Zyryans and Mansi.

The Zyryans (Komi) came to Saranpaul from areas west of the Ural Mountains, crossing them in the 17th century through a pass called the Sibiryakovsky tract. They still have their own national autonomy there. In Saranpaul, they are engaged in reindeer herding, fishing, and some people work in expeditions. The most common surnames are Rochev, Khatanzeev, Vokuev, Kanev, Filippov, Semyashkin. In general, they are quite numerous throughout the country.

Komi in national costumes

The Mansi (Voguls) are a small nationality. According to the 1958 census, there were only about 6,000 of them. They live mainly on the banks of the Severnaya Sosva River and its tributaries, and very few in the north of the Sverdlovsk region. For example, in the village of Solva in the Severouralsky district, only 4 families lived. The most common surnames are Kurikov, Nomin, Anyamov, Khatanzeev, Bakhtiyarov. They are mainly engaged in hunting, fishing, reindeer herding for themselves, excellent expedition guides - no one in these areas knows the terrain better than them. They can take you to any area without roads and a map of the area. All geological and survey expeditions in all years could not do without their services. Even two ATLs, which arrived in Saranpaul in March, went from Ivdel on their own through complete impassability for about 600 km, and then arrived in Khobeya accompanied by guide Petya Nomin.

Winter clothes

They also had no equal in hunting. For example, Vasya Kurikov from Ust-Man'ya once in winter, in the snow, drove three wolves into the clearing and shot them one by one. He chased them on skis for several hours, threw off his fur jacket along the way, and blood started running from his ears towards the end, but he shot the whole pack. I had to work closely with them, so I will describe these encounters later. I want to note another feature - exceptional honesty towards others, and they often did not even understand when they encountered deception. In earlier years, they did not have locks on their forest huts, but having repeatedly encountered acts of vandalism and looting of supplies from all sorts of "tourists", they began to lock them.

By faith, they were pagans - they worshiped various wooden idols-gods.

They had their own sacred places on their territory - for example, the Yalbynya River, where they sometimes celebrated their rituals and hung ribbons on tree branches. When you ask them about such places, they do not support the conversation and avoid answering.

According to their religion, this people descended from the bear, so it is considered a sacred animal that cannot be killed. But living in such a wild wilderness, encounters with a bear were inevitable. Sometimes they were critical for a person's life and they had to shoot to kill. In such cases, rituals were performed as if to cleanse oneself from sin - a "bear festival" was held.

In a residential area, the head of an animal was placed on a plate, all the residents walked around and sang: "Don't be angry with us, 0yka! We are not to blame. It was not us who killed you, but the gun! And the gun was invented by a Russian!" 0yka in Mansi means bear. For the Mansi, as indigenous people, it was allowed to get one moose per year for their family without any licenses. And everyone who could caught fish for their own needs, despite the presence of fishery inspectors. And in general, it should be noted that in such remote corners, fishery inspectors were not raging. They understood that people caught fish for themselves, for food, and it makes up a significant part of their diet.

Khurumpaul

In the Northern Sosva in the fall there was a run of nelma - this is a Siberian whitefish, a species exceptional in its taste qualities. Also here was a run of the famous Sosvinskaya herring, which for 5 years I could not buy in the store in its special ambassador - it was all sent to Moscow in 10-liter barrels. And what they salted themselves was also tasty, but not the same at all.

A common misfortune for these peoples was "fire water" - alcohol. Everyone drank - men and women, young and old, managers and subordinates, on holidays, and often on weekdays. This was stopped by the lack of alcohol for sale in stores. Taking advantage of this, individual rogues and grabbers from among the temporary workers in this territory, exchanged muskrat, sable, squirrel skins with hunters for bottles. The organism of the local aborigines had absolutely no protective or regulatory mechanisms, and some residents prematurely ended their lives in a state of delirium tremens, or froze to death in winter. In addition, the rather harsh climate also left its mark and some suffered from tuberculosis.

In all public places of Saranpaul there was a specific smell of dried fish and clothes made of dressed reindeer skins. The most common transport among the local residents were reindeer teams of 3-4 reindeer and sleds. A reindeer herding state farm was also based here. In normal years they had up to 15,000 heads, and if there was ice or food shortage, the herd decreased. In one year, polar wolves reduced the herd by 3,000 heads - and these predators constantly accompany the herd in all its movements from Saranpaul to the Kara Sea and back

Previously, the shepherds and their families lived in herds. But in recent years, good wooden houses began to be built for them in the village, and part of the family lived in these houses during some months. They were allowed to keep 50 of their own reindeer in the herd, so every autumn they slaughtered 50 heads for meat and handed it over, and they again had 50 heads of the resulting young animals left over for raising. In the late 50s, the delivery price for venison was 50 kopecks per 1 kg. And only in the early 60s did the price increase to 1.1 rubles per 1 kg. At this price, it could always be bought in any quantity. Moose meat was sold mostly underground for 50 kopecks per 1 kg.

The village was very long along the river and was conventionally divided by small ravines into 3 parts - the first, second and third villages. Near large rivers there is always such a "longitudinal" nature of construction. At the very beginning of the village on the river bank we were given a place for an oil depot - several tanks were given to us by the 105th expedition, and thus we had a kind of joint oil depot. But the local authorities gave us the main territory for the development of the expedition base far away from the river, approximately more than 1 km. Even further away, a new land airfield for AN-2 and helicopters was almost completed.

I returned to the hostel again and a day later my electric razor disappeared. It became clear that someone was checking the contents of the rooms. I had valuables that I didn't want to part with - a rifle, a shotgun, a fur suit, and high boots. I went to look for housing in the private sector, since in the coming months I was supposed to work at the expedition base. In one of the houses, not far from the office, I was offered both shelter and board for only 50 rubles a month. This was, in general, a ridiculous amount of money, and I immediately agreed.

The owners Krasnovsky - Vasily Nikolaevich and Feoktista Vasilievna were already people of a respectable age - he was about 65 years old, and she was 55. She was a native of the village of Pokrovskoye, where Grigory Rasputin came from. She remembered him well, when he repeatedly came there from the capital, already at the royal court. She did not recall anything bad about him. And Vasily Nikolaevich was a professional fisherman, as he called himself - "Krasnolovets". I have never come across such a name even in literature. It turns out that this is what they called fishermen on the Volga (and he was from there) who caught only "red" fish - whitefish, sturgeon, beluga. In the 1930s, fate threw him to Siberia, where he settled forever. They had one son, Nikolay, about 25 years old, who worked in the 105th expedition and lived with them. Nikolay and I slept in the hall - he on the bed, and I on the sofa. They also had a small kitchen-dining room, where the old people huddled. At first, the food was quite varied, both meat and dried fish, and they took milk from the neighbors.

It soon became warm, the first puddles appeared and wild ducks flew in. Nikolay got up early in the morning, went to one of these puddles in the area of ​​the new airfield and brought back several before breakfast. Later, when this puddle merged with the spilled Lyapin, he began to bring back more than a dozen each time. That's when the "duck feast" began. At first, they made noodle soup with ducks, then they got tired of it and started making duck soup with homemade noodles. Later, they began to stew ducks in the oven, then fry them in a frying pan. Thus, morning, afternoon and evening, ducks prepared in different ways stood on the table. After two weeks, I begged and asked them not to show me them in any form anymore. Since then, I practically don't eat them, with very rare exceptions.

The field season was quickly approaching. It was necessary to draw up a lot of documents for the production of blasting operations, transportation and storage of explosive materials. My experience of working in the Karpinsky party was very useful to me. I prepared all the documents and flew to Berezovo. First, it was necessary to obtain a certificate for the purchase of explosive materials from the Mining Technical Inspectorate and, at the same time, permission for the right to carry out blasting operations in the Khobeinsky party.

The Mining Technical Inspectorate, then and now, is the controlling organization for the production of dangerous works - blasting, operation of lifting equipment and pressure vessels. Thousands of rules and instructions were written on these topics, which were intertwined with each other from duplication to contradiction. Moreover, both the production workers and inspectors knew these "peculiarities" very well, as they knew that if all these rules were followed, then production should simply be stopped. Therefore, relations with the inspection were always difficult, and to a large extent they were built on personal connections and trust. It should be noted that I always managed to build normal relations with them, since I never grossly deceived them and carried out their instructions within the agreed timeframes. Different people worked there. Among the young people, there were many who had not done well in production and deep down they had some "envy" of the successful production workers. There were also those who liked to have at least a little power over people, at least through the prism of the "Rules..." and "Instructions...". The older inspectors were mainly former production workers who had transferred there for various reasons. In my observations, it was best to work with this category of inspectors. As a rule, the spent ballast from among the directors of enterprises and unpromising party functionaries was "dumped" into the management staff of the inspections.

I flew to Berezovo with the documents. Smirnov Nikolay Vladimirovich - inspector for our district. Drilling engineer, transferred from an oil exploration expedition to the inspection. Relatively young, about 30 years old. He lived in the settlement of the Berezovskaya oil and gas exploration expedition, in a typical house. We met. I showed him the passports of drilling and blasting operations - there were no special comments. As I later guessed, he did not know mining operations at all, and seismologists often came to him with such passports. He wrote out all the documents, but immediately added that in some time he would come to us in Khobeya to check the compliance of the documents I presented with practical application. Of course, he saw me for the first time, and he simply could not act differently.

After that, I went to the police department to get permission for air transportation of military equipment from Tyumen to Saranpaul. The documents I presented also did not cause any comments and the next day they issued me all the permits. I returned to Saranpaul and began to wait for the departure to Tyumen. Problems arose at the well in Sidoryak's party and the head of the expedition gave me the order to go to the drilling site, sort it out, report our proposals to him if they were of a cardinal nature.

The ice drift passed and all the rivers were free. The next day, Sidoryak I.M. and I went to his drilling site. The two of us went on his motorboat with an outboard motor "Moscow" along the Yatriya River, which went straight south from Saranpaul. We took guns with us. We had to go up about 70 km. At normal speed - less than 4 hours. The water was very high and the current was strong. After a while, the engine started acting up and started "spitting" gasoline from somewhere - Sidoryak dug around in its "guts", but could not find the fault. I did not understand anything about it at all. We had already driven more than half the way and saw a black grouse sitting on the very top of a birch tree, right on the shore. I asked the boat to direct it to him. About 40 meters away, I shot - he was sitting, from the second barrel - he was sitting, I reloaded the gun and shot again - he was flying away. The boat bumped into the shore, we got out. I looked - there was another wood grouse sitting 70 meters away, I approached to 30 meters, I shot - he was flying away. I looked to the right - another wood grouse was sitting 80 meters away. I approached, shot - and he was flying away again. For the first time I saw such a quantity of game that were practically not afraid of shots. And this is what happened with the gun. At home I loaded the cartridges manually and poured the powder by eye, without measuring, and the shot too. That's why the shot was scattered a lot when I fired and I didn't hit the target. Apparently I added too much smokeless powder. We didn't shoot any more, although there were quite a few birds visible in the trees around, but further away. We drove further up. Suddenly, after some time, the engine started "sneezing", shooting and finally stalled. We looked at the gas tanks - both were empty. Sidoryak said that the drilling rig was not far away and we would quickly walk there along the shore. We fell silent, made our ears "house", listened, but the sound of the drilling rig's diesel engine was not audible.

There was nowhere to go anyway, so we decided to tie up the boat here and walk to the drilling site. Along the bank there was a wall of very thick, tall willows, so thick that you couldn't even see the riverbed from the bank. And here we made a huge mistake - we tied the boat to the willows in this remote place, and didn't make any clearly visible marks on the bank. We walked away from the boat and climbed a hill - the bank was quite high. We walked along it for about 300 meters - and along the river there was still the same dense willows, and suddenly it occurred to us - how will we find our boat if we suddenly have to float downstream on it without a motor, to the expedition? And we realized that now we would not be able to find it from the shore, and we would have to walk to the drilling site.

There were no paths along the shore at all - people appeared here once a decade, and then by accident. Black grouse, wood grouse, ducks - all of this was all around in countless numbers. I no longer had any desire to shoot. True, Sidoryak, having once seen a wood grouse about 80 meters away at the very top of a larch, told me that he could shoot it with his gun. He had a German double-barreled 16-gauge shotgun from the Zimson company. I did not believe him and we argued. He inserted a cartridge with buckshot and fired. There was a characteristic dull sound of a low-speed buckshot hitting a bird, about the same as when a bullet from a small-caliber rifle hits. The wood grouse jumped up and began to glide to the ground at an angle of 45 degrees away from us. We ran and looked for it for a long time, but did not find it - its brown color was almost indistinguishable from the color of last year's foliage, which was well scattered around the area.

The road was becoming more and more difficult, some low-growing bushes were constantly getting in the way under our feet. We were very hungry - and we did not take any food with us on the road, hoping to have lunch at the boiler room at the drilling site. Of course, we could get some game and roast it over a fire, but this would take a lot of time and we might not get there during daylight hours. There were very swampy places and our feet sank into the quagmire. We had been walking for about 4 hours, but there were no signs of people. I already had a thought to find 2-3 dry logs, tie them together with pins and, sitting on them, and lowering our feet into the water, begin to descend down to the boat, which should be clearly visible from the river. It was utopian, if only because your feet could quickly lose sensitivity in the cold water, and it was very easy to tumble into the water from two logs. We were already thinking about staying overnight, and then suddenly heard a very faint knock of a diesel engine. This immediately gave us strength and we began to climb some hill that appeared in front of us. At its very top, the sound was already much closer, and about another hour later, almost crawling, we descended into the ravine, to the drilling rig.

On the shore there were 2 trailers and a ZIF-650 core drilling rig with a diesel drive. The drillers had already had dinner and the cook had to quickly prepare food for us - he fried venison and cooked rice porridge with condensed milk. I had not eaten so greedily for a long time and the rice porridge did not seem so tasty. However, we were very tired, it was already getting dark and we left all our work until the morning.

First of all, in the morning, we sent a motorman on the second boat that was standing with them to bring ours in tow. We ourselves took care of the well. It was drilled according to the geological survey plan, today it had a depth of about 200 meters. During its drilling, another 20 meters higher, the walls began to collapse and a fountain of pressurized water came out of the well. We immediately decided to block this interval with a secret column

12 meters long. After that, we continued drilling, although the outpouring of water from the well continued. On the second trip, the drilling tool jammed in the secret column and everything came out at once to the top. When we disassembled this bundle and poured out the jam, everyone was amazed. The jam turned out to be pure quartz, not even sand, but angular breccia-like pieces of quartz 4-5 mm in size. And absolutely transparent, without the slightest impurities. Nobody knew how thick this layer was.

To continue drilling, it was necessary to use a weighted clay solution to suppress the water fountain, determine the exact thickness of this sand, and then decide what to do - either block it again with a longer secret column, or continue drilling without casing. There was no weighting agent either at the well or in the expedition. It could only be brought from somewhere during oil exploration expeditions - and this is a lot of money, and most importantly - there was no time. The drilling rig had to be moved to another site during high water - otherwise it would remain here until the winter roads. We decided to use only what was here. As a result, we were unable to get through the entire sand layer, we went a few more meters deeper, but the well was constantly blocked. In the end, we suggested closing it and transporting the equipment to a new point.

The motorman brought our boat - he immediately saw it from the river. It turned out that we had traveled more than 15 km along this off-road. The guys at the drilling rig knew a lot about these boat motors and quickly adjusted it - there were no breakdowns, the carburetor needed adjusting - I didn't know anything about them then. We sailed back very quickly, and even downstream, without problems. I didn't shoot any ducks, although there were countless of them. Sidoryak shot a couple of them for home.

By evening we returned to Saranpaul. The next morning the expedition leader called me and told me to prepare all the documents for leaving for Tyumen to receive two Letestyu pumps, explosives and transport them by air to Saranpaul. The preparations did not take long, since I had already received all the permits for purchasing and transporting explosives. The next morning I flew to Berezovo, but there were no tickets to Tyumen for that day. I bought one the next day and went to the hotel. But there were no vacancies there either. I ate in a restaurant and went to sit at the airport - there were rare cases when they gave 1-2 seats on planes passing from the North. But nothing worked out here either. In general, it should be noted that with the onset of spring, life in the North suddenly becomes more lively, a rapid movement of people and transport begins and small hotels are always overcrowded. Propeller-driven aircraft of those years took on board very few passengers - at most 28 people on the IL-14. There were enough passengers at the airport for the night. Some of them left for the village in the evening, and those who had enough chairs, dozed on them all night, including me.

I arrived in Tyumen in the evening and settled into the Zarya Hotel. The next day I was at the office of A.G. Bystritsky. He said that there were no small planes at the moment, but an LI-2 would arrive soon. This is a large machine with a lifting capacity of 2 tons, but it was only possible to fly to Berezovo, and then reload onto an AN-2. The second obstacle was a categorical ban on the combined transportation of explosive materials with any iron. There was no choice, no time to think, and I began preparations. I went to Parfyonovo and looked at the manufactured pumps - they were made well, strictly according to the drawings. It should be noted, however, that at the beginning of their operation they had one defect, which I will write about later - they were missing one important part, which was not even on the drawings. I accepted the pumps and signed for them. Another 4 pumps were made by the Tyumen Construction Machinery Plant, but they were not ready yet.

Explosive materials had to be registered at the base explosives warehouse, also somewhere in the Parfenov area. This is where major problems arose. The thing is that the department carried out blasting operations only in seismic batches in boreholes. TNT in round ingots and checkers was very suitable for this purpose - it is not afraid of water, but it produces a lot of harmful gases and could not be used in pits and shafts where people work. The ammonite or detonite we needed, which are used in our mines, were not in sight. They could appear in the warehouse only two years after the new application company. There was, however, a little ammonite in sacks - I had to take it together with TNT in blocks. Of the blasting agents, there was practically everything we needed - electric detonators, detonator caps, detonating cord and fuse, SVM blasting machines, etc. I ordered about a ton of explosives in total.

A few days ago, 2 people came into the personnel department of the department. These were exactly the people I needed right now - blasters. One of them - Shirmanov Ivan was actually a fellow countryman from the city of Serov, he had the right to carry out blasting operations in open and underground mining operations. Moreover, his wife Klavdiya was the head of the explosives warehouse in Serov - also a very necessary person for us.

The second one, Dmitry Povarnitsyn, had a license only for seismic work. I also hired him on the condition that he would pass an additional exam and receive a license for open-pit mining. He actually received such a license, worked for us for more than a year, and then went back to seismic work.

A different story happened with I. Shirmanov. In the summer, his wife and daughter came to Saranpaul and began to manage our VM warehouse. She was a very neat woman, everything was in order with her. The facility was very important and was regularly inspected by various regulatory organizations. Ivan himself worked for Khobeya, he knew the business well, had a lot of practice. Sometimes we transferred him to other field parties for one-off work. He had only one drawback - he liked to drink. But he did it quietly, without loud scandals. Moreover, all the lovers drank only in the village - in the field there was nothing to drink. However, in 1964 he found himself in a company of not quite familiar people and was killed in a drunken brawl. His wife's business qualities reached A.G. Bystritsky and he soon took her to Tyumen to manage the base warehouse of the Naval Directorate.

As always, before going on a business trip, Chepkasov V.A. gave me a bunch of tasks. Several questions had to be asked and clarified from Ervie Y.G. He received me very quickly - at that time there were few people in his reception room. A number of questions did not cause any objections from him, regarding receiving a light all-terrain vehicle GAZ-69, he said that we will decide after receiving it. And I moved on to the last question - I asked for rifled weapons for the expedition - several barrels of carbines of caliber 8.2 and 7.62 and 20 Nagants. At the word "Nagants" Ervie flared up: "What Nagants do you want! Chepkasov, what, forgot his story in the Polar Urals?"

I did not make excuses, because I did not know any stories on this topic and ended the conversation. Later, the geologists from the Polar Urals told me that some dissatisfied workers attacked Veniamin Aleksandrovich, despite the fact that he had a pistol with him. However, Chepkasov himself categorically denies that such a story happened to him. Later, rifled weapons did appear on the expedition.

In my radiogram to the expedition chief, I outlined the situation with the transportation of all the cargo on one plane at once and asked him to assist in ordering two special AN-2 flights at once to transport cargo from Berezovo to Saranpaul - after all, no one would have allowed us to leave a ton of explosives at the airfield.

New buildings in Saranpaul

I still had one more thing for me personally. Ever since Yeniseysk, my dream was to have my own motorboat, but good at that time "Moscow" boat motors costing 200 rubles were impossible to buy in a store in places with many rivers, like in the Tyumen region. A few days ago, I ordered something for the expedition from the warehouses of the ORS Geological Administration. But these were food products. Then I remembered that I saw industrial goods there as well. I went to the head of the ORS again and asked: "Do they have "Moscow" boat motors?" He replied that they did. I asked for one for myself in cash and one for the warehouse for the needs of the expedition. He allowed it and signed the invoice. He said that he would send these two motors on the next special flight with food to Saranpaul. I would have to pay the money at the expedition's cash desk. Literally a month later the motor arrived, and I transported it to the Krasnovskys, and a couple of weeks later I bought a very good wooden boat from one of the locals for 30 rubles with dimensions close to those I wanted to have.

One day before the flight, we brought pumps to the airfield, and explosive materials had to be delivered early in the morning on the day of departure. In principle, according to all the rules and aviation regulations, our cargo had to be distributed among three sides: iron, explosives, means blasting. But in the conditions of the beginning of the field season and the lack of aviation, it was simply impossible to scrupulously follow all the rules. Early in the morning of the next day, we brought explosives and saw an LI-2 with metal folding seats already standing near the pumps. First, we loaded explosives into the very front of the plane, then we placed the pumps, and at the end of the cabin, boxes with blasting agents.

The flight to Berezovo lasted about 3 hours. We unloaded. Right there in the transportation department they told me that the expedition had already issued 2 AN-2 aircraft for the transfer of cargo to Saranpaul. We quickly loaded two planes and in 2 hours we were already in Saranpaul. The explosives were transported through Lyapin that same day and loaded into the VM warehouse, and the pumps were brought to the expedition warehouse.

Vinogradov (the author) 1963

With the passage of ice and the rise of spring waters, active navigation began throughout the territory. Thousands of large and small ships began delivering cargo to the most remote corners of the region. The route by water was not only the only accessible to most places, but also the cheapest. Three organizations delivered cargo to Saranpaul - a local cooperative, expedition №105, and our expedition. Some had their own transport, some had their own and rented.

A large volume of cargo was delivered by the cooperative. After all, it was necessary to deliver food and manufactured goods for a year for 3,000 people. When the first lighter arrived for them, about 100 people were mobilized for unloading, mainly workers from both expeditions. The time given for unloading was very limited, and if the standard deadlines were not met, large fines were imposed. The main goods were flour, cereals, sugar, canned goods, alcohol, furniture and other manufactured goods. The loaders were divided into two parts - one took the sacks from the holds and put them on the backs of the other part, which carried them along the liquid gangways to the shore transport. I was in turns in both parts. If the sacks of flour and sugar weighed about 50 kg, then with rice they weighed 80 kg. Unloading went on all night, and was finished only in the morning. By the end, I was already swaying and my legs could not hold me. After I slept during the day, my whole body ached, and it took a couple of days to recover from such unusual work.

Expedition N105 also brought goods to their warehouses, in order to then deliver them to the mountains along winter roads. But they had another peculiarity - every summer they delivered about 500 workers to the mountains for seasonal work. This was a very special contingent - as they were also called - recruited. Their recruitment began in Tyumen in April. Each was given money daily at the rate of 2 meals. Basically, these were people who had been through camps and prisons, often more than once. Most of them went on this expedition every season to earn something and knew the places where they were going well. A separate steamer was specially chartered from Tyumen to Saranpaul for their transportation. The entire village prepared for their arrival and took special precautions. The movement of the steamer was monitored from the very beginning of departure and before it moored, a crowd of onlookers had already gathered on the shore. Once I witnessed this event.

The ship was just turning towards the shore, and there was already a large crowd of people with knapsacks on their shoulders on the deck. As soon as the gangway was lowered, they all rushed to the shore. Those in the back shouted to those in front: "You take a place for me too!" - they ran to the private sector to addresses known to them, where they were expected every year. After this, many villagers firmly locked the doors with bolts and hid the dogs. All untied and not vicious ones were simply eaten. During one of the navigations, they even reached our village and dragged a dog to themselves, throwing its head with us. A few days later they were loaded onto a barge and transported along the Manya River to the mouth of the Naroda River. From there they walked along a path into the mountains. During the journey from Tyumen to the work sites, several people simply disappeared - some without a trace, others were found killed. People were lost at cards, and even simple quarrels ended in tragedies. The same events, only "weaker", happened in the fall, when they returned from field work - at that time there was still no such mass invasion, and they left gradually. Our expedition also recruited about 150-200 people for the season, but our people behaved more quietly, although there were individual excesses, mainly related to drinking.

Lyapin Coast in Saranpaul

Saranpaul Street

The Administration allocated us water transport to service the expedition - a self-propelled 20-ton barge "Kolkhoznitsa", an 80-hp water-jet boat, a BMK-90 boat and an oil barge with a capacity of 100 tons. All this equipment, loaded, also approached us from Tyumen. The main part of the cargo was on an 800-ton lighter, which also soon approached. Almost all the heavy equipment, transport, metalworking machines and prefabricated residential buildings were loaded on it. To unload it, we had to make very powerful gangways from logs, since the tractors and trucks weighed 12 tons each and were unloaded under their own power. There were 2 outlandish ATS-712 tractors on the lighter. It was an artillery tractor (medium) weighing 12 tons and with a body load capacity of 3 tons. It had a very powerful power plant - a four-stroke V-shaped 12-cylinder diesel engine B-275 T, with a capacity of 275 hp. The chassis had rear sprockets, and like the S-100 tractors - with lower and upper rollers. We used them very actively in winter to transport cargo to field parties. In the summer, we welded sleds for them, installed a 10-ton tank on them and they very easily and quickly dragged it from the shore to the new airfield, transporting aviation gasoline. In winter, they sometimes also attached sleds to them if the field workers had a lot of cargo. They had a warm cabin for 6-7 people and, I believe, for the expedition conditions, this was a very useful vehicle, especially in winter, and sometimes in summer. The same lighter also brought prefabricated timber houses and a new drilling rig ZIF-650 with a diesel drive.

Unloading continued, and I, having loaded 2 pumps onto a helicopter, flew with them to Khobeya - there, due to the rapid melting of snow, water inflows into the pits increased sharply, and the excavation in a number of places simply stopped. We landed on a site in the area of ​​the second line - where we had marked it out in the winter. In the spring, I flew here for the first time and immediately discovered our major winter shortcoming - we had not built at least the simplest toilets of the "outhouse" type around the housing and places where people congregated. People went to several places in the forest, having made quite solid paths there in the winter. In the spring, when the snow lost its firmness, such hikes sometimes ended with the path not supporting the weight and the person falling through the entire depth of his legs, finding himself among numerous piles of excrement, and sometimes sitting on some of them, which was clearly visible in some places.

The pumps had an autonomous drive in the form of a gasoline 2-cylinder engine UD-2. We installed one of them on the surface near one of the pits, secured the suction hose, threw the snorkel into the pit, which contained about two meters of water.

We poured a bucket of water into the cylinders to reliably create a vacuum and started the engine - it started right away. The pistons each dropped down once, the water in the cylinders gurgled and went through the pump into the pit. We looked into the cylinders and saw that both rods were bent, and the pistons were unnaturally bent. We disassembled the upper part, took out the rods, fixed them with a sledgehammer, and put everything back in place. Again we poured a bucket of water and started the engine. Another blow and the same external picture of damage to the rods and pistons. Kamenev and I had already started to blame the mechanical workshop - the manufacturer, but then we decided to look and analyze more closely. When we took out the pistons, I began to examine them and look for the place of impact, after which they bend. I found a completely clear mark from the impact of metal on metal. Apart from the lower valve of the pump, there was nothing left, and when I looked into the cylinder again, I saw the lower valve of the pump standing vertically and leaning against the wall. I measured the piston stroke - the guess turned out to be correct. During the first cycle of water suction and the piston's upward stroke, the lower valve opens. During the piston's downward stroke, it should fall down onto its seat, but it remained standing vertically, leaning against the cylinder wall, and the piston hit it, bending the rod. We took out the lower valves, welded travel stops to them so that they always fell onto their seat, and the problem was solved forever. I think the drawings were not amended in a timely manner, and we were given an uncorrected set.

Soon the chief engineer, Arkady Ivanovich Kuleshov, a drilling engineer, arrived to the expedition. He came from the Urals, where he worked as the technical director of the Bulanash party, the Trans-Ural expedition, which was mainly engaged in the exploration of coal deposits in the Yegorshinsky basin. He had always been engaged only in core drilling, he did not know anything about mining exploration, and especially placer gold. He also had no idea or practice in blasting operations. In our expedition during this period, and even a year later, there was only one drilling team, led by senior drilling foreman Vasya Chertushkin. Above him stood the head of the drilling party, I.M. Sidoryak, then I, as a senior drilling engineer, then the chief engineer of the expedition. Above us stood the curator of the expedition from the geological department, driller Nikolay Nikolaevich Sizov. Four people in the expedition alone led one team, and the fifth was from the department. A truly true saying: "Too many cooks spoil the broth!" - fully corresponded to our "successes" in drilling.

Kuleshov A.I. was a good specialist, and as a person too, but it seemed to me that he somehow did not find his place in this situation, or, more simply, a niche for applying his knowledge and experience. I am well aware of the experience of organizing the work of drilling parties, already developed in the Ural department, where everything is thought out in advance, where any future work site can be reached by land transport at any time of the year, where regular courses are held to train drillers and drilling foremen. Faced with the working conditions in Saranpaul, he simply could not find acceptable solutions and was mainly engaged in economic affairs - construction, supplies, i.e. partially occupied the niche of the deputy head of the expedition.

For the newly received drilling rig, they also found a suitable well - right in the geologists' settlement, 100 meters from the newly built expedition facilities. The question arose of how to carry out the installation - in the summer or winter version, what height and shape to install the pile driver. The design depth of the well was 600 meters. The sedimentary rock thickness is not very strong. Even if the work was very "sloppy", it could be easily completed a month before the cold weather, so they decided to make a summer canopy. They considered it indecent to install an ordinary tripod at the exit of a 9-meter long candle, and decided to install a tower 4-legged derrick 18 meters high, so that the candle from the well would exit from 3 rods 13.5 meters long, which significantly accelerated the process of lowering and lifting operations, and ultimately again reduced the time for drilling the well.

Derrick

However, a small problem arose here - all our drillers had seen such pile drivers in operation, but no one had taken part in its construction. I had to first study the theory of assembling such rigs myself, and then supervise this work, since the process was very dangerous and people could be injured. I decided to assemble it in pairs, and then, after lifting these pairs one by one through the assembly boom, connect the pairs with crossbars in a standing position at the top. We selected 4 relatively even pine logs 18 meters long, the butts of the logs were spread in pairs to the required width and made stops for them from wooden planks; the tops were directed in opposite directions and raised on 2-meter-high sawhorses. Both pairs were sewn together with crossbars to the very top, and thus represented quite strong panels. In the gaps between the crossbars, more staples were nailed. Then 2 tractors and 2 ATS were driven up. Each vehicle was hooked to a panel with a cable and lifted one by one through the assembly booms to a vertical position, but with a slight tilt away from the tractors. The second transport units acted as anchors and kept the raised panels from falling. Thus, a tower pile driver stood on the ground in shape, but it was necessary to secure it in this state with side crossbars. Vasya Chertushkin climbed up one of the panels to the very top using the brackets and crossbars - there, even earlier, crossbars of the required length had been tied up to tie the panels together - the tractors, on my command, adjusted the required distance between the tops of the panels by tensioning the cables and Vasya nailed the upper crossbars into place. Then he was given several poles-strings, which he pushed through the brackets and fastened the panels on the lower tiers. The structure immediately acquired the required stability, the cables were removed and the usual work on further arrangement of the pile driver began - the installation of ladders, work platforms, installation of the crown block, etc.

There could not be any special problems with the installation of the drilling rig - summer installation under a canopy did not present any special difficulties. However, we paid attention to the fact that the drive diesel of the Altai plant SMD-7 was started from an electric starter. Of course, somewhere in warm places this is a blessing, but in the conditions of the North of Siberia its normal operation was impossible - here diesel engines of the D-54 type were needed, and necessarily with starting from starting engines. All artillery tractors also had a starter start, but in addition to it, in the winter period they also turned on a torch heater for preliminary heating of the diesel, which the SMD-7 engine did not have. True, at that time this difficult prospect of a winter launch was somewhere far away from us, and we did not think about it much - now it was summer and we began drilling a new well with songs

Seasonal geological survey parties began to actively gather in the settlement together with their simple belongings and workers hired for the season. They were located in all suitable and adapted premises for living. Those who did not have enough - put up tents in the expedition settlement. The assigned and newly organized geophysical parties worked all year round. On the eve of the field season, the heads of the parties and partly the expedition management concluded contracts with nearby farms for the rental of pack horses, which were used to move the property of the parties and detachments to new camp sites.

The transfer of personnel and property of the parties from the expedition base to the work areas was carried out, as a rule, by MI-4 helicopters - there was simply no other type of transport in the summer in the mountain taiga area, and there is none now.

The management personnel of these parties - the heads, senior geologists-geophysicists - were all young guys, mainly graduates of the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute of the 1955-57 class, as well as those who came from other universities - Mezentsev V.P., Kostyuk B.F., Neguritsa E.P., Sevastyanov G.I., Zolotaryov L.P., Chupin I., Shalnykh V., Sazonov G., Davy M.N., Kruglikov Y., Abakumov V.G., Rakhmachev E., Vysotsky K., Vernik I.I., Korkunov V., and others.

I have been in contact with all of them on various occasions, in different places, and even over several years. With some more, with others less.

The one I remember most was Mark Nikolaevich Davy, the head of the Parnuk geological survey party. In principle, his full name was Mar-Eng-Len, based on the initial letters of the classics' surnames. When he was born in 1934, it was a very fashionable fad to give such names. He graduated from the Sverdlovsk Mining Institute in 1957, was retained at the department, and had already passed all the candidate minimum exams with excellent marks, but feeling dissatisfied, he dropped everything and went to field work. In general, I have never met a person with such unconventional thinking and extensive knowledge. He was a smart man and a continuer of the family profession - his father was a member of the corps of mining engineers in Yekaterinburg before the revolution, and many other relatives were also involved in mining - it's a whole dynasty. After working for two seasons in the Subpolar Urals, he came up with a completely new stratigraphy scheme for these areas. He believed that the scheme drawn up by the geological luminaries of the early years should be turned 180 degrees. He told me this with such conviction that it was impossible not to believe, but the level of his listener's knowledge in the field of stratigraphy did not allow us to enter into any fruitful discussions. He had slightly irregular features in the lower part of his face, but they were completely unnoticeable when talking to him. But he had very beautiful hands, with long, thin fingers.

We had a common petty passion - playing cards for money - preference, English poker, ochko. The last time I played these games was when I was still studying at the institute, and a couple of times on the Kiya. There I was taught, but the game was pretend, without money. For two years of work after the institute, I had not only no time, but also no partners for the game. Here such an opportunity appeared - in the evenings, after work, almost all the engineering and technical youth of the expedition wanted to play and often played. Mark was among the first, if at that moment he was in Saranpaul. His wife Valya, a pretty woman, also sometimes played willingly and well, but not in men's companies, but in the family circle in the company of her husband and someone else, and often I was the third. They played for a long time. Sometimes, having drawn a "bullet" in preference, they sat down to play poker. If poker got boring, then in order to tickle their nerves more, they switched to "ochko". But sometimes I noticed that they began, most likely involuntarily, to play along with each other, and stopped in time. But no offense arose on this topic. And to finish the topic of card games.

I first started playing for money in Saranpaul, and was engaged in this business for about 25 years. The statistics are approximately as follows: in 60% of cases I won, in 20% - I ended up at zero, and only in every fifth game did I lose. The losses were small - up to 10 rubles. And only twice in all these years I lost relatively big - 25 and 35 rubles. It must be said that the element of luck in card games, in my opinion, plays an insignificant role. Still, the main thing is the ability to analyze the course of the game, study the character of the players, know their strengths and weaknesses in individual elements of the games. I believe that playing preference and poker, like nothing else, reveals a person's character even regardless of his desire. Secrecy and openness, greed and extravagance, cowardice and reckless risk, stinginess in moves and sweeping behavior, the ability to analyze and flow at the will of the waves, the presence or absence of acting talent - or in other words, the ability to put a good face on a bad game - all this is perfectly outlined within a few hours after the start of the game. And if you play with some people several times, then you can already imagine well what to expect from a person in certain card layouts, and in communication too. However, let's return to Davy M.N.

In 1964, they received a very good, well-appointed apartment in Tyumen in a new building in the Melnikaite Street area. In the spring of 1965, I came to their home on another business trip, they were writing a "bullet", and I stayed overnight with them. Mark said that they were quitting and leaving for Chita, since he considered his work in the Subpolar Urals region, searching for deposits, to be unpromising.

Note. 50 years have passed and Mark's conclusions have largely been justified - not a single deposit has been found (except for gold, but it was on top). But this does not mean that he is completely right. In my opinion, there are certainly deposits there, but for this it is necessary to carry out a very large volume of drilling work. Moreover, it is not a fact that these new deposits are at an economically accessible depth today. With an annual drilling plan in the expedition of 3,000 linear meters and one drilling rig, what could be discovered in such a gigantic territory? Absolutely nothing! Mark calculated correctly that his life would not be enough to discover anything here. Which is what happened. This region will revive only with the arrival of the railway here.

It was very difficult to get an apartment in Tyumen in those years, it was apparently even harder to quit. These were real Professionals. I don't know any more specialists who would give up their apartments in Sverdlovsk or Tyumen and go somewhere in Eastern Siberia, into the unknown, for real work. (In 2006-2007, I found some scant information about them on one of the Internet sites. This couple has settled in Siberia very well. Mark still works as a mineralogist in the Udokan geological exploration expedition, he is a PhD candidate. And his wife Valya is walking a cute little dog in the photo.) Recently, while reading the notes of hikers passing through our former work areas, I saw spots in a photo of a cliff along the Nyays River that looked like faint colors of copper oxides. I remember that geologists did not take pictures there. I decided to ask Mark Davy and went online. After a short search, I found material describing the tragedy that happened to him in 2008 - he drowned while rafting down the Kalar River - apparently he got into a "barrel" behind a large stone and could not swim out - the water was very cold, and his age - 74 - is not very suitable for such cases. A man of immense talent with a "sunny" character, a major specialist. He could have left a big mark anywhere - science, education, but he chose to work almost his entire life in this remote region - the Udokan copper ore deposit. What can you say? Unique objects attract unique people.

A memorial plaque at the site of Mark Davy's death

Kalar

In June, all field parties were sent to the work sites. A large volume of blasting operations was planned in the ditches and trenches of the Nyayskaya party. I prepared all the paperwork for permits for blasting operations. I agreed with the party chief about opening a VM supply warehouse with him - about its location, security, etc. I went to Berezovo to Smirnov, received permission and agreed with the police about going to the work site and opening a warehouse there. Soon, I flew to the site with a police officer and he gave permission to use the warehouse. Then, having loaded explosives into the helicopter, I flew to the site. It was on the slopes of Mount Turman-Nel (Black Nose). The helicopter landed on a bare mountain and then we walked down along a small stream into the forest zone. They had a base there, tents and a canopy for diners next to the cook's kitchen.

A real Vogul Laika

We went to the ditches. They were up to 100 meters long. The topsoil and the quickly disassemblable, bouldery part had already been mostly selected - we had to go deeper into the heavily cracked rocky formations. We did not have the means for classic drilling of boreholes, so we began to make so-called boreholes - this is when, using a crowbar and a hand, we made depressions up to half a meter deep and about 15 cm in diameter in weakened places. They were made along the entire length of the ditch. And only such boreholes could we load with our TNT and placer ammonite. The first time I loaded about 20 boreholes, lowered an electric detonator into each one without checking and connected the circuit in series, fortunately, the power of the blasting machine allowed it. I pressed the button, but there was no explosion. This was the first time in my practice. This means there was a break somewhere in the circuit, most likely in some electric detonator. I had to unload all the blasting caps and get the electric detonators out of there - not a safe job at all. But that was the price for neglecting one of the points of the rules for blasting operations - all electric detonators must be checked for bridge integrity before use and lots with the same resistance must be selected. I didn't know how to do it yet, but I looked again at the blasting machine and saw a milliammeter with divisions of 50 milliamps on it. I immediately remembered from my college course that the current resistance of an electric detonator is about 23 milliamps. Having rummaged around in the machine a little more, I realized how it can be used to both select and reject electric detonators. The first mistake was beneficial. I checked several dozen electric detonators and among them I found a defective one with a broken bridge. Then I selected a series with approximately the same resistance and put them into the blasting caps again. This time I made the charge connection diagram parallel and everything went well. I walked along the entire ditch and checked the places where the charges were laid to detect failures - charges that did not explode completely or partially for some reason - with such a connection scheme, they were possible. But everything turned out to be normal - about half a meter deep, the rock was well loosened and the miners began to remove the destroyed rock..

In another ditch, I decided to try a mixed blasting method using electric detonators and a detonating cord. Here, the ditch was cut from scratch. Every meter, they filled holes with crowbars from the surface along the entire length of the ditch, filled them three-quarters of the way with powdered ammonite, put a detonating cord in each and connected it to a common main line, and attached an electric detonator to one of the ends. Everything worked perfectly, but one of the boreholes did not explode and there was a failure. Since a detonating cord was laid in the borehole, opening the charge was a relatively safe undertaking. Apparently, the explosives were placed unevenly in the borehole, there were some constrictions and the charge did not explode. I added some explosives, placed a new detonator and blew it up without any problems. After the explosion, more than half of the soil was thrown out of the ditch outline, and the rest was easily removed by the miners with hand tools. The scheme for using blasting operations and blasting equipment at such sites became clear. It was not new to me and had already been successfully used in the Karpinsky party, I just transferred my experience to other conditions.

One morning I noticed a group of people who were loading a horse with loads to go to the work site. Among them I saw a black-haired, round-faced girl in brown trousers - I had already met her once in the corridor of the expedition office at the beginning of the summer, and I noticed her. This time they got ready and quickly left the base.

I discussed everything with the blaster and the party engineer responsible for blasting operations, and asked them to notify me immediately if any serious problems arose in these matters. I returned to the expedition by the next helicopter.

The next day I looked at the progress of the drilling rig installation in the village - things were moving along well. There were a lot of observers and controllers, many considered it their duty, if not to help with something, then just to gawk - after all, this was an unprecedentedly high structure for such a small village - many were seeing it for the first time.

At the next planning meeting with the expedition leader, Ilyashevich M.V. and I were tasked with flying to the settlement of Tolya, looking at everything on site and preparing documents for accepting a residential settlement of geologists and several units of equipment from the balance sheet of expedition №101 to the balance sheet of our expedition. As I wrote earlier, the Tolya geological exploration party of the Northern Expedition of the Ural Geological Administration was located in this settlement until 1957. It was engaged in the exploration of coal deposits. When the Ural geologists left in 1957, and the Tyumen geologists had not yet arrived, the entire settlement was taken over by expedition №101 from the settlement of Novo-Alekseyevka, near the city of Pervouralsk, which was engaged in the exploration and extraction of piezo-optical raw materials in the regions of the Middle and Southern Urals. There, on the ridge, in the area of ​​Mount Telpos-Iz, they mined piezoelectric quartz, but the reserves turned out to be small. It was about 60 km from Tolya, and there was no housing closer. In 1962, they curtailed the work and offered to give everything to Tyumen geologists. Our people agreed.

Without putting it off, we flew to Tolya by plane. The flight lasted about 40 minutes. There was a strong headwind and the plane began to shake quite a bit in the air. Before that, I had flown for many hours non-stop, but I always tolerated the pitching quite well. This time, by the end of the flight, I was close to the limit, and those who met me noted my green complexion. It turns out that Tolya had its own airfield with an 800-meter runway. The new owners added 200 meters to the strip when the requirements for the size of landing strips became stricter. We were met by representatives of the 101st expedition - Yuzhanin and Grankin, and the Vasilievs, a married couple - Nadezhda and Nikolay, already well past middle age, who lived here, were listed today as guards of the base and have not left anywhere since the time of the Ural geologists.

The village simply amazed me - how well everything was thought out and organized, planned and built in these difficult natural conditions of impassability and great isolation (more than 300 km) from the expedition base in the city of Ivdel, Sverdlovsk region. Here, in Tolya, it was necessary to bring big and small geological bosses from all over Siberia, and from Moscow too, and show it as an example of civilized development of completely wild and uninhabited off-road spaces, creating a normal life for geologists in those years. Very successful layout - the residential sector entered as if into the bend of the river. Tolya and was bordered by it on three sides. Industrial zones were at some distance. Many typical two-apartment residential buildings, a school, an office, a bathhouse, a store. In the industrial zones there was a mechanical workshop, a garage. To generate electricity, a traction engine was used, running on local coal.

Coal was mined right on the spot, for which 4 adits of small length were driven on the steep, opposite bank of the river. All the buildings were in very good condition from fresh wood and looked like a picture. The only drawback of the residential buildings was the tar paper roofs, but after going through several dozen houses, we found dripping traces of moisture on the ceilings in only a few. The houses were mostly clean and there were no signs of any kind of panic flight, which sometimes occurs during mass exoduses. The streets were also clean, without traces of dirt and in places overgrown with tall grass. The airfield runway was located just half a kilometer from the village - it began at the river cliff and went 800 meters deep into the forest.

The party was supplied with materials and equipment along winter roads from the city of Ivdel and in the summer by water transport from Tyumen along the tributary of the Severnaya Sosva-R.Volya for 160 km up to the pass base, and from there 40 km by land transport to the party base. Of course, these were very complex and expensive transport schemes, and in the future it could only pay off with the discovery of very large and necessary deposits for the country in these areas, and the possible future construction of a railway here to organize their exploitation

But we must give credit to the people - the organizers of the work, those who managed to create this base in such difficult conditions in 3-4 years. First of all, this is the head of the Northern Expedition Sulman R. and the head of the Tolinskaya geological exploration party.

Having examined the village and its surroundings, I well understood the melancholy of Polshchikov N.I., who had to leave this area in 1957 and move to the Karpinskaya party, which in those years was also subordinate to the Northern Expedition. Then I had the idea that was it really right to expel the Ural geologists from these places and transfer them to Tyumen? This is even if we leave aside the methodological management of a single geological region. And the second question that arose: "Wouldn't it have been better to land the newly formed expedition on the ready base in Tolya, and not build everything anew in Saranpaul?" These questions will never be answered exhaustively.

Representatives of the 101st expedition presented us with 2 S-100 tractors, a ZIF-55 compressor and a welding unit for transfer. The Vasilievs fed us all excellent borscht with kilogram pieces of meat in bowls. When I asked what kind of meat it was, they told me it was goat meat. I liked it - it was the first time I ate it, but later I realized it was elk meat. Having signed the acts of acceptance and transfer of material assets, we all flew to Saranpaul.

It is necessary to tell about the role of aviation in the development of these wild places. It is possible to state with full confidence that in terms of cargo turnover aviation firmly occupied the second place after water transport. Field work in the mountain taiga conditions of the foothill and mountain part of the ridge in such volumes was simply impossible without aviation. Airfields for AN-2 in the area of ​​expedition work were in 4 villages - Saranpaul, Nyaksimvol, Ust-Manya and Tolya. Seaplanes on floats were accepted only by Saranpaul, but pilots with the right to select sites could find here very many places for splashdown of the devices. The AN-2 aircraft, a propeller-driven biplane, with a lifting capacity of one ton, with a flight speed of about 180 km/h. The aircraft engine is the ASH-82 with a capacity of 1700 hp - two seven-cylinder stars folded onto one shaft, it worked on B-91 gasoline. An exceptionally reliable machine both in terms of engine and airframe. It has been operating in the country since 1946 to the present day and there are no such reliable modern replacements yet. I know of only two accidents with these aircraft in our region - in 1958, due to a sharp deterioration in the weather in the mountains, in the area of ​​the Pelingich section, an aircraft rented by expedition N105 crashed into a mountain in the Zapadnyye Saledy ridge and took on cargo in Saranpaul. The second incident occurred with our aircraft, which left Saranpaul for Tyumen, which I will describe later.

A large class of aircraft in terms of volume of use were helicopters. MI-4 with a lifting capacity of 800 kg. It had the same ASH-82 engine, but running on B-95 gasoline. Flight speed was about 170 km/h. MI-1 is a small machine for two passengers or 200 kg. cargo, had a single-row 7-cylinder star engine (half of the AS-82), and ran on B-91 gasoline.

I was not very familiar with the aircraft crews, but I had to work a lot and closely with the helicopter pilots - I was engaged in delivering cargo to different field parties and, in addition, they, as a rule, were all fans of preference - and here I could not stay on the sidelines.

The crew commanders were different people - it was important for us who could fly and land where, what cargo he was able to deliver there, so we worked with them for a long time and we knew most of them well who and what they were capable of.

In our mountains there were such sites where some crews did not land and returned back. Others safely delivered the cargo. There were, relatively speaking, non-separable cargo. For example, a diesel power station weighed 1220 kg. There was then the crew commander A. Ermakov, who agreed to deliver it in one piece to Khobeya. He did this by adding little fuel - the shoulder was very short. Others could not be persuaded to do this either.

That same year, for a time, we had a MI-4 crew working for us, the commander of which, E. Zilberfarb, was distinguished not only by his unusual surname, but also by his excellent driving. His wife, a very beautiful young Jewish woman, whom he took from the Kyiv Geological Prospecting College, always flew with him and lived in the places where he was based. He himself, about 30 years old, physically strong and densely built, but with a little, in my opinion, excessive plumpness, flew like God. There were no sites where he would refuse to land. He had his own special style. The most difficult stage is takeoff and landing. The experience of the crew was determined by these elements. If the plane came in for landing immediately without any circles and landed the machine smoothly, this was the highest class. Moreover, the skill of piloting was clearly visible only when in the cockpit of the MI-4. A couple of times I was invited there to confirm from above that this was the site they were flying to. I was convinced that this was an extremely important moment - a heavy machine begins to quickly descend onto a seemingly tiny site made of logs, the pilot changes the angle of the rotor blades with the control stick with his right hand, and changes the pitch of the rotor blades and the engine speed with his left hand, turning the "pitch-gas" handle. You can just physically feel the rapid fall of the machine down and the physical efforts of the pilot during this operation, when sweat often runs down his face, although there is excellent ventilation in the pilot's cabin. On the MI-1, such extra efforts are unnoticeable - the machine is light.

Of course, Zilberfarb did not go unnoticed, and in the fall he retrained for the giant helicopter MI-6. After that, he already worked for oil workers. Apparently he distinguished himself there too, and was appointed to represent our technology and the country in the summer of 1963 at the air show in Bourges near Paris, where he was supposed to fly on the MI-6 - by the way, this was the first foreign presentation of the machine. But a small aviation accident happened - somewhere in the spring in the North, taking off on an airplane, he touched the front landing gear on a snowdrift and broke it. This was enough to remove him from the flight to the air show, but he continued to fly in the North. Unfortunately, his flying biography, and his life, ended very early. In the late 60s, while celebrating the New Year with his company, he suddenly fell off his chair - no one could help him - a blood clot had blocked a vessel in the heart area.

The monthly sanitary norm of flight hours for helicopter pilots was 75. But given the high demand and shortage of machines in the summer, it was sometimes extended to 100 and in emergency cases - to 120. The overwhelming majority of crews fulfilled it, but there were very few who did not even reach half of their standard.

Wood grouse on spring roads

One of the brightest representatives of those who did not fly the norm was Misha N. - we will not mention his last name, a pilot of the MI-1 helicopter. He almost never flew to the mountains - the reasons were different and always. Either low clouds over the mountains, or the wind was stronger than normal, or something else. He flew mainly to flat areas. His total flight time per month rarely exceeded 10 hours. Other crews laughed at him good-naturedly, but did not condemn him, they said that because of chronic lack of money his wife left him. Once, having found myself in Berezovo, and having done all my business, I went to the airport to look for something to Saranpaul. Suddenly I saw Misha, who told me that he was here for maintenance work and in half an hour he was flying to Saranpaul, which turned out to be very convenient for me. Half an hour later I was already sitting behind him in the cockpit. He found out the weather forecast for the route, received permission to take off from the controller - and we were in the air. About 15 minutes into the flight, he started pointing somewhere into the distance. I asked him: "What's the matter?" "See," he said, "there are clouds ahead, you can't fly!" I told him that I could fly around them to the right or left. "No," he said, "you can't!" and turned the plane back to Berezovo. Luckily, our second MI-4 helicopter was there on some business. I found the commander and asked him when he was flying. He replied that in an hour. Then I told him that there were clouds along the route and that I had just returned with Misha. Then he laughed merrily and remarked to me something about having found someone to listen to and someone to fly with! Indeed, an hour later we took off and without any tricks arrived in Saranpaul. These clouds turned out to be very rare and the land never disappeared from sight. Of course, the MI-4 had an autonomous radio drive, while the MI-1 did not. Perhaps this is the reason for the pilots' cautious behavior. But other pilots of these machines always flew their norm. N. Babintsev and A. Balandin were especially good. The first one switched to the MI-4 a year later, and even later mastered the MI-6. When we had already left there, I saw his photo on the MI-10K helicopter crane, which transported heavy loads on an external sling and was engaged in the installation of television towers. We often flew to work sites with the second one. In addition, I took him spinning fishing on my motorboat.

Once, an MI-6, chartered by expedition N118, flew to Saranpaul from the western slope of the Urals. He landed not far from the houses, at the old airfield, brought 2 mobile compressors and narrow-gauge rails for adits. I went to look at it out of interest. Of course, the machine impressed not only with its size, but also with the specific, soft sound of its two jet engines. With its enormous weight, takeoff and landing were much softer than machines with piston engines. It was simply a beautiful sight

By the end of the 60s, helicopters with piston engines MI-1 and MI-4 were already working out their service life, and the industry began to produce MI-2 and MI-8 machines with jet engines. If the first could replace the MI-4 with some stretch, then there was practically no replacement for the two-seater MI-1. And it was widely used in geology as a liaison and for field geophysical work. The charter of MI-2 helicopters for these purposes was 3 times more expensive, which created and still creates considerable difficulties for geologists and geophysicists.

Aircraft accidents and disasters with helicopters occurred quite often in those years. The main reasons were loss of orientation (especially in the mountainous part) due to a sharp change in the weather, breakage of the main blade, separation of the tail rotor, engine failure in flight, missed landing on a site in the forest, landing on soft ground and the machine tilting, objects from the ground getting under the rotor during takeoff, and many other minor incidents, including a person being hit in the forehead by the tail rotor when he came close to the working MI-1 from behind (in this case the rotor broke, but the forehead remained intact). Flying in a machine in which the passengers feel a malfunction is an unpleasant experience.

Once, A. Balandin and I flew in an MI-1 to the Limestone Quarry site in the upper reaches of the Yatriya River. We landed on the platform, and I went to the drillers about my business. About 3 hours later, I returned. I saw that the pilot had removed the magneto and was trying to figure something out. He explained to me that one magneto had failed, but the other was working fine. He did not want to stay there and wait for a working magneto to be brought, and we flew back. During the flight, the machine unusually often fell down, then gained altitude again. He carefully flew around all the lakes and large swamps from one side or the other. When we flew to Saranpaul, he told me that the spark from one magneto is not enough for complete combustion of the fuel in the cylinders, so the engine sometimes loses power and at that moment the machine seems to fall down. That's why he flew around the lakes in case of engine failure and forced landing.

We had no flight incidents or accidents with helicopters in our expedition. But our neighbors had them with all types, but mostly with MI-4.

Our aviators worked under contracts and flew to work not only from Sverdlovsk or Tyumen, but also from other nearby and distant regions of Siberia. According to the plan, the expedition had about 700 flight hours per year on MI-4 and about 1200 hours on MI-1.

In general, it should be noted that the work of aviators in such sparsely populated and harsh conditions of the North was not easy. True, one of their main demands when concluding contracts for air services was the creation of more or less normal living conditions for the crews - the allocation of separate housing only for them, the organization of separate meals for them, and the supply of food. It was especially difficult for the aircraft technicians in winter - they got up very early and started their engines - stoves. From each stove to the engines and gearboxes of the helicopters, hoses of a special material with a diameter of about half a meter were stretched, and hot air was supplied to the units through them. Flights took place at temperatures up to -40 degrees. If below - the flights were stopped. But at such temperatures, it took several hours to warm up the units to the required condition. In general, it should be noted that the organization of search and survey, search and exploration, geophysical work in the summer, even in such small volumes as in our expedition and on its territory, is completely impossible without aviation.

However, life and work went on. In our "oldest" party - Khobeinskaya, which was six months old, problems also began to arise. Chepkasov V.A., although he began his career as a geologist for gold at the Kolyma sites in "Dalstroy", did not know some of the features of such work in thawed rocks, and Kamenev V.M. was a complete newbie. Therefore, in the summer, an idea arose to go to a good organization and gain experience on the spot. In those years, it can be absolutely definitely said that the best geological organization for the exploration of placer gold in taliks was the Sosvinskaya party, Severouralsk expedition. Maybe there was something good in the Far East, but we did not know it, and it was far away. Chepkasov V.A. suggested that Kamenev and I go and see everything in Severouralsk, to the Sosvinskaya GRP. Along the way, we started talking about personnel vacancies in the expedition apparatus - we were missing a chief mechanic and a head of the mechanical workshops. I advised the head of the expedition to invite a well-known senior mechanic of the Karpinsky party, Egorov L.G., as a chief mechanic, and N.I. Polshchikov from the same party as the head of the mechanical workshops. Egorov was a technician-mechanic for agricultural machinery by education, but he had already spent most of his time in geological exploration. He was an exceptionally talented person in the field of technology. Not only did he know drilling and transport equipment well, he could also apply some non-standard technical solutions in its repair, and was a very good innovator in a variety of areas. He was a highly qualified specialist, and had clearly overstayed his time as a mechanic in the party. In addition, he was an avid hunter and with the onset of the winter season, he regularly shot animals of various sizes, including elk, under license. Together with the party's mechanic N.P. Korionov, a native of the hunting village of Baronskoye in the upper reaches of the Vagran River, they went into the taiga for these hunts. He certainly knew about the abundance of game in our area from the stories of N.I. Polshchikov. V.A. Chepkasov agreed to negotiate with them regarding their transfer to us.

Kamenev and I took a passing flight to Serov, from there we arrived by train to Severouralsk. The next day we were at the expedition office. The head of the expedition V.A. Rivkina met with us, and then we had a long talk with the chief engineer A.Ya. Atayev. It would seem that we came for experience, but he did not miss the opportunity to ask us about the details of our existence, work, geological results - he was not just an inquisitive person, but maybe for these reasons he knew a lot and had a huge experience in organizing work both in his expedition and others. He told us a lot of things to pay special attention to in the Sosvinskaya party, immediately called there and asked us to accept and show us everything we wanted. An hour later they called from there and said that they were expecting us the next day.

The next morning we were already in the village of Pokrovsk-Uralsky, 7 km from the city in the office of the Sosvinskaya GRP. We were received by the head of the party, Pavel Arkhipovich Krupnov, a gray-haired man of more than middle age, a little plump. This man worked all his life in the Urals, in the exploration of placer deposits of gold and platinum. He had colossal experience in this work. We talked for a long time on various topics. Then he called the technical director of the party Lukashenka P.P., we got acquainted, and they advised us to go to their main site today - the village of Tulaika, in the upper reaches of the river Vagran. We agreed.

It turned out that there is no normal road there in the summer - only tractors with sleds and ATL trucks can get there. And we had to ride horses for about 65 km. We had no experience in horse riding, and had to learn on the go. Lukashyonok P.P. went with us.

Only in movies and pictures do they show riders sitting beautifully and prancing on horseback. For beginners, this way of riding is a serious test. After only ten kilometers, my backside and perineum began to hurt. This pain intensified when riding on a hard road and at a trot. It was easier if I let the horse gallop, but the horse could only endure such a gait for a few minutes and then switched to a steady walk again. In the middle of the journey, there came a critical moment when it seemed that everything was over, I could no longer endure this torture. But after a short rest on the ground, we moved on.

At first we drove along a relatively hard dirt road towards the town of Bruskovaya, then turned left and went along a summer road impassable for cars in the forest. In the second half of the way, it came out almost to the bank of the Vagran and went up. After some time, we drove into the village of Baronskoye - a place of exceptional beauty. On the elevated part of the bank there were several old huts surrounded by several huge cedars. Down to the river there were flooded meadows with a variety of grasses and a large number of flowers. Separate parts were fenced with a fence and used as pastures for cows and haymaking. The five-walled huts were black with age and built of thick solid trees. They were probably more than a hundred years old, and maybe much more. Two or three families lived there at that time. We stopped, bought a liter jar of cold milk from the hosts, from the cellar, to describe the taste and smell of which no superlatives are enough, rested, and went on. Where the riverbed was visible from the shore, there was already movement of turbidity in the water. As Lukashenok explained, these were already traces of the work of the hydraulic cradle during the bulk washing of sand at the work site. Only late in the evening did we arrive at the site. Having dismounted our horses, Kamenev and I noticed that we both had our legs "wheeled" and were limping. We gave the horses to the groom, and went into the house ourselves. There was nothing to do until the morning - we simply could not move.

Mt Kolokolnya

In the morning we started to get acquainted with the site. In the river valley, right in the center of the exploration site, a base village of normal wooden houses was built, where there were dormitories for workers, engineering and technical workers, a small office, a boiler room, and a bathhouse. The work lasted 22 days, and then everyone went on a common weekend for 8-9 days to their families. And this work schedule was maintained all year round. The site was well equipped with equipment - several light tractors, power plants. I'm not even talking about the various pumps. They tried to organize the work of the tunneling teams so that at least two teams of tunnelers worked on the exploration line - then they considered it profitable to provide them with Letestyu pumps with an electric drive, and give them a separate power station. They washed the sand completely on hydraulic cradles of their own design, placing them in places of the greatest accumulation of material for washing. There were, of course, single remote pits. There they installed pumps with individual gasoline drives. Here they saw for the first time the "Letestyu" sucker-rod pump for pumping water out of shafts more than 8 meters deep. It was a single cylinder with a piston, lowered on a set of water-lifting pipes to the required depth in the corner of the shaft and driven by a crank mechanism by a rod on the surface.

All the miners were highly qualified specialists in their field, and could carry out shaft boring in almost any conditions. The overwhelming majority of shafts reached the raft - there were literally only a few that were not finished. And this despite the fact that the conditions for some shaft boring were extremely difficult. The main problems arose in shafts located close to river beds and streams. There was always an increased water inflow here and quicksand horizons were encountered. If the water inflow was dealt with by increasing the number of pumps on the surface, then the boring of quicksand also required specific professional skills. In such cases, the so-called "fallow" fastening was used - leading driving of the fallows. Fallows are wooden plates about a meter long, pointed at one end. In a fully secured shaft, a wooden frame was placed at the face in front of the quicksand and fallows were driven down along its perimeter in small increments - as far as they could. The sand was removed from the inside. And so on for the entire length of the fallows, which did not allow the quicksand to fill the shaft. If the thickness of the quicksand for one row of fallows was not covered, a new frame was installed and a new row was driven. True, each row of fallows ate up part of the live cross-section of the shaft. The largest number of rows that they managed to set was 3. But this is such a professionally complex job that we could not teach even one miner to set one row of fallows at Khobeya for several years. The miners here were collected from almost all the placer gold and platinum deposits of the Urals. The work is physically hard, sometimes dangerous, requires high qualifications and no educational institutions taught it, but you could only learn next to a skilled worker.

Due to the fact that in recent years the volume of geological exploration work has decreased 10 times, many expeditions have closed, including the Severouralsk one, I think that in a few years in the Urals it will no longer be possible to find a single miner capable of digging pits in the thawed soils of placer deposits, and maybe this profession will disappear altogether in the country and we will have to start all over again, like under Demidov.

We were very impressed by the work of the hydraulic cradle. With relatively small dimensions and labor costs - very high productivity - up to 6 cubic meters of sand were washed per shift. The most difficult work was partially mechanized - sand was loaded into the bunker by a Pioneer crane. The party had an exceptionally smart mechanic - Toporkov V.P. - a good innovator. He had worked in parties of this kind all his life and was well aware of the weak points of the equipment used, made spare parts in advance and always had a stock of them.

In general, it should be noted that the Sosvinka party was a well-organized enterprise, self-sufficient in terms of work methods and the choice of equipment used and the technology for sinking shafts. The role of the expedition was very great only in some issues, namely: supply of equipment and consumables, complete manufacture of pumps in the Central mechanical workshop, winter centralized delivery of goods to distant areas. Over the many years of its work, the party has conducted reconnaissance of many industrial development sites in the valleys of the rivers Vagran, Tulaika, Uls, Sosva with its tributaries, Vels, and Turya. In general, there was something for everyone to learn here.

We spent 4-5 days at the site. We examined almost all the objects, made the necessary notes, and began to get ready for the return journey. On the second day, the fatigue in our legs from the ride passed, and on the fourth day it was already barely audible. We returned again on horseback on the same horses. The return journey seemed shorter and it was already easier to ride - apparently, you need to get used to everything. By evening, we were at the party's base. We talked again with the management, took some special documentation forms prepared in advance at our request, drawings, and left for Severouralsk.

The next day we were on an expedition, where A. Ya. Atayev again talked with us for a long time. Leaving Kamenev in Severouralsk, the next day I went to Veselovka to the Karpinskaya GRP base, found Egorov L.G. and Polshchikov N.I. there, and gave them, on behalf of the expedition leader, verbal invitations to work in Saranpaul. Both accepted this invitation with enthusiasm. We started talking about details. They asked me about Saranpaul, about the expedition, about wages, working conditions, about housing. I satisfied their curiosity as best I could and we agreed that our expedition would send them an official invitation to work.

Having returned to Saranpaul, we reported the results of the trip to Chepkasov V.A. What conclusions did we make? In order to achieve serious results in such a labor-intensive business as searching for placer gold, it was necessary to significantly increase the provision of the Khobein party with equipment - pumps, transport, electrical equipment. The party itself needed to organize training for workers in advanced and modern methods of work at that time. Maybe 2-3 miners should have been sent for training to the Sosvinskaya GRP. However, in my opinion, the geological department at that time was not ready to increase the material and technical supply of gold mining, and the expedition did not have such opportunities at all. Therefore, it took the Khobeinskaya party about 7 years to transfer the 583 kg gold deposit on the Palnik-Shor stream to industry.

In these northern regions, with such an abundance of rivers and lakes, naturally, the question arose by itself - how are things with fish and fishing here? The answer was very simple - excellent! As soon as the ice drift passed and the spring waters rose, the chub began to move from the bottom to the top. With a fishing rod in any backwater, you could catch a bucket or more of it very quickly. Its main difference from its relatives in the Vagran and Sosva rivers was its extraordinary fat content. In my opinion, the fatter the fish, the tastier it is. This salted and dried chub glowed through and through when peeled. Many amateurs prepared it for future use, for the winter. The local state farm caught it with seines in the backwaters very much to feed the minks on the fur farm.

At the beginning of July, the first schools of syrok came up the Lyapin - this is a small fish (up to 2 kg) of the whitefish species - also fatty and tasty when dried. It also looked good fresh - in fish soup, or in a frying pan. Everyone who could and had gear caught syrok, and prepared it for the winter for future use. The first wave of syrok in July was the fattest, but it rolled down after a week. The main one came at the very beginning of August. It went up the Lyapin tributary - the Manya River, 60 km. Sosvinskaya herring went with it. One night I was going up the Manya River at that time on a floating amphibious transporter and pointed a spotlight straight into the water - it was an indescribable sight. The riverbed was just boiling with cheese and herring - schools of fish were constantly swarming in the spotlight beam - it was richer than in an aquarium!

At that time they caught it with drift nets and seines on the sands in hundreds of kilograms - for themselves and for sale. Then they put it in brine for a week, and then hung it in pantries on hangers. After drying, they put it in boxes. At that time, in any house from local residents it could be bought for 15-20 kopecks a piece, depending on the size. In principle, the state in those years prohibited catching these types of fish at all, there was a fishery inspectorate to control these processes. All hope was that the people working in the fishery inspectorate understood well that living on fish and not eating it for the small population of those places was pure absurdity. There were cases when someone was caught and fined. But in the end, everyone who wanted to had fish by winter, and the fishery inspectorate showed its work to higher authorities, reporting small fines.

Sosvinskaya herring is a completely special one, found only in the Severnaya Sosva river and its tributary Lyapin. A small fish up to 12 cm long, from the salmon species, very fatty in the lower and middle reaches of the S. Sosva, and already significantly "drier" in the upper reaches of the rivers. As old-timers said, it came to us already "swallowing sand". It was caught by brigades of the state inspector and delivered to the Berezovsky fish factory. There it was salted with more than 25 types of spices, packed into wooden 10-liter barrels and sent straight to Moscow - in five years of staying there I was not able to even try a single fish from the special salting. Local residents salted it themselves using 2-3 spices. The spread of its taste was significant and depended on many factors, including the age of salting. I still think that a well-prepared cheese was better than this home-salted herring.

Upper reaches of the Khobeyu

Khobeyu River

The object of mass fishing was also the shchokur (peled). This is a large, up to 3 kg, whitefish, moderately fatty. It was found mainly in large oxbow lakes. It was caught with set nets and in large quantities in late autumn. It was stored right on the spot in specially dug pits, and then taken along winter roads on reindeer sleds to Saranpaul. It was sold at a price of 50 kopecks per fish. In winter, it was eaten as stroganina. You bring the fish from the pantry home, after half an hour you peel off its thawed skin, then again for half an hour in the cold, then shave it lengthwise with a sharp large knife. Or, if it is summer, you salt the fish on all sides, wrap it in damp burlap and put it in a cool place for a day. Then you cut it up and eat it lightly salted - everything is very tasty.

In the autumn, the famous Siberian whitefish, nelma, flowed along the Northern Sosva, but we did not catch it. In the lower reaches of Lyapin, in the area of ​​the village of Lombovozh, there were sterlet and sturgeon, but we did not catch them either. Although, as it became known later, a few years later this fish came to Saranpaul.

Of the other fish species of commercial importance, there were pike and perch. They were found in countless quantities, but they were caught not for their own food, but for feeding various animals - minks and foxes on a fur farm and domestic dogs. Sometimes ide and burbot were caught for themselves. A special article is taimen. A large, beautiful salmon predator was a desired object of amateur fishing with a spinning rod, trolling, and "mouse". The average weight was 5-8 kg. Some specimens caught by trolling reached 20-30 kg. Personally, my friends and I never caught such giants - they were the prey of local residents. And small specimens, frankly speaking, were not caught as often as we would have liked. And in general, taimen could only be caught by spinning in the upper and middle reaches of the rivers - tributaries of Lyapin - Yatriya, Manya, Khulga. There was taimen in Lyapin, but it was caught only by local residents, mainly with a mouse and a trolling rod. One of the specimens caught at that time weighed 37 kg. There were many graylings in the upper reaches of mountain rivers and their tributaries, but no one caught them on an industrial scale. And the geologists who worked there in the summer caught it with a "boat" and a fly.

In the fall of 1962, when the field season ended, in the area of ​​the Nyayskaya party's work, some weak ore occurrence with radioactive "exposure" was discovered along the contact of the Man-Khambo granite massif with shale rocks. Based on the results of the examination, it was decided to open a year-round site with mining operations at this location. If something more significant were discovered there, the site would be transformed into a year-round party. Chepkasov V.A. suggested that I go there as acting head of the site. I felt his faith that something could be there, and in addition to this, he suggested that I include the settlement of Tolya with everything that was there in my sphere of activity. And I immediately agreed. It was clear that if something serious was discovered in the mountains, Tolya would automatically become a base village for further work in this remote area.

A few days later I flew to Tolya. The Vasilyev family lived there permanently, and they were registered with us as the village guards. They lived in a large cottage and took me into one of their rooms. They were elderly people, quite calm, but apparently with a difficult fate. Before the war, Nadezhda worked as a chef at a famous restaurant in Kharkov, did not have time to evacuate, and lived and worked under the Germans during the occupation. After the return of Soviet power, she came under the inspection roller of the special services, and eventually ended up in the North, where she found her Nikolay. He was a very quiet man, short in stature. They had no children. They had lived in Tolya for a long time. About 5 years later they adopted a boy, and in 1970 the administration allocated them an apartment in Tyumen. In August of the same year, the three of us from Severouralsk flew to Ust-Manya on vacation, took a boat and went first down the S. Sosva, then up the Volya, and having climbed 160 km. in the area of ​​the pass base, we met a boat that was going up to Tolya with Vasilyeva. The meeting was very unexpected and warm. She told everything, that they were given an apartment in Tyumen, and she was going to Tolya to pack her things for the plane, which was supposed to arrive for her in a few days.

Ust-Manya. On the right is Neguritsa E.

Nyaksymbol village. Martin Anyamov (far left), Vinogradov (far right)

Visiting Martin - Vinogradov, Rodchenko, Anyamov and a Bear Laika

They had lived alone in Tolya all these years and provided intermediate radio communication between some teams of geologists and drillers. Now she had to dismantle the radio and hide it in a designated place. I asked her not to do this and leave it for us to communicate with the geologists in Ust-Manye. This, of course, was a violation of all and any instructions, but she met me halfway. We went by boat to the mouth of the Tolya River, lived there for two weeks and went up the Tolya River to the settlement. From there I contacted the geologists in Ust-Manye, and they took us from the settlement with the fish in a passing helicopter. However, let's go back to 1962.

One day the Vasilyevs told me that an old lathe had been abandoned at one of the Ural geologists' bases - it was in great shortage at the time. I contacted the expedition, and they sent me a tractor driver for the trip there. The tractor driver turned out to be Kolya Ognev - a stocky, red-haired guy, an inveterate gambler, whom I knew in Saranpaul. He was almost a local from the cooperative. At one time, he headed a section in the village of Khurumpaul for burning quicklime from limestone, and brought its cost to double the price of granulated sugar. In fairness, it should be noted that this was not only his "merit" - in winter, sometimes the stone had to be transported on reindeer sleds for 150-160 km.

In the evenings, he sat down to play cards with me - there was absolutely nothing to do there in the evening. By the light of a kerosene lamp, we played preference, poker, blackjack. He always tried to win, since he knew for sure that I would always give up the loss. However, in the end he lost me a very large sum, and for several years afterwards promised to pay it back, but never did. But that's just by the way. I would like to add another interesting fact from his biography. It turned out that Kolya was one of the last people to see off a group of ski hikers from the Ural Polytechnic Institute led by Igor Dyatlov, who died tragically in February 1959 at the foot of Mount Otorten in the Northern Urals. There is a good quality photograph of the entire group of hikers against the backdrop of a loggers' residential barracks in the taiga, where all the loggers seeing them off are standing on the barracks' stairs, and among them is Kolya Ognev with a big red beard - I recognized him right away, although he didn't have one in Saranpaul. We lived in Tolya for a long time, there were many different conversations, but I don't remember him telling me anything about this last meeting with the hikers.

Ilya Anyamov

Martin Anyamov

A couple of days later he prepared one of the S-100 tractors and we went with it to the machine tool. It was the end of October, there were still puddles on the road and it was relatively warm. Since tractors had not been on the road for several years, it had dried out, overgrown in some places and the tractor was going well. Somewhere after 7 km of road, and half a kilometer before the destination, we had to cross a small stream. But about 50 meters before the water, one of the tracks skidded on a turn, tore off a strong layer of turf and the tractor immediately fell to the right side. After that, the left track began to sink, and the machine sat firmly on the rear axle and engine crankcase. The place was boggy and swampy. Apparently, the tractors went another way, which we did not see. If Kolya were an experienced tractor driver, he would have tied logs across the tracks from behind and the tractor could have been pulled back immediately - either with the main engine, or the starting engine, or by turning the starting handle manually. But it started to twitch, and the tractor finally sat down. He said that we would bring a second one and pull out the first one. I had no idea then how difficult such operations to free equipment from swampy places are.

The next day we prepared another tractor, took a tow rope and drove out to the first one. The first snow fell and a light frost hit -10. We drove up and hooked the stuck machine with a rope, having started its engine before that. Kolya got behind the tow rope, and I got behind the levers of the first one. Both of us had to drive out in reverse - there was no access from the front. I put my car into reverse, and Kolya simultaneously pulled the tow rope - the tracks of my tractor were spinning freely in the mud, and the effort of the second tractor was not enough to pull my car to solid ground. After a short time, the tracks of Kolya's tractor also started to skid, and its front end fell into the mud. We unhooked the tow rope and tried to back out, but it was no use - the tracks were also spinning freely, and the tractor was sinking. This time we were smart enough not to spin the tracks any more and to leave the second tractor almost at the top with its front end slightly submerged. It was already getting dark and we had to move back to the village on foot. Before that, we looked at the lathe, which we did not quite get to. It was a very ancient construction from the early 1930s, nicknamed "Shaggy". I was dressed quite warmly - a fur leather suit and dog boots. The return journey on foot for 7 km in such clothes - and by the end of the journey the sky seemed to me "as big as a sheepskin" - I was so tired and could barely move my legs. However, this was not the main thing. We had to solve the problem of tractors ourselves, because there was nowhere to wait for help - there was taiga all around, and the bear was the boss. There was no other transport in Tolya, and it could not come before winter. And then at the end of October a thaw suddenly hit and it started to rain. This weather lasted for about 10 days and somewhere on November 9, severe frosts hit right away, and everything was seized by an icy shell. It's good that about three days later about 10 cm of snow fell and it warmed up a little.

And then a new problem appeared. In the next communication session with the site, geologist Kim Vysotsky reported that a wild horse with huge, overgrown hooves had come to the mine workings. It was a horse lost during the summer field season. In the summer and early autumn it had been feeding on the grass, and when snow fell it came to people. Vysotsky reported that there was no food for it at all on the site and asked me if it was possible to feed it rice? And I immediately repeated the same question to the expedition. A day later, V.A. Chepkasov replied that if my salary allowed it, then the horse could be fed rice. However, measures were taken, and I was radioed to personally ensure the airdrop of pressed bales of hay from an airplane that would bring it to Tolya. We quickly agreed with Vysotsky on the necessary identification marks on the ground.

In addition, for safety reasons, people had to be warned about the ban on entering the drop zone. The next day, an AN-2 landed with hay, and I went on board. And before that, I put my felt boots in the oven to dry, and I put on my mukluks. I showed the drop point on the map - a half-million to the crew commander. He also invited me to the cabin to the suspended seat of the flight engineer for guarantee, and I had to visually confirm that we had landed in that place. After that, I had to go down to the cargo cabin, the flight engineer had to tie me up with a rope from behind, open and secure the door, and then, at the sound of the siren, I had to push the bales of hay into the constantly open door. Generally, such work should be done by crew members, but in this case, for some reason, they made me do it, not without reason believing that such "bombing" could have unpredictable consequences. Moreover, such a "nuisance" with a human victim happened a year ago, and not far from this place, which I will tell about later.

The distance here was small - about 50 km. and in 20 minutes we reached the landmarks and the platform - smoke fires were lit at the beginning and end. I confirmed the target to the commander and went down to the cargo cabin. While the plane was making idle circles, the flight mechanic tied a strong rope around my waist, and secured the other end to metal brackets on the opposite side, and opened the door. He himself had tied himself up before this. A powerful stream of frosty air gushed from the open door, and the exposed face instantly began to freeze. The pilots lowered the machine, laid on a "combat" course, and then the siren sounded. I managed to push 2 bales, when the siren sounded again - no more throwing, and the plane went on a turn. At this time I dragged new bales to the door and hid my face from the wind. A moment later the siren sounded again - I had already managed to drop 3 bales. On the third turn I dropped the rest - it was clearly visible that they were landing in a strictly designated place. The door was immediately closed, and the flight engineer began to wipe my cheeks - they had managed to get caught after all, and they had turned white. We quickly returned back to Tolya. And I ran to warm up in the house. There was some kind of smell of burnt wool. At first I could not understand what was going on. Then Vasiliev came in and confessed that while I was flying, he lit the stove without looking into the oven. As a result, my felt boots burned and became completely unusable, which, in general, greatly reduced my maneuverability in the mountains, on the site.

Since we had no transport in Tolya or on the site, we decided to hire three reindeer teams in the fall, for which our representative flew to the village of Nyaksimvol and signed an agreement with the local industrial farm, which allocated three reindeer teams to us under the control of father and son Anyamov for our transport services. As soon as the swamps stopped, in November, they arrived in Tolya under their own power for a distance of 160 km. They were a family - father and son Ilya and Martin Anyamov. They drove three teams of reindeer. Ilya was very old - he was 80 years old, tall, which is not at all typical for the Mansi people, but he still moved very quickly. He did not understand Russian at all, and such a long life was not at all typical for this people. By the way, when we flew to these parts on vacation in 1970, Ilya was still alive and felt pretty good. Martin was 35 years old, quite a stocky build. There were three brothers in all - all professional hunters. Their characteristic feature, like all the Mansi people, was exceptional honesty and trust, which sometimes led them into trouble. Part of the way of life of this people and some details from the life of the Anyamov family are well described and illustrated with many photographs in the book of the Perm cameraman Mikhail Zaplatil in the book "In the Forests of Northern Sosva". By the way, they knew him well.

We met them very warmly after 7 years. We had a long road ahead of us for 400 km. from Nyaksimvol to completely remote and deserted places. Martin gave us one of his dogs with us. During our further travel and overnight stays in Mansi villages, we immediately said that this was Martin's dog and he lent it to us for a while. Everyone believed him. She really did warn us at the mouth of the Tolya River about the approach of bears, although she was afraid to bark at them, because she only went for small game. He also had a bear-catching dog, but he did not give it to us. It was a large husky with a tongue cut in two lengthwise. Last winter, in the area of ​​his winter hut Nervatpaul, he encountered a bear - a connecting rod. He had a small-caliber rifle with him - he fired, but the cartridge turned out to be defective - the bullet only went under the skin. The bear roared and rushed at Martin. At that moment, the dog rushed at him, he caught her with a claw and split her tongue in half. The dog, wounded, grabbed him from behind by the gachi, Martin managed to reload the rifle and with the next shot killed the animal on the spot. In fact, the dog saved his life.

After finishing fishing in Tolya, I asked the commander of the helicopter that came for us to make a short stop in Nyaksimvol so that we could release the dog. When the helicopter landed, I saw Martin in the crowd of people meeting him - the dog jumped out of the open door and threw itself right at his chest.

Let's go back to 1962. The way here from Nyaksimvol was not easy for them - polar wolves followed them. They had to grease the reindeer's legs with kerosene at the overnight stop to scare off the predators. We put them up in one of the free houses, and the next day Martin and I - each in one team - went to the tractors. It was much better to ride on a sled than to walk there. Although it was the first time in my life on a sled, the road there passed without incident, since it went, mostly, uphill.

We drove up to the tractors - everything was completely frozen. The first one was submerged to half the height of the tracks, but the position of the second one seemed much better. Digging into the frozen ground with crowbars was an empty and useless occupation. It occurred to me that the fastest and least labor-intensive way would be to blast the frozen ground around the tracks with small-bore explosive charges. With this decision I went back. Of course, Martin showed me the basic techniques for controlling the sled, but I did not pay enough attention to some points. This concerned the descent from the hills, when the sled must be braked and not allowed to run away. Real drivers brake with the toe of their foot, shod in specially made shoes without felt soles. But I was wearing high fur boots lined with thick felt. I could not brake with my foot - otherwise my sole would have been torn off in the first meters. And I tried to adapt for this purpose a long pole - a khorey, which is used to control reindeer on the move. On gentle hills it worked well. But then a rather steep one approached, and I tried to brake with the khorey, but something did not work, and the sled rushed down. Since the traces connecting the sleds to the reindeer are soft, the sleds quickly caught up with the running reindeer and hit them on the legs from behind. The reindeer, in order not to receive another blow from the sled, begin to run even faster. The sleds also go faster and again catch up with the reindeer and hit them more painfully, etc. In the end, the reindeer developed such a speed that at the next sharp turn I was simply thrown out onto the side of the road like a ball. The team raced far down and went out of my sight. On foot, I went far down, right under the mountain. There I saw Martin, who had gone down before me - my team was standing next to him. He understood what had happened, and we had a good laugh. For braking purposes, I had to cut down a short, about one and a half meter, strong pole, and slide down any hills without any problems.

I flew to Turman with the nearest helicopter and brought all the necessary explosives to Tolya. The next day, Ognev and I went to the tractors. We heated up several crowbars on a fire and made a series of holes in the ground under the tracks. I blew up small charges of up to 100 grams in turn. When the blasted rock was cleared away with a shovel, the tracks of the second tractor were practically on the surface. After that, Kolya started the engine and with some difficulty drove back onto a flat road. After that, we decided to repeat the success on the first tractor. I also blew up several boreholes around, cleared them, but the tracks were still immersed in frozen silt. We decided to give the soil some more time to freeze and went home to Tolya on the tractor.

A few days later we came to the tractor again - everything was frozen again, and I repeated the operation of chipping the permafrost with small explosions. This was repeated several times and finally the tracks were completely cleared from the outside. But suddenly we noticed that as it was being cleared from the outside, the tractor sank deeper into the swamp, and now it was already submerged to the full height of the tracks and only the cabin was above the surface. And considering the blasted rock thrown out on the sides, then half the cabin was sticking out. In this position, it was impossible to get out of this hole using the usual method. We had to build a smooth descent from behind, again using blasting operations. Again, it took several days for the ground to freeze after each explosion. Then, when we decided that we could start leaving, we arrived at the site early in the morning.

Naturally, starting the main engine and trying to leave with it right away was a useless exercise. We started to move the tractor backwards manually - by turning the handle of the starting engine and alternately turning on the left and then the right clutch. Turning them on simultaneously did not help - the clutch slipped. Apparently, the tractor was frozen solid from below. Then I placed 3 small charges under the rear axle and the engine crankcase. And this managed to knock off the frost from the body and get out from below onto the still thawed soil. Only after that the machine moved from its place, and first alternately, and then with both tracks, it began to slowly move backwards. Together, turning the handle in turn, in two or three hours we brought the tractor out of the pit onto a hard, sloping place. After that, we started the main engine. It was already dark and a swarm of sparks rushed up from the exhaust pipe, and with a great roar, noise and strain the tractor slowly began to crawl back out of its trap.

Ilya Anyamov was standing right there on the side of the road and was so impressed that he raised his hands to the sky, raised his eyes there and began to say something, apparently addressing his Gods. After a short time the machine was already standing on level ground, and was still showering a swarm of sparks. About 10 minutes later we heard a knocking in the running engine and turned it off, not risking driving it to Tolya. The main thing was done - we got both tractors out without outside help. The lathe was left in place until better times, which, as it turned out, came only 35 years later, when any metalworking machine tools can be purchased in any quantity, often for a symbolic fee.

Soon I learned that the head of the mechanical workshops, N.I. Polshchikov and his wife, had arrived in Saranpaul to work, but L.G. Egorov was not allowed to go - he was taken straight from our plane in Ivdel, from where he was going to fly in for inspection and negotiations on the expedition.

On the morning of January 15, I flew to the site in the mountains. The base was located in the valley of the Parya River, a tributary of the Tolya River in its very upper reaches. The most interesting thing is that on two adjacent 200,000-scale tablets it is still listed in their titles as "Turman Geological Base". Preparations for winter work were made in early autumn. A large barracks for workers, a barracks for housing and an office for engineering and technical workers, a bathhouse, and a bakery were built. I recognized the bakery because during one of my visits here in the summer, I was asked to make a hole in the stone using blasting, suitable for baking bread. Near the base, I found very strong, vertically standing strong slates. After the blast, a hole with vertical walls was formed there. It was covered with a thick sheet of metal on top, stones were placed on top, and everything was covered with earth. A thin metal flap was installed in the front. The bread was baked by Popik's wife, who also worked here as a miner, having transferred here from the Khobein party. The design of the oven turned out to be very successful. After it was heated with a good portion of firewood, the natural stone heated well on three sides and retained heat for a very long time. The bread never burned or was damp. This was the best bakery in the field - I have never eaten tastier bread.

The barracks for the engineering and technical workers were of a decent size. On one side it had common bunks for 5-6 people, then there was a large stove made from a 200-liter barrel, and on the other side there were another small bunk for 3 people. In the middle there was a large table for office work. The bunks were also lined with felt, like on Khobei, but lice did not run on it, since everyone washed in the bathhouse. The engineering and technical workers on the site were senior geologist Kim Vysotsky, radio operator Vasya Zavalishin, and geological technician Nina Volkova - to my surprise, the same pretty girl whom I met here and in the expedition office in the summer. While I was walking around the sites, it quickly got dark. In January, in these latitudes, daylight hours are only about 3 hours. We lit candles - we did not have a power station, and began to look at various business papers. Then we went to bed. I started looking for my sleeping bag on the big bunks, but it wasn't there. The guys told me that they had put it on the small bunks, where the only girl, Nina, also slept. I didn't object. I had to climb into my bag in the girl's presence. We both liked being together so much that we've been sleeping together for almost 50 years.

I remember the food there well, which I haven't seen for a long time. In addition to tasty bread, we had plenty of Hungarian lecho in large 5-liter jars and very fatty real Krakow sausage. There was also plenty of sausage mince in jars and condensed milk, and real butter wasn't coming out either. True, everyone at the food center was already sick of venison - we would have liked something better, but no one could offer anything.

A day later, the Anyamovs arrived with reindeer teams. During the conversation, Martin told me that he and his father would eat separately, using their own food, but that they would take what they needed from our warehouse by recording it, as everyone did - no one had any cash on the site. Then he asked: "Do we have fresh meat?" I answered that we only had venison, but everyone was sick of it. He asked: "Will we take fresh elk meat from them at 50 kopecks per 1 kg?" - "Of course!" I answered, but added that within a radius of 10 km. "none of our guys even saw a moose track!" They had one 20-gauge single-barreled shotgun between them, and he asked me for another gun. I gave him my 12-gauge double-barreled shotgun and a few rounds of Brenneke bullets. They immediately put on their camus skis, and both quickly disappeared from sight.

I had already forgotten about them when, about 2 hours later, Martin suddenly came and gave me the gun. I thought that they had decided to postpone the hunt for another day. But he suddenly said that he needed to assign people to carry the meat - everyone was very surprised by such a quick success. They assigned him four people, and they left. Another half hour later, Grandpa Ilya came up and started to explain to me with signs that he had also killed an elk and was asking for people to carry the meat. A silent scene ensued - everyone was simply stunned. I gave him people too. A couple of hours later, the first group appeared. They carried part of the meat in backpacks, and the rest was wrapped in the removed skin, and it was dragged straight through the snow, like a sled. After a while, the second group arrived with exactly the same method of transportation.

Martin told me that he approached the beast to within 35 meters and killed it with a single bullet to the head. He took out the badly crumpled bullet and gave it to me. I kept it for a long time, but then it disappeared in our numerous boxes. He praised my gun.

Back in December, the expedition sent me a letter from a group of Leningrad mountain hikers led by Rudolf Nikanorov. They asked geologists who had a winter base in the area of ​​their planned ski crossing along the Northern and Subpolar Urals to give them a week's shelter and rest on a long route. I invited them to visit our base, rest, and wash. He gave approximate coordinates and warned about signals when we were carrying out blasting operations.

After some time, the expedition raised the question of conducting prospecting operations for placer gold in our area in the upper reaches of the Parya, Tolya and Nyays rivers and their nearest tributaries. If the Parya flowed several hundred meters from our home, then in the upper reaches of the Nyays it was necessary to conduct a preliminary reconnaissance of the area, to find a suitable place for housing.

We planned to go to this area with Kim Vysotsky in mid-February - it was already warmer and lighter. The distance was about 19 km, but there was very deep snow there. And in general, this is typical for the forest border bordering the goltsy - the snow is blown away by the winds from the mountains and settles in the wooded area. By the way, for the same reason, after 2-3 weeks, we had to give up renting reindeer sleds and send the Anyamovs back to Nyaksimvol. The reindeer had a hard time getting through the snow, and there was no need to even mention the luggage.

Kim and I left early in the morning on wide skis - golitsy, and only reached the place in the evening. There was a log hut there, a fairly old building of unknown origin, about 5 by 6 meters in size. Inside there was an old - very old iron stove with rotten sides in places. An earthen floor and small bunks. A small window in the wall.

Less than a year ago, in December 1961, a ground detachment of geophysicists from A.A. Latypov's party was stationed here and a tragedy occurred - the detachment's cook, a middle-aged woman, died. As an eyewitness, Kolya Ognev, said, they were running out of food, there was no helicopter, and an AN-2 plane came to drop the supplies. Apparently, there was no prior agreement on safety measures between the participants in the operation. The cook came out of the hut, began to watch the drop and overlooked something. At one point, a frozen pig carcass flying from above hit the corner of the chopped crown of the hut and knocked a piece of wood out of the cup of the log. This piece hit her right in the temple and killed her instantly. After that, she was placed in a snowdrift and covered with more snow. They reported the incident to the party base. From there, apparently, somewhere else. No one came to investigate, and later they sent a reindeer team and took the body to the city of Ivdel for burial. This was just the period when the party had already left Salekhard, but had not yet arrived in Saranpaul - there was anarchy. Therefore, no one was even punished and the man was "written off". The place of the chip on the corner of the hut was clearly visible even today. And in general, such stories, even those that happened a year ago, do not add optimism when spending the night in such godforsaken places.

We looked around the area. Half a kilometer below, a small river the same size as Nyays flowed into it. From here, the bare peak of Turman-Nel was clearly visible. We lit the stove and made tea in a tin can that we had taken with us. The stove was so full of holes that we didn't even need to light a candle - it was light enough. We hadn't taken sleeping bags with us and had to writhe on the bunks all night from the cold, which had begun to creep into every crack after the stove had burned out. Later, hordes of mice suddenly appeared. They ran in crowds all over the hut, squeaking and rustling with dry last year's leaves and pieces of old paper wrappers. The appearance of new living creatures in their domain a year later made such an indelible impression on them that some of them, the bravest, decided to get to know us better and began to climb onto our bunks and run over our bodies, especially when the stove went out completely and pitch darkness set in. It was no longer possible to sleep normally. In addition to the mice, the sounds of the February blizzard and the loud creaking of trees coming from the surrounding area were disturbing.

We got up early, boiled some tea, ate. Having finished reconnaissance of the area, we set off on the return journey. Our ski track was completely covered with snow overnight, but the trail was still visible and we reached the base of the site a few hours later.

The pits for placer gold laid in the floodplain of the Parya River were successfully advancing. But we could only dig them to the groundwater level, since we did not have any drainage equipment. Closer to the river bed there were quite large boulders, which we broke up with overhead charges - TNT blocks with electric detonators. The sand was washed selectively and layer by layer in 2 valleys with a thickness of 0.2 meters. The washing was carried out in Siberian wooden trays.

Once a rather curious story happened. A geologist came with washed concentrate - in it a good weight gold grain with sharp edges was visible. Moreover, its color and texture were very similar to high-grade red gold. I immediately sent a radiogram to the head of the expedition, and he ordered that the concentrate be sent to Saranpaul immediately by the nearest helicopter. Which we did. And he himself flew out on some business. I brought the concentrate to Chepkasov V.A., he unfolded the package, immediately saw the gold grain, and was amazed at its size. He immediately called S. N. Kameneva, who was working with the concentrates, and ordered her to take all the measurements, weigh them, etc. After some time, he called her again and asked what the gold piece weighed. For some reason, she was very embarrassed and quietly said that the gold piece was gone. V.A. Chepkasov was surprised and exclaimed: "How so? Why not?" She answered that the gold piece had dissolved in acid. A silent scene ensued. Everyone knew that real gold only dissolved in "royal" aqua, but not in any acid. Then he laughed and turned to me with a question: "What kind of trash could have ended up in our concentrate?" I thought about it and said that it was probably a piece of the copper casing of the electric detonator that was used to blow up the boulder in the pit. Everyone agreed with this.

The pits in the Parya Valley never turned up any gold, and prospecting work there was stopped. And in the upper reaches of the Nyaysa, they didn't even start during my work in those years.

Along with this, another story happened here. I flew out of the area on an MI-1, which made an intermediate landing in Tolye on assignment. There, the expedition's chief geophysicist, S.P. Oshev, sat down with me and we headed for Saranpaul. Having barely taken off and gained a little altitude, one of us saw two moose below. Oshev had a small-caliber TOZ-17 magazine rifle with him. He asked the pilot to hover above the animals at a low altitude and himself opened aimed fire at them through the slightly open side door. Although the animals tried to move somewhere, the helicopter easily overtook them and the shooting continued. It took more than 10 shots for them to fall. Then the car landed nearby, right on the snow of a small swamp. Oshev rushed to look for a knife to bleed them, but nothing was found. He tried to do it with a screwdriver, but it was also useless. Then they lifted the car into the air and landed in Tolya again. Oshev told Vasiliev to go to the animals, process the carcasses and deliver the meat to Tolya. This story continued at the end of the year, which I will write about later.

Manya River

As it turned out, this method of "hunting" was quite widespread in those years among employees of organizations using helicopter transport. Two years ago, during a MI-4 flight, the pilots saw a large brown bear in an open area. They decided to chase it first, and then crush it with the weight of the helicopter. The bear turned out to be smarter than the crew - he did not run from them, and when the machine began to descend on him, he began to grab the side wheel with his paws, creating a dangerous overturning moment. The "hunt" ended in a draw, but could have been tragic for either side.

Around mid-March, hikers from Leningrad finally approached us. There were 7 of them, led by Rudolf Nikanorov, and one girl among them. Their route was of the highest difficulty category in those years. They left the Ivdelsky district of the Sverdlovsk region and walked along the Ural ridge with two intermediate stops near people. The first was our site, the second was a weather station on Mount Telpos-Iz. The total length was about 600 km. Travel time was about 20 days, not counting rest days. The group was well equipped with everything necessary for such a hike. Six first-category athletes and one master of sports. They walked mainly along the edges of forests and the alpine part. Then their route ran north again to Mount Telpos-Iz, from there to the area of ​​Mount Neroika and then a descent along the western slope to the station Synya, Pechora railway.

We met them well. We washed ourselves in the bathhouse, replenished our food supplies, rested for a couple of days and went on. At my request, they sent us a telegram from Synya station that they had arrived safely.

Our life went on. One of the interesting aspects of such life was the heating of iron stoves. It is clear to everyone that with dry firewood - cedar, spruce, pine - you can easily light and heat the room. But finding dry firewood, even if you live in the forest, is not so easy. When many stoves are heated, the dead wood around the village is cut down first. Then comes the moment when you have to go far and through deep snow to get dry firewood. That's when new heating methods begin to be sought. One of them was the use of frozen birch firewood. You fill the stove with them - yes, full - this is a must, put in some light dry kindling and light it. The fire burns slowly, the damp wood hisses, and after a while the whole stack of damp wood suddenly flares up and the stove starts to hum from the raging flames, like a jet plane, and everything heats up quickly, and the stove even turns red from the temperature. Once I tried another method - I threw a TNT block on the burning kindling - it began to melt and the liquid part flared up, the damp wood also caught fire well from it.

Often in the dark we observed glowing traces and lights in the sky that moved from the south to the north. There were suggestions that these were some traces of moving missiles, but no one could say anything definite. Spacecraft were launched in those years only once and they went in circular orbits around the Earth. We received confirmation that this was related to the defense industry at the end of March. That day we were waiting for a MI-4 helicopter with cargo. It was not there all day and only in the evening we heard the roar of the propellers. I automatically glanced at my watch - it was about 8 o'clock in the evening, and the question immediately arose: "Whose helicopter is this?" Civil aviation at that time of year flew only until 7 in the evening (helicopters). After some time we saw it - it was zigzagging and passed over us - everyone saw the star on the fuselage - belonging to the Ministry of Defense. Then it turned west of us and landed, even turning off the engine. They took off somewhere an hour later, which was clearly audible. Apparently, they were looking for something that had fallen from above. Only at the end of the century did I learn that one of the design bureaus in the Chelyabinsk region was developing tactical missiles of the SKAD type, and was conducting test launches along the Ural ridge from south to north.

A new field season was approaching, and with it new troubles. During my last visit to the expedition, the question arose about my return to Saranpaul to work. Chepkasov V.A. offered me the position of deputy chief engineer for drilling and blasting operations and safety. I agreed and said that I was already married. He already knew something and said that Nina would work as a technician - a geologist in the office.

While still in Saranpaul, I had to solve the housing problem. There were no new buildings available in the expedition yet. The nearest four-apartment wooden house was supposed to be ready by winter - they promised to give us an apartment there. I didn't want to go live in a barrack-type house, so I asked the owner of the apartment where I lived as a bachelor to recommend me suitable private housing. To my surprise, she very quickly told me to contact her sister - Varvara Vasilievna, who lived alone in a large private house not far from hers. I had often seen her before, when she came to the Krasnovskys - she was a calm, already elderly woman, she did not drink herself and did not tolerate drunkards. Since I had proven myself earlier as a non-drinker, she immediately agreed to take us in. And what's more, she offered to cook us lunch, which was very convenient, since we were both leaving for work. The price for housing at that time was very low.

I flew to the site and told everyone that Nina and I were leaving for work in Saranpaul. Of course, both Vysotsky K. and Zavalishin V. were good guys, but still, no matter how you look at it, the joint residence of a married couple with young bachelors in the same room created unnecessary tension, and to some extent even affected production relations. We began packing, although there was nothing special to pack - everything could be carried in your hands. At the end of March, an MI-1 helicopter came for us. We said goodbye to everyone and went to the helipad. That day, for some reason, a very strong wind was blowing from the mountains. When the machine began to approach from the east for landing, apparently the pilot "missed" a little and decided to make a second approach. As soon as he turned around, the wind instantly "blew" him away to the east again - it felt like a fluff had been swept off a table, although the excellent pilot Kolya Babintsev was at the helm. But everything went well and in an hour and a half we were already at the airfield in Saranpaul, and an hour later we arrived at our new place of residence - to Varvara Vasilyevna.

Her house was small - one large room, and adjoining it was also a large kitchen-dining room. Nina and I slept in the large room, the hostess - in the dining room. Each private house also had land plots of 6 acres. There, despite the harsh winter, there was a fairly warm summer with hot days. Vegetable crops grew well - potatoes, cabbage, onions, garlic, carrots, beets. Cucumbers grew only in greenhouses. Even the tomatoes ripened to a brown color, but only on the southern side of the buildings, sheltered from the northern wind. In addition, they had to be picked before the first August frost. However, despite the good opportunity to grow vegetables in the local climate, the state farm did not do this at all. Some fresh vegetables were brought in by water in the fall from the south of the Tyumen region. But they did not last long, since the main harvest fell in September and there was no time to deliver them to the North by water due to the early cold weather and ice formation.

While most homeowners provided themselves with vegetables, all visitors switched to "hay" - dried vegetables and canned vegetables by the New Year. The taste of dried vegetables in those years was so disgusting that it is impossible to describe. Dried potatoes in drums resembled soap when boiled, and cabbage and onions had no taste or smell. Borscht in jars was much better, but it was also impossible to transport it in winter. Of course, in any northern region, fish in any form and fresh meat have always been a lifesaver in food. I have already written about fish stroganina, but frozen stroganina from venison is not much worse, and especially from elk meat, if you also dip it in a solution of vinegar, pepper, mustard.

After a quick home setup, I immediately got to work. The field season was approaching and it was necessary to prepare documents for blasting cases for some field parties. In addition, it was necessary to demolish the 18-meter tower pile driver in the village, left over from drilling a well. As I expected, drilling the well became much more complicated with the onset of cold weather. Firstly, starting the diesel engine in cold weather without heating led to a rapid discharge of the batteries and downtime. It was necessary to drive up the tractors and constantly "light" from the running running diesel engine. In addition, in the section of the passable rocks there were lenses of "permafrost", and no one knew how to pass them correctly. In the end, the walls of the wells in the area of ​​​​this permafrost thawed, the rock collapsed and the tool seized. The well was closed at a depth of about 360 meters. For me, this case was not very clear - after all, we had drillers who drilled wells in similar conditions and they had to take appropriate preventive measures such as washing with a saline solution when approaching the zones of "permafrost", but nothing was done. By the way, I myself have not encountered such phenomena in practice, and only knew the theory.

The construction of the expedition base was proceeding at a good pace. A mechanical workshop with a diesel power station, several 4-apartment residential prefabricated timber houses had already been built, a residential house made of round timber, and the foundation of the office were in the works. A large construction site was in operation. Almost on the river bank, a large material warehouse made of corrugated iron was built. The expedition apparatus occupied, as before, the old building of the office of the 105th expedition. But the location of the services was different. The largest office of the former head of the expedition was given over to the geological department with a camera room, and V.A. Chepkasov himself occupied a very modest small office, where it was difficult to fit up to 10 people for daily planning meetings. I was first seated in a passage room, and a little later transferred to the office of the chief geophysicist Oshev S.P.

In May, signs of impending river breakup and flooding became visible. One of those days, I found myself on the river bank near our warehouse and a 100-ton oil barge with the remains of aviation gasoline standing almost opposite. The barge was completely frozen into ice about 80 cm thick, and there were also powerful ice fields around. But there was almost no snow on the banks, strong streams ran towards the river, and in many places there was already a strip of water between the ice and the bank. There was something I didn’t like about this situation. I instinctively felt the onset of imminent ice drift and a threat to the barge; if suddenly the water arrived and the ice shifted, it would simply be crushed. I went on an expedition and reported to V.A. Chepkasov about my concerns and that something needed to be done. But no one had a clear idea of ​​what exactly to do. He reacted rather skeptically, saying that it was not yet time for the ice to drift, and that I was panicking in vain. However, as a rather cautious person, I sent Chief Engineer Kuleshov A.I. there to clarify the situation. He went, looked, returned and reported to the chief that everything was fine there and no danger was expected in the near future. Everyone sat down on their chairs again and forgot about the matter.

Two hours later, I went to the shore again. Literally 10 minutes after my arrival, cracking sounds began to be heard and the entire 400-meter-wide ice shell of the river was broken and piled up into numerous hummocks. Since the barge was standing in a small coastal recess, all the ice around it remained completely intact, and it did not have the slightest opportunity to move. I ran to the office and reported this matter to the chief. He immediately jumped up and we ran to the shore. There, near the barge, workers had been hammering away with crowbars for several days, trying to chip away at this thick ice. The sight that V.A. Chepkasov saw on the shore shocked him so much that he grabbed a crowbar from the nearest worker and started chipping away at the ice himself. What could a crowbar do in almost a meter of ice? After several blows to the ice, the crowbar slipped out of his hands and instantly sank under the water. He wanted to grab another crowbar, but thought better of it and stopped. The situation seemed incomprehensible and hopeless at the moment; time had been lost. The general principle of saving ships from ice drift (if they are not in some remote backwater) consists of timely release of the ice and mooring during the rise of the water in some coastal "pockets".

Then the idea occurred to me to use explosives to chip away at the ice, but the skipper of the barge, a thin grey-haired old man of about 70, waved his arms briskly, expressing his disagreement with his whole appearance. He was afraid that the petrol in the tanks might explode or the seams might burst and the barge would sink. His arguments did not seem serious to me, but the possible results and method of application were still unclear. But that was probably not the main thing. The problem was in delivering the explosives. After all, they were in a warehouse on the other side of the river, which had to be reached on foot, overcoming 400 metres of broken and tussocked ice. There were no other means of transport at the time. All that was needed was a helicopter, but there was none. The head of the expedition, having thought a little and realising that there were simply no alternatives, gave his consent. The head of the explosives warehouse, Shirmanova K.I., came up and we both went to the other bank. It must be said that walking on such ice is not at all for the faint of heart. If relatively large ice floes could support the weight of a person, then smaller ones began to sink or turn over. In some places, we had to quickly jump over, although for Shirmanova, who had a decent build, this was no easy task. Overall, she showed herself to be quite worthy in this situation. The thought already occurred to me that we should have moved with strong poles in our hands. In the event of falling into the water from an ice floe, we could have leaned on the pole. True, nothing would have saved us if the ice had started to drift. Having filled our backpacks with about 20 kg of explosives, we returned to the same, right bank.

Having examined the area around the barge, I saw that it was frozen into the ice massif approximately 30-40 meters on each side. The decision was immediately made to chip away at the ice from the edges of this massif, gradually approaching the barge. I placed 400 grams of ammonite in ice holes on four sides and blew them up. The ice tore off exactly up to these holes. The calculation turned out to be correct. I loaded the next holes 10 meters from the barge hull. After the explosion, almost all the ice broke off from the iron sides, and the barge floated freely surrounded by broken ice floes. Now there was a new task - it had to be pulled into the nearest "pocket" on the shore. They drove up an S-100 tractor, threw a tow rope onto it, raised the anchor and slowly began to pull it towards the nearest small ravine. The water level in the river began to rise noticeably, but large ice floes still prevented the barge from being pulled to the shore. In order to finally clear the way, several more explosions had to be carried out to crush them. The barge was finally brought into the coastal ravine through the already rising water at 5 o'clock in the morning. The whole process took about 14 hours of continuous intense work. The most interesting thing was that half an hour after the end of this work, the general ice drift began on the river. After this event, I was convinced that I had some intuition. Why intuition? Because I did not have systematic knowledge in the field of breaking up large rivers from ice, and I myself had never seen ice drift on such a large river before.

Right after the ice drift, the expedition management decided to relax a bit and go hunting. I had just decided to test the purchased boat and the new "Moscow" motor. Although I had no experience in operating a motorboat, V.A. Chepkasov, A.I. Kuleshov and I.M. Sidoryak sat down with me without fear. We went up the Lyapin, then turned onto its tributary, the Yatriya. It is translated from Mansi as "the kosachnaya river." Kosach is a black grouse. We had barely gone up the Yatriya a few kilometers when we started to come across pebble spits on both banks, where wood grouse sat and pecked at pebbles. The colorful plumage of these birds blended in well with the same brown pebbles, but if you looked closely you could tell them apart. We opened fire right in the direction of the boat, which they were not afraid of if it was parallel to the shore, and let them approach to 30-40 meters. Each of us got a couple of birds - there was no point in shooting more. The next day off we went there too, but a little further. The big water threw several thick ice floes onto one of the pebble spits. For some reason they start to melt from below, as a result of which whole through "caves" have formed near the ground in these ice floes. Even far away, we noticed some unusual behavior of birds in the area of ​​these ice floes. When we drove closer, it turned out that black grouse were mating in this place, bumping into each other, running back and forth through these holes, making mating sounds, and they did not pay the slightest attention to us, although it was already about 12 o'clock in the afternoon. While driving along the river, we repeatedly saw birds sitting in trees and very close by, but we did not shoot, because there was no need. This river really deserves its name, and real sport hunting with stalking game on it is simply impossible due to its absolute fearlessness and abundance. Here you need to shoot as much game as you can eat. All the extra shot simply disappears and harms nature.

In the next few working days we went again by motorboat up the Yatriya to the drilling rig located at the limestone deposit. It was quite far, more than 120 km. The speed of the boat with two or three people up did not exceed 20 km per hour. In addition, we needed to have about 70 liters of gasoline. A 20-liter canister was used up in 3 hours and 20 minutes. We also needed to inspect the place for transporting the rig even higher up the river. We got to the place and stopped for lunch. We lit a fire and put on the brew. After some time, I saw three large ducks flying from the upper reaches of the river, grabbed a gun and fired twice in turn. The first duck plopped down on the water, the second one also fell on the river as a wounded duck along the inclined glide path. I quickly reloaded one barrel to finish off the wounded bird, ran to the boat to start the engine, and threw the gun into it. However, it did not hit the boat, but slid along the edge of the starboard side and gurgled into the water. I forgot about all the ducks and began to catch the gun. The depth near the shore, according to estimates, was more than 3 meters - it was the height of the spring flood. We tried everything - long poles with a nail, and a spinner from a spinning rod - all in vain. We spent at least a couple of hours. We had to accurately mark the place. I made sketches of coastal landmarks to identify the place from a motorboat, from the river. Then a large biscuit was moved to the exact place where the gun fell and I also included it in the drawing. It was a pity about the gun.

The story ended quite successfully. About a month later, when the high water had subsided, we went to the drilling site again. I recognized the place from the boat. We moored to the shore in advance and found a dry place on foot - the landscape changed a lot at low water. I returned and asked my partner to very slowly move the boat to the crash site with an oar. Such caution was necessary so as not to muddy the water. I lay down on the bow of the boat with a long stick and a hook on the end. As soon as the bow of the boat approached the site, I immediately saw the gun in the water - it was lying at a depth of only about a meter. I took it out, opened the barrels, threw out the soggy cartridge, closed it again and clicked the triggers - only one barrel worked. I checked again - yes, one trigger did not work. At home I opened it - one of the main V-shaped springs, which was on the combat platoon, burst in the water. In the machine shops, they made several springs for me according to the sample, but none of them worked. And the gun regained its quality only after I exchanged a spare part for the "Moscow" engine for a factory mainspring from the local police officer A. Kotlov.

Soon, the first barges with materials and provisions approached the expedition along the high water, and a fairly solid 500-ton tanker delivered gasoline and diesel fuel.

The main cargo arrived again on a large 800-ton lighter, among them a ZIF-650 drilling rig with a D-54 diesel engine, as well as two previously unseen floating tracked transporters - amphibians K-61. This was a very unusual machine. In the center of the waterproof body-boat stood a two-stroke diesel YaAZ-204, forced by turbocharging to 145 hp. From it, a cardan shaft went forward through a system of intermediate gears to the central conical tail of the front axle, and from it, power was transmitted by rollers to the front drive sprockets of the tracks. From a special transfer case to the back - to drive the propellers, there were 2 more shafts. On the left and right sides of the body there were metal tracks made of corrugated iron for installing transport and other equipment, and at the back of the body there was a folding ramp for driving in. The carrying capacity on the water was about 7 tons, on land only 5 tons. In terms of overall dimensions, it easily accommodated a 3-axle ZIL-157 type vehicle, not to mention the ATL or any artillery systems. When moving on water, water constantly entered the body through the cracks in the folding ramp. For its continuous removal, there was a small pump, which worked in constant mode when moving on water. The speed of movement with cargo on the water against the current on Yatriya was about 5 km/h, on Manya - a little more, because its current is calmer. Why do I describe this machine so much? The fact is that in my deep conviction, and subsequent experience has shown this, K-61 turned out to be the only transport suitable for successful use in the summer period in the natural conditions of the Saranpaul expedition.

Expedition settlement, the new office on the left

With the retreat of spring waters on the rivers of the region - tributaries of Lyapin, water transport, except for motor boats, does not pass. But the amphibian, and even with a fairly good load-carrying capacity, reaches almost all places. Where it is shallow or there is a spit - it goes on tracks, where it is deep and steep banks - it floats. Only places with a strong current and at the same time great depth, as well as a large number of large hidden stones in the riverbed are inaccessible to it. Of the design flaws, only one was found - weak metal of the teeth of the conical shank. On all three machines in operation, these teeth were cut off and the machines stood idle for a long time waiting for a spare part from Tyumen. Only using these machines we managed to throw equipment, materials and maintain current supplies of the exploration party for coal in the very upper reaches of Yatriya, the same site for limestone exploration, and some exploratory wells in the middle reaches of the Manya and Yatriya rivers.

In the spring, it suddenly turned out that Tyumen would not be able to provide us with cartridge ammonite for blasting operations this season either. Something had to be done urgently, because the stock in the warehouse was already running low. Chepkasov V.A. asked the head of the base of expedition 118 Kanev A.N. for help, but he could not resolve the issue himself and advised him to contact the base village of expedition 118 - Kozhim. They answered positively from there, but they offered to take the explosives from them in Kozhim and transport them by plane across the Urals to Saranpaul. The head of the expedition immediately gave me the task of preparing all the necessary documents for receiving and transporting explosives. First, it was necessary to prepare the papers and take them to Berezovo to the inspection and police, then take some of the papers with you there, to the Western slope, and get some more permits in the city of Inta. Along the way, Chepkasov V.A. gave me the task of going to Khanty-Mansiysk and looking at the Belogorsk DOC for wooden houses that were suitable for our conditions and that this DOC could sell us.

I left for Berezovo on the passenger ship "Shleev", which takes about a day to travel. The distance by water is 455 km. In the lower reaches of the Sosva, I noticed huge flocks of ducks. They were flying in the air in flocks of thousands, covering the river islands half-flooded by spring water with black carpets, and did not react to our ship at all. Smaller flocks of several birds could be seen everywhere. I had never seen such a number of ducks before or after. Moreover, I did not even imagine that a duck could gather in such huge flocks.

Having done all the paperwork in Berezovo, I bought a ticket for a seaplane to Khanty-Mansiysk. We arrived in two and a half hours. We landed at the Samarovo hydroport. This is a kind of suburb of Khanty-Mansiysk, or as it was commonly called - Khanty. Previously, it was, apparently, a separate village on the bank of the Irtysh, then it became part of the city. There was a hydroport for float planes, a pier with a river landing stage for passenger ships, a large fish cannery. It was still a few kilometers to the city itself. I spent the night in a hotel and along the way found out where the village of Belogorye was and how to get there. It turned out that it was located on the right bank of the Ob River, 20 km after its confluence with the Irtysh. Passenger transport went there extremely rarely and local residents recommended that I hire a local taxi for this purpose in the form of a motorboat. I found a man right there on the bank of the Irtysh who agreed to take me there for 10 rubles. The boat he led me to turned out to be of decent size, with a stationary L-3 motor and even had a small visor at the front.

A strong north wind was blowing, and on a head-on course, driving a large wave. For some reason, the motorman immediately drove the boat closer to the left bank and went along it. I later realized that it was shallower there, and accordingly, smaller waves. However, although they were considered small, they hit the front of the boat with such force that numerous splashes from the blows fell not only on the boat, but also drenched both of us. Escaping from this, I sat down below the front visor, but it still got to me. And in general, this frail vessel in the middle of a huge water flow did not inspire enough confidence. The thought consoled me that people who live among such water constantly catch fish here, apparently they build reliable boats, and specifically for these conditions. After 10 km the Irtysh flowed into the Ob and here there was a sea of ​​water and even steeper waves. A weak engine and a large oncoming wave slowed down the movement considerably. But having crossed the confluence of the great rivers, we went along the right bank of the Ob all the way to Belogorye.

This is a large settlement of people working mainly at a large woodworking plant. Wood was processed here and the simplest wooden mobile houses were made. Of course, even for that time, this was "garbage". Frame houses, with plank wall paneling and internal sawdust filling. They were not even put on tractor runners. All this was made of raw wood and hammered together with a dozen nails - hence their "strength". But even for such products it was necessary to get a purchase order in the region. Of course, it was better than a tent in winter. We later purchased two houses and installed them at the expedition base as temporary housing.

I returned to Berezovo late and went straight to the hotel. It was always hard to find places there with the start of navigation, because there was a lot of movement of people, and their flow increased sharply. They gave me a place on a folding bed in some room. I went down to eat at the Sosva restaurant. I ordered and waited. Then a young girl, quite pretty, with reddish hair, sat down next to me. She also ordered something small, and started talking to me. At first I didn't quite understand the subject of her interests, and when I figured it out, I began to find out who she was and where she was from. It turned out that a month ago a decree "On the fight against parasitism, etc. ..." was issued. According to this decree, she was sent from Saratov to Berezovo, as she claimed - for a relationship with a university professor (she was supposedly a student). When I suggested that she go on our expedition, go to the field, and start earning money the normal way, she giggled and said that she would earn more here. I am surprised at the authorities who found such places for the re-education of this contingent!

The field season had begun, and the explosives in the warehouse were running out. There was no time to waste, and I, having collected all the necessary papers, left for Kozhim, for expedition №118. I had to travel by changing carriages and a roundabout route. On June 22, I flew from Berezovo to Salekhard. Why did I remember the exact date? It was the day of the summer solstice, and in the dormitory room of the Salekhard expedition, where I spent the night, the sun did not set below the horizon all night and stood above it, unusually for me, illuminating the room.

When the plane took off from Berezovo and went straight north, a panorama of the lower Priobye opened up. If at the beginning of the flight the Ob riverbed was clearly visible, then an hour later it disappeared completely and merged with numerous sorki, flooded by spring waters. Occasionally, islands of dry land with trees were visible. Again numerous flocks of waterfowl were flying in the air and sitting on the water. Twice white swans were clearly visible sitting on the water.

Salekhard turned out to be a small village, built up mainly with one-story houses, here and there two-story buildings were visible. I hitchhiked to the expedition village on the Angalsky Cape, where I was put up for the night in a half-empty hostel. The locals were unhappy that the geologists received a salary increase coefficient of 1.8, while they only received 1.5. Although they lived nearby. They constantly wrote complaints to Moscow so that they would be paid the same, or the geologists would be reduced to their size. Permanent commissions went to find out the truth. The geologists got tired of this and called an astronomer from the Pulkovo Observatory to accurately determine the coordinates of the expedition. And the measurements showed that the Angalsky Mys, where the expedition was based, was located 711 meters north of the Arctic Circle and it received its allowances correctly, but the city of Salekhard was slightly south of the Arctic Circle and its allowances were also correct. This is, of course, an oddity, but such was the division of the sizes of the zone coefficients in the Government Resolution in 1960.

In the morning I had to cross the Ob to the Labytnangi railway station and then go by train. I went to the pier, where they told me that a small motor ship, "Dalniy", was scheduled to go there in an hour. The width of the river in this place was astounding - about 20 km. Labytnangi was right on the opposite, left bank of the river and was very poorly visible. The river's water flow was so powerful and deep that the ships passing in the distance did not leave any waves on the shore. "Dalniy" went to that shore for about an hour, there were no large berthing facilities there at that time - there was a simple landing stage. Along the shore there were several parallel railway lines, there were a couple of floating cranes, and above the shore, on its high part, there was a small building of the railway station with a small waiting room. I bought a ticket straight to Kozhim, but in a special passing carriage, which was attached at the junction station of Seida to trains going from Vorkuta to Moscow and Leningrad. The train was leaving in a couple of hours.

Actually, a few words should be said about this railway. It consists of three parts - to Vorkuta, to Labytnangi, and the Salekhard-Norilsk section (unfinished). All these sections were built mainly by prisoners, for whom camps were set up along the entire route of the road. Construction began in the mid-30s and the last section was stopped after the death of I.V. Stalin in 1953. If the first two sections were completed and are still in operation, then from Salekhard the road went 280 km to the east. The quality of its construction on the tundra was poor - crushed stone was poured directly onto the permafrost, and after some time it "warped" and became unsuitable for use. Only young pioneers and hunters traveled along it to shoot wood grouse on the pebbles. At one time it was called the 501st construction site. And it was described in the novel by the participant of those events, engineer A. Pobozhy, "The Dead Road", announced in one of the thick magazines of that time, but never published due to the change of the General Secretary of the CPSU. During the construction, however, freight trains went far into the tundra, even crossing the Ob under their own power. For these purposes, with the onset of frost, logs were laid on the ice and filled with water. This was done until a strong layer of ice was frozen. Then the sleepers with rails were laid and the track was ready until spring. True, the trains were not full length, but lightened - 2-3 cars in a coupling. Apparently, in the distant future, they planned to build a bridge, and maybe a hydroelectric power station, survey work for which began in the 60s. But when large oil and gas deposits were discovered, smart heads made the right decision - to screw this project. Otherwise, the northern half of the region would have been flooded with water, and the fields would have had to be exploited from floating drilling platforms - such is the terrain here. But I consider the halt in the construction of the railway to the east to the Yenisei to be a gross mistake by N.S. Khrushchev. After all, the transportation of goods back and forth by water and air to the Norilsk industrial region for 50 years cost several orders of magnitude more than the cost of completing the construction and subsequent operation of this railway. And considering that this region will still exist for several decades, the losses from ill-considered decisions increase even more. Of course, it was impossible to use prison labor when continuing the construction. But in 1953, when working in the North, there were very good benefits and wages, and there would always be civilians to work on this construction site.

The train was slowly picking up speed. A rather dreary landscape stretched outside the window - sparse forest, bare peaks of hills. Often there were either active camps with towers in the corners, or abandoned ones. Soon the mountainous part of the Polar Urals appeared. These were completely bare peaks, sometimes with sparse forest below. Almost all the bare mountains and some of the slopes from them still had snow, although it was already the third ten days of June. You could see and hear the cold wind howling outside the windows. I was also interested in the station 106 km, where the Polar-Ural expedition was based. The train arrived there in the evening, but it was as light as day. The place did not seem very favorable to me for human habitation - there were some small houses, gullies, trailers in a completely treeless area. People in winter clothes - quilted jackets and homeless-looking hats - were wandering around the station area. This place seemed very uncomfortable to me for living, and not because I was used to the taiga, and there was none there. It was something else. Near Semipalatinsk, for example, there was even less forest, but it was quite pleasant and comfortable to live. The issue, apparently, is not so much in the nature and climate, but in the living conditions that a person creates for himself in a broad sense, of course.

After that, I went to bed and was woken up early in the morning already in the city of Inta. I got off the train onto the platform, it seemed that I was alone. In front of me towered a huge station building, very tall, with large columns. I went inside and there was no one there. A very large, cyclopean-sized hall, good tiles on the floor. I needed to ask someone about the city, but there was no one there. Then a woman's heels suddenly clicked on the tiles, and I rushed to intercept her, afraid that she would hide from me in the numerous nooks and crannies of this empty huge barn. She explained to me that the city itself was about 7 km away, that regular buses and taxis did not go here to the Vorkuta trains, since during these months passengers from Vorkuta never get off here, but go at least to Moscow, and then to Sochi, and that the city could now only be reached by a random ride. I was lucky, and I got to the city on some passing car.

It was a pure coal miners' city - waste heaps near the mines were visible all around. The architecture was quite simple - mostly two-story wooden and cinder block houses, and some in the very center had a unique architecture inherent only to Inta - I have not seen such houses anywhere else. I explain the presence of such a huge station in such a small town by some favor and love of I.V. Stalin to coal miners in general. I have observed examples of such a good attitude in other coal regions of the country, and not only in the construction of large railway stations.

I found a mining inspection, where I was given a certificate for the purchase of explosives without any difficulty, based on the documents I had brought with me. A little later, I took another train from Vorkuta to the station 1247 km, or it was also called Kozhim.

Here was a large expedition by the standards of that time, No. 118, which was engaged in both exploration and industrial mining of piezoelectric quartz on both sides of the mountainous part of the Subpolar Urals. It had 2 balances - one budget for exploration work, the second - industrial enterprises. Since they were engaged in strategic raw materials, the supply was at an excellent level. They practically did not experience a shortage of consumables, equipment, or transport. Several aircraft, including an MI-6 helicopter, were constantly working for them. The base was located on the site of a former prison camp for those who built the railroad. Industrial buildings were partially preserved and were used for their intended purpose after renovation. Most of the residential barracks were destroyed and in some places their remains or outlines could still be seen. In addition to them, there were still a lot of ruins and rubbish, the dismantling and removal of which, it seemed, would take many more years.

The expedition received me well, they processed all the documents for receiving explosives, they said that as soon as the weather improved and planes arrived from Pechora, they would load me up and send me off. In the meantime, they settled me in a guest house - a one-room apartment in a typical geological 4-apartment cottage of those years. There were no residents, and there was nowhere to go in the village either. Then a neighbor appeared who advised me to go to the bridge over the Kozhim River, one of the many tributaries of the Pechora River. It was about 3 km away. from the village, and I went for a walk one day. I went to the bridge. It was quite a wide river, about 90 meters. And the water level from the bridge was also about 10 meters. What was especially surprising was the transparency of the water. Every stone on the bottom was visible, although the depth of the river in this place was more than 3 meters at a glance, and given such transparency, even more. In addition, the water had a very beautiful greenish-bluish tint. This, of course, was not the color of the water itself, but a reflection of the greenstone rocks of the river bottom. Compared to this, the water of the flat eastern part of the river could simply be compared to jelly. Salmon came to Kozhim every year to spawn and rose to its very upper reaches in the mountainous part. During the run, it greedily grabs the spoon, but a very strict fishery inspectorate stood in the way. In the village I was told a story about how recently one person caught 7 fish, somehow they found out and he had to pay a fine of 350 rubles.

In general, in those years it was an ecologically clean region, where the only polluters were the very rare mines of the Pechora basin. In the Vorkuta area, almost all the mines were dangerous due to gas and dust, in the Inta mines the situation was better. Local residents told me that over the past year there were 2 very powerful methane explosions in the Vorkuta mines and each time several dozen miners died. There was not a word about these disasters in the open information, although some rumors reached us in Saranpaul. In the mining inspection of Inta, they let it slip to me that the leadership of the District in Vorkuta had been completely replaced, and one of the ordinary inspectors was brought to trial. But people are not always to blame for such accidents - the behavior of the earth's interior cannot be described by mathematical formulas, and therefore is often unpredictable.

Soon a new group of people arrived from Moscow to visit us. They said that this was some kind of thematic party from a geological research institute dealing with problems of piezo-optical raw materials. I was surprised by the huge number of unloaded suitcases and pack animals, which filled several storage rooms. The head of the party, a stately middle-aged man, drew my attention to the snow-white shirts that he never got dirty from wearing. Later, the locals revealed some of the secrets of this party to me. They come every year for a month and a half. The composition is mainly female. These are cooks, collectors, laundresses. In addition to geological instruments, they bring with them several gun barrels, a whole suitcase of photographic equipment, a whole suitcase of white shirts, which are changed daily even in the field. The goal, of course, is noble - to look for patterns in the distribution of piezoelectric quartz in the earth's crust, but the methods raise some doubts. Such trips are very similar to safari at government expense.

Attempts to fly away were made almost every day. The airfield was not far, about 2 km, but the planes came from the city of Pechora, 40 km away. It happened that the plane was loaded, but then they did not allow it to fly to the eastern slope because of the weather. Then suddenly there was weather on the eastern slope, but not on the west. Finally, about 2 weeks later, we managed to take off with the cargo. We crossed the Ural ridge almost at a right angle. It turned out that it consists of 5 parallel ridges - the highest central part, and 2 ridges lower on both sides. The highest peaks of the Urals were clearly visible - the mountains of Narodnaya, Kolokolnya, Manaraga (bear's paw), Neroika. We quickly crossed the ridge and I immediately recognized our landscapes, familiar to me earlier from helicopter flights. The total time in the air was less than one hour.

A state enterprise such as an expedition would not be such if it did not have all the appropriate attributes of those times, namely, a party and Komsomol organization. There were very few party members then - no more than 5 people, and M.V. Ilyashevich was elected secretary. But he decided to create a Komsomol organization with my return from the field. During a personal conversation, he offered me to become a secretary of the Komsomol organization and I, after a short stubbornness, agreed. What awaited me in this field, I knew very well. Even in those years, the Komsomol in such remote places practically did not play any role, discipline was at the lowest level. Komsomol members did not go to meetings, because they knew well that the decisions made there and requests to senior "comrades" - members of the party, were never seriously considered by them and not carried out. The overwhelming majority of young people of Komsomol age - up to 28 years old - were not removed from the Komsomol register in the district committees when moving to a new place of work or residence, and if they were removed, they later threw away the registration cards. The expedition was mainly staffed by young people, but only 10 people were registered, and only engineering and technical workers. There was not a single worker.

Looking back on that time, we can say with confidence that Komsomol life was going on more or less decently then, mostly in Moscow. There were a lot of Komsomol functionaries in the apparatus of the Komsomol Central Committee and in all sorts of youth organizations. In addition to the ideological blandness, they were also offered a lot of "salads" in the form of frequent trips abroad, special rations and special clinics, so there was a tough fight for these places, and in order to show the senior "comrades" the usefulness of their existence, they produced a huge number of useless papers and bombarded the grassroots organizations with them. In the regional committees, "the chimney was lower and the smoke was thinner." And as for the district and grassroots - they were not considered at all. Of course, the Komsomol was considered a reserve of the party. And people of Komsomol age were accepted into the party only with a recommendation from the Komsomol. But this only concerned engineering and technical workers. If it was necessary to accept a worker into the party, then this requirement was not met. That is why even now I cannot answer the question: "What did the party want from the Komsomol?" and "What role did it play in the country in general?" I mean the period only after the war, when I already had a conscious life.

About 15 people managed to gather for the organizational meeting of the expedition youth, and only during working hours. Ilyashevich M.V. spoke and proposed me as secretary. Not a single person objected, since everyone was completely "indifferent" to the matter - anyway. And each participant in the meeting thought: "It's good that it wasn't me!"

By mid-summer of 1963, rumors began to circulate in the expedition about an imminent change in the expedition's leadership. And indeed, the rumor was confirmed - Ilyashevich M.V. was leaving home, to Sverdlovsk, and in his place, unexpectedly for everyone, the chief engineer Kuleshov A.I. was moving, and a new person was arriving in place of the chief engineer. It should be noted that all the changes took place "without noise and dust", apparently they had long been agreed upon in Tyumen, and what is most interesting is that all the details became known only after receiving an order from the administration - everything was kept secret. Why Ilyashevich left - I don't know. He lived quite well here. Perhaps he didn't get along with the expedition leader. But why Kuleshov took his place is still a mystery to me.

I can only assume that the administration was planning to replace the expedition leader, but not immediately, but after "testing" the candidate for some time in the position of chief engineer.

Soon, the new chief engineer, Yuri Fedorovich Drozdov, arrived with his wife. He was already quite an elderly man, over 50, with a somewhat peculiar management manner. People in the know told us that he came from Moldova, that he was almost a friend of Ervie, and that the latter allegedly worked there under his leadership - which was hard to believe just a month after his stay in Saranpaul, the difference between them was so great. Not in Drozdov's favor, of course. After Drozdov's arrival, V.A. Chepkasov went on vacation.

The 1963 field season was extremely difficult for many reasons. Unfavorable weather conditions, shortages in the field workers' supplies, and a lack of transport all played a role. The government's spring decree on a new tax on horse owners played an extremely negative role in providing the field workers with pack horses - in order to prevent owners from "getting too rich," they were asked to pay a tax of 200 rubles per head by August 1, and another 200 from January 1. A horse then also cost 200 rubles. It became completely unprofitable to keep horses, and almost all of them were sold for slaughter. As a result, field parties were able to rent less than half of the required number of heads for the season, which sharply limited their ability to move in the field. And from mid-summer, helicopters disappeared from the expedition altogether, and we sometimes could not even deliver food to most of the parties in the field camps. The field workers' mood began to deteriorate quickly, and they began to express their displeasure in a rather harsh manner in their radiograms to the expedition. Numerous appeals from the leadership to the administration, to the district party committee, to the aviation enterprises remained unsuccessful until August. The helicopter appeared only at the end of August, when the end of the field season was already approaching.

One summer, a radiogram from M. Davy came from the Parnuk party with approximately the following content: "In the upper reaches of the Lomes-Vozh River, in a cave, human bone remains were found. Small personal belongings and an aluminum spoon with initials are lying nearby. What should we do?" We inquired about the district prosecutor's office and they soon responded that no one would go to the field party and allowed us to bury them on site. Apparently, one of the uncaught prisoners who rebelled in the camp near Salekhard in 1950 died en route to the mainland.

That same summer, a very famous athlete of those years, world champion in artistic gymnastics, and the following year, in 1964, who became an Olympic champion, Boris Shakhlin, unexpectedly arrived in Saranpaul. It turned out that his brother was working as a turner at the base of expedition N105. Natives of the city of Ishim, Tyumen region, both began doing artistic gymnastics there, but only Boris entered the big sport. He was going to his brother for a week to relax and fish. Of course, for us this was a big event and half of the village, headed by Malyugin I.N., the chairman of the village council, poured out onto the bank of the Lyapin to meet the seaplane. Almost the entire expedition office also came out to have a look, especially since V.A. Chepkasov was expected to return from vacation today.

Finally, an airplane appeared from the east and immediately splashed down against the current onto the water without any ripples. Immediately, two motorboats with the harbormaster set out from the shore to pick up the passengers. Everyone froze in impatience. Finally, one boat pulled away from the airplane and began to approach the shore. The boat had not yet reached the shore when the local drunks, who had already gotten drunk that morning in honor of such an event, rushed to meet it shouting: "Long live the world champion! Glory to Boris Shakhlin!" As soon as the boat bumped into the shore, they immediately rushed there to a short, stocky man who, seeing such a stormy meeting, began to point somewhere behind him with his thumb. They understood this gesture as a request to take two suitcases standing behind this man in the boat to the shore. They grabbed them in their hands, but the man took them away and explained to them in his voice that he was not the one they thought he was, and that Shakhlin was riding behind in a completely different boat. It turned out that Chepkasov V.A. was mistaken for Shakhlin. Incidentally, they were very similar in build - both short and stocky. And the local aborigines, not spoiled by frequent sight of celebrities of such scale, very easily confused him with another person - after all, there was no television at that time. The real Shakhlin was taken by his brother into his boat and dropped off on the shore far from the crowd.

In August, several papers on the same topic arrived to the expedition - in September, in Khanty-Mansiysk, under the auspices of the regional leadership, a regional conference of young geologists was being held. We were given two places and one was supposed to speak. The head of the expedition suggested that I go and also be the speaker. Before the trip, we discussed the topic of the speech and where to place the emphasis. I have never written a written report in my life, and I have never read from writing. All my reports and speeches were written down in a notebook in the form of theses, which I had in front of me. And I still think that this is the best way to convey my thoughts to the audience. This system has never failed, and I have had to speak often, on various occasions and in different audiences. True, this system works only if the speaker is able to quickly and competently formulate his thoughts on the go. Otherwise, you have to write a text. Having arrived in Berezovo, I went to the district committee of the Komsomol. There they told me that I would be considered a speaker from the entire Berezovsky district, and not just my expedition, to which I also agreed.

The next day we flew to Khanty and checked into a hotel in the center. This time we had the opportunity to take a closer look at the town. It looked rather unsightly even for those years. Two-story houses of old construction. The only thing that stood out for its size was the wooden three-story administrative building where the district authorities were located - this landmark was called the largest wooden house in the north of the Ob.

A lot of young people gathered at the conference. The presidium included Ervie Y.G., the secretaries of the regional party committee and the Komsomol, and a number of other leading comrades. In my speech, I spoke about the work of the expedition, which was not yet two years old, about the great difficulties in supplying field parties this season. During the break, I went outside and walked along the building. Then I was suddenly called out: "Come here, Vinogradov!" Ervie Y.G. was standing by the wall. and smoked in his usual light blue suit and already with the Hero of Socialist Labor star on his jacket, which he had received a month or two ago. "You are not whining like a Komsomol, Vinogradov! It is not good. You are bankrupt! Your expedition has no money to pay for aviation!", and so on in the same spirit. I objected that what does this have to do with people who are sitting in the field without food? We are simply obliged to provide them with basic supplies. It seems that we did not find a consensus in the conversation on this topic. I am still sure that the temporary lack of money in the expedition's accounts could not be a serious reason for the absence of helicopter aviation during this field season. There was something else.

Soon I received a call to Sverdlovsk to take exams for the correspondence postgraduate program of the Mining Institute. I wanted to study issues of placer exploration using drilling equipment. They brought in a percussion-rope machine and planned to install a column machine. There were no problems with passing exams in philosophy and a special subject, but I barely got by with English. And the teacher warned me not to come to the candidate exam with such knowledge. They enrolled. But starting any scientific research in those conditions was a pure utopia.

Around October, the head of the expedition, V.A. Chepkasov, gathered the management team and announced the order of the head of the department, Y.G. Ervie, about transferring him to the position of chief geologist of the expedition, and in his place the chief engineer, Y.F. Drozdov, was appointed chief. The news caused mild shock and bewilderment among those not involved in this order. Drozdov also tried to add himself to these "not involved", as if shaking his head in disapproval. But all the adults were sitting there and understood perfectly well that he was in the know, and without his consent the appointment could not have taken place. They did not open a discussion - in those days it was not accepted, and besides, it was useless. All those not involved left the office, leaving the old and new chief alone.

After some time, Chepkasov came to me and the chief geophysicist Oshev and asked me to help him move his desk to our office. We brought it in and began to install it right next to Oshev's table.

Assessing the retrospective of those events, as I did then, I still believe that the removal of V.A. Chepkasov from the post of head of the Saranpaul expedition was a personnel error by Y.G. Ervie. And not at all because Drozdov, in terms of his business qualities, was completely unsuitable for the new role, but because Chepkasov's potential would have allowed him to successfully lead the expedition in such a difficult region for many years. A man of exceptional honesty and integrity, not a grabber, with excellent production experience in the past, he was always aware of the affairs of all the expedition's divisions. He knew and delved into such details of the production process sometimes that even a narrow specialist in this field could have reached a dead end. Leaders of this level need to be trained for many years in precisely such difficult conditions. It will not work to take someone from a prosperous region and transplant them to this soil, as all the subsequent experience of this expedition has shown. Of course, like any person, he probably made mistakes, perhaps in the selection of personnel. Besides, despite his stern appearance, he was still a soft person inside (not at all spineless!), he pitied people and rarely punished them seriously.

The expedition's main specialists were mostly people his age or even older. At the regularly held evening planning meetings, he gave everyone assignments and always made them report on their implementation. This is where the "moment of truth" often came, when some of those reporting had nothing to say. He reacted to this quite indignantly, but without shouting or loudly banging his fist on the table. He only stubbornly sought an answer: "Why didn't you do it? You promised! What's the matter then?" The eyebrows on his face became even thicker and darker, sometimes he lightly slapped his palm on the table. From another unrestrained leader, one could have heard a bunch of different epithets interspersed with obscene language, but not from him - he knew how to restrain his emotions.

I immediately developed a normal relationship with him. I tried to carry out all his instructions, and he trusted me. Unfortunately, I did not always justify this trust, but not because of any bad habits or bad behavior, but solely because of my still inexperience.

The reasons for his removal from the position of chief, I think, were hidden in the intrigues against him of the geological management of solid minerals. To justify this decision, I think 2 reasons were offered to Ervie. The first is the ineffectiveness of the expedition's work over the past two years. Although what results can you expect in 2 years of work in such a closed area! But the geological service of the management bears no less responsibility for such results! The second reason was used - this is the dissatisfaction of the field workers with the supplies in the past field season due to the lack of helicopters. Moreover, in some cases this dissatisfaction acquired an exaggerated character. Gena Sazonov, a senior geologist of one of the field parties, who dabbled in writing, began publishing the story "Salem-yu - the Heart River" in the regional Komsomol newspaper. I read several of its issues. There, under a completely transparent and easily recognizable surname, Chepkasov was described, who allegedly gets into the only helicopter, flies somewhere into the taiga to hunt, and kills moose there with wild bloodthirstiness. And at this time in the field, due to the lack of helicopters, geologists are starving. And there are many other absurdities. Not only was this unfair to Chepkasov, it was simply a lie. By the standards of today's life, this scribbling could be called commissioned, but I do not think that in those years this was possible. Nevertheless, under the pressure of such "facts" Ervie decided to Chepkasov V.A. remove and put in his place a more "productive", in the opinion of the initiators, Drozdov Y.F.

The events, according to the story of Chepkasov V.A. himself, developed as follows: "With the head of the planning department, we arrived in Tyumen for the balance commission. The expedition was working at a loss, and Ervie understood perfectly well that with small volumes of work, and in such difficult conditions, it is difficult to ensure break-even work. In his conclusion, Ervie uttered the phrase that Chepkasov would be released. He expected that in my final speech I would ask to leave me as the head, and I would achieve the correction of affairs. This did not come from my lips, I only noted that Drozdov cannot be appointed head of the expedition." Subsequently, one of the members of the commission conveyed Ervie's phrase regarding me: "Look how proud!"

Valley of the river Khalmer-Yu

He really does have such a character. In the summer of 1963, we were waiting for a special flight from Tyumen with some important cargo for the field workers. It arrives. We open the cargo hatch - and there are iron nets for beds. Chepkasov lost his temper and turned the flight back to Tyumen. Bystritsky was furious about this action, and he also had a bad character!

After this, an endless series of changes in management personnel and all sorts of reorganizations began in the expedition. In addition, either by chance or for other reasons, an outflow of engineering and technical workers who had arrived at the beginning of the expedition's organization began. One of the first to leave was I.M. Sidoryak, who bought a house in the city of Dzhankoy, in the steppe Crimea. Others began to leave after him little by little.

However, the professional activity of V.A. Chepkasov, naturally, did not end there. He worked for another 3-4 months in Saranpaul, and then, in the spring, he left again for the Polar Urals as the head of a field party. He did not work there for long and Ervie Y.G., realizing his mistake in relation to him, and sensibly judging that such personnel are not to be thrown away, took him to a leadership position in his geological department. Somewhat later, he recommended him for the position of head of a group of Soviet specialists-geologists in Mongolia - this was already told to me by V.M. Kamenev, who came to visit me in Severouralsk. In the spring of 1974, a paper came from Moscow to the expedition, which said that we were holding a cluster scientific and technical conference and its leader from Moscow was listed as the deputy head of Glavzapadgeologiya Chepkasov V.A. When I read this paper, I immediately understood who he was talking about. Everything turned out like this. After the conference, we went to our home, reminisced about everyone and everything, and then went our separate ways. He gave me his address and phone numbers and invited me to visit.

The next time we met was in 1980. I flew to Moscow on a business trip from Semipalatinsk-21. I had some free time, and I went to Barrikadnaya. I called from the checkpoint and he immediately sent me a pass. I went up to a floor somewhere. I knew that Moscow was short on space for officials, but his office was simply amazing. There was only room for one table and a row of chairs against the wall opposite. When I sat down on one of the chairs, my knees no longer fit - the table was in the way and I had to put my legs diagonally. But the table was really big, I don't think I've ever seen one like it anywhere else. The surface of the table was completely sterile. There was no paper, no pencil or pen, no book, no calendar - absolutely nothing. There could be two reasons for this - extremely low document flow and the owner of the office immediately sent rare papers to subordinate clerks for execution, the second - the papers were put away in the desk before the arrival of an outsider, since many of them could be for official use or even of a closed nature. This was the style of work in those years.

Veniamin Aleksandrovich was very kind in communication. He asked me: "Do I drink Ceylon tea?" - "Of course, I answered, if I have it!" In those years, this was already a great rarity. He took a cup, an electric kettle, a 25-gram pack of Ceylon tea from the nightstand, and, grossly violating fire safety regulations, plugged the kettle into the socket. When the water boiled, he didn't skimp on the tea leaves - it was obvious that he knew a thing or two about tea.

In the conversation I told him that in 1957 I lived in the same room in the dormitory of the Mining Institute in Sverdlovsk with one of the Mongolian representatives, namely Dembreldorj Sereeterin. He was extremely surprised and said that he knew him well, had business relations with him in Mongolia, and today he holds a high post as a representative of Mongolia in the Council for Mutual Economic Assistance and lives in Moscow. However, he does not maintain relations with him today, since in those years communication with foreigners was not welcomed, although there was a saying that "A chicken is not a bird, and Mongolia is not abroad!" After talking with him, his wife, who worked here, also wanted to look at me.

Irina Pavlovna, a wonderful woman, his faithful companion in all his wanderings and moves. I have not seen her since Saranpaul for more than 15 years. And I noticed only small changes. She worked as a secretary of the board of the Ministry of Geology of the RSFSR. And the Minister was Rovnin L.I., former chief geologist of the Tyumen department. Her work was extremely lively, people were constantly coming in, asking something, phones were ringing. For her lively character, this was the very work.

As for the work of V.A. Chepkasov himself in the Main Directorate, I have serious doubts that he experienced complete satisfaction from his work. He was a physically strong man, a good athlete in his youth - a skier, and even in old age he regularly put on skis. And suddenly, at 45 years old, he sits down to "sort through" papers, with his experience and knowledge. Of course, it is good to live in Moscow, and children can study in decent universities, and the living conditions and medicine are all better than on any periphery. But such people, having roots in Moscow, and even making them members of the board of the Ministry, could have been much more useful, heading territorial geological associations on the periphery. For example, V.A. Chepkasov could well have headed the geological service of the Urals, including the territories from Chelyabinsk to the Polar Urals. And so it turns out that good specialists and managers are taken to Moscow at a very mature age, and "fermented" until retirement at large tables, forcing them to rustle papers. And the periphery at this time is slowly rotting.

And in general, I believe that at the end of the 50s, the method of horizontal rotation of personnel in civilian organizations was undeservedly sent to the dump (the military still has it). The principle of selection prevailed - even if it is poor, but our own! Local personnel, although they have the best momentary knowledge of the situation, are heavily "overgrown" with all sorts of family and other undesirable connections, which affects relationships with people. Even in genetics, the lack of an influx of fresh blood leads to stagnation and degeneration of species, and what can we say about the management of large teams, and even in difficult operating conditions!

Chepkasov V.A. and so he was lost for real production forever. In 1988, he suffered a serious illness - apparently his heart simply could not accept this Gorbachev mess called "perestroika". In April 2000, we met again at his home, and again drank excellent Ceylon tea! Now he leads a quiet life of a pensioner, often walking his dog on the street in the summer, but in the winter he is transformed and 3-4 times a week he runs on skis for 12-15 km. per day.

However, let's return to Saranpaul. In November 1963, it was necessary to break through a winter road to the "Izvestnyaki" section, where a drilling rig was installed and a team was working. The total distance there was 120 km. Of these, 90 went along the quarterly clearing in the forest, and 30 km. It was necessary to find an acceptable road without cutting down forests, through clearings and some small streams. This was the way to the upper reaches of the Yatriya River. We went on two ATLs. I took with me a guide, the already known Petya Nomin, and two workers with a Druzhba chainsaw, in case we had to cut through a dense forest somewhere. The frosts had already grabbed the ground and about 25 cm of snow had fallen. The guide and I were riding on the front tractor. The movement along the clearing was normal at a speed of about 10 km/h. One day, a horn from a second car sounded from behind and we stopped. I got out and saw a carpenter holding a large black bird by the neck. I came closer and saw a huge wood grouse. It turns out that the bird was sitting in the snow and our tractor partially ran over its body with its caterpillar track, we drove forward, and the wood grouse raised its head on a long neck from the snow. The guys in the second car saw this, stopped and pulled the slightly crushed bird out of the snow by its neck. After that, they honked at us.

Returning from the field on a MI-4

The path along the clearing did not present any particular difficulties due to the low snow cover. When it ended and we turned into the virgin land, some troubles awaited us. A frozen bed of a small river appeared ahead. I got out of the truck and decided to examine everything carefully myself. We broke through the ice - it turned out to be quite shallow - somewhere up to 30 cm. However, the climb to the opposite bank was quite steep and insurmountable for the trucks, especially since they were loaded with 5 barrels of diesel fuel each.

Then I ordered the driver of the second car to stay where he was, and I decided to drive down the river in the first truck and look for a more gentle exit. We drove about 70 meters down, made a sharp turn and in the light of the headlights we saw a gentle exit, but at that moment I felt a strong roll of the car forward, the ice cracked and the whole car fell to the bottom. The place turned out to be deeper than we expected - the fan of the running engine sometimes caught the water with its tip, and splashes flew out from under the hood. A moment later I saw the light of the headlights in the rearview mirror and realized that the second truck was quickly approaching us. The driver and his two passengers had already "had a drink" on the way - I noticed this even earlier - and now, as they say, a drunk can do anything. They did not wait for my return, but rushed after us after a short period of time. Having made a turn after us, they managed to see that we were in the water, but I am not sure that the driver would have had enough reaction to brake in front of us and the collision would have been inevitable. At that moment, the ice underneath them gave way and they fell 2 meters away from us into our hole - although theirs was a little shallower. We arrived.

Both banks were steep and inaccessible for exiting by the usual method. Driving along the river bed was also impossible due to the depth and thick ice. All military tractors have an excellent emergency device - a traction winch, which is driven by a separate power take-off shaft. Its traction force exceeds the maximum weight of the loaded tractor by 40 percent. We decided to take advantage of this. First, we turned the second tractor back to the bank, unwound the cable and hooked it to a thick pine tree and turned on the winch at the slowest speed. The machine slowly, breaking the ice, began to crawl onto the bank. The most critical moment was at the so-called "break" - the steepest place on the bank. If the cable had snapped - and such cases did happen, then the tractor would have simply turned over into the river with its tracks up. The first one was pulled out in the same way, but this time we were backing it up with the one that was already standing on the bank. After that, we found a suitable place for the crossing, sawed and threw trunks of nearby trees into the riverbed and crossed safely. This was a good lesson for me. We were lucky that it was shallow enough and both engines did not stall. We had nowhere to wait for help on land, we had to cut down a large area for the helicopter, and it was impossible to walk 30 km in winter to the drilling site through solid snow. In the end, by morning we were there. The conclusion I made was not to take drunk drivers on long journeys, and to be more careful myself.

In the middle reaches of the Manya River, in the fall, we dropped off a new drilling rig ZIF-650 on the K-61 amphibious vehicle. We built a chopped wooden greenhouse for it and brought in trailers for housing. The work was going well until the Constitution Day holiday, which was celebrated on December 5th in those years. The drilling rig was not stopped for the holiday, as the weather was quite frosty. However, after the holiday, on December 6th, a radiogram suddenly arrived from there that there was a fire at the drilling rig. The chief mechanic and I immediately went to the site. What we saw there was a sad sight - the fire had destroyed almost all of the drilling equipment and all of the drill pipe candles standing in the hatch. The fire started inside the hothouse near the diesel engine, and the flames burst out through the drilling rig and pump through the open upper hatch, like into a chimney. When they began to sort out the reasons, according to the foreman, they stopped work for several hours for some reason and turned off the diesel engine. In the severe frost, it quickly cooled down. When the foreman started to start it again, a spark allegedly flashed during the start of the starting engine and the gasoline that was supposedly poured on the starter caught fire. The flame quickly spread from there to other oily parts of the installation, and they were unable to put it out.

This version was for small children, although theoretically it could not be excluded. Even in front of us, the foreman himself was still drunk. The reason was simple and obvious: a very cold engine was started with a torch of open fire, which caused the oil spilled around to flare up. It was noticed too late, since everyone was still quite drunk from the vodka they had brought with them for the shift change. The drilling rig was completely destroyed. The foreman was transferred to assistant driller and the case was sent to court, which ordered that 10% of his salary be collected over the course of a year, which was hundredths of the damage caused. And in general, I believe that 99% of fires on equipment in geology occur due to the use of open fire, drunkenness, or both.

Immediately after the fire, Drozdov flew to Tyumen for a meeting. And there - it was there that a huge scandal broke out. During a meeting at Ervie Y.G.'s, the phone suddenly rang, which the owner apparently picked up at any meeting. As eyewitnesses said, Ervie's face slowly began to change color. Then he hung up and asked Drozdov Y.F.: "What happened to your drilling rig?" He answered that there was a fire and the drilling rig had burned down. "Then why am I hearing about it from others instead of you?" Ervie Y.G. was furious, and there was a reason for that. Drozdov replied that immediately after the radiogram from the drilling rig about the fire, he sent a radiogram to him in Tyumen. And indeed, this radiogram arrived in Tyumen about 4 days later... only in an envelope, not by radio. When they sorted this matter out, it turned out that Drozdov Y.F.'s secretary, by mistake, instead of taking the written radiogram to the radio, put it in an envelope and gave it to the post office. And there was always a vigilant comrade at the post office who had to report correspondence about unusual cases to the appropriate authorities. By the way, there were also jokers among the geologists. Once one of them sent a telegram to his friend in Tyumen: "Load oranges in barrels. The Karamazov Brothers." The sender of the telegram was quickly summoned to the appropriate place, and they spent a long time finding out the registration and place of residence of the Karamazov brothers. However, let's return to the story of the fire.

Ervie received a call from one of the secretaries of the regional party committee, who was informed by the special services that monitored the airwaves in the region and detected a radiogram from our drilling rig about the fire. Everyone thought that it was about a drilling rig for oil and gas exploration, which cost a lot of money. That year, about 10 teams worked in the entire geological department in the oil and gas industry, and the loss of even one of them was irreparable in the short term. However, if all these people had known at once that the drilling rig, which looked like a small hybrid of a spinning wheel and a sewing machine, had suffered, then no one would have made any noise. When they found out about it, everyone immediately calmed down. But I think that as a result of this story, Drozdov received a "black mark" from Ervie.

However, our troubles did not end there. It is not for nothing that the proverb says: "When trouble comes, open the gates!" In our field conditions, up to ten workers worked on cutting clearings - sightings for geophysicists in the forests. Usually they worked in pairs and lived in tents, in the forest, carrying all their simple belongings on themselves. The clearings - sightings that they cut created a ground network for the measurement points of the gravimetric party. In general, this was quite hard physical labor, although well paid. But everything had to be carried on one's own, including food, a tent and an iron stove.

In mid-December, a radiogram came from one of the field teams of geophysicists that an accident had occurred in one of the pairs of loggers - a man was covered by a fallen tree and died. Telegrams were immediately sent to all the district authorities, to the administration, to Tyumen. The district prosecutor flew out to us to investigate, and our curator arrived from Tyumen. There were no helicopter pads nearby and the crew of the MI-4, on which we flew to the site, had to choose a landing site as close as possible by trial and error. These events took place in the area of ​​the Khora-Syur elevation, and they landed on one of the high-rises. The pilots warned us that the last time they could take off and go to their base was 17-00. We had 2 hours at our disposal. The descent was quite easy for a distance of about 1.5 km. Although there was deep snow all around, we followed human tracks, albeit covered in places. We approached the scene. A dead man was sitting by a fallen tree, his head covered with some kind of rag and already covered with snow.

In general, all these events were the strongest psychological test for me. Before this, I had never had to be close to dead people, and I did not have the slightest desire to do so, always avoiding this matter. Here, naturalism surpassed all conceivable limits for me. The prosecutor came up, removed the rag from the dead man's head and noticed that tits had already managed to peck at some of it, and besides, he was already frozen like a stone in a sitting position. After this, measurements of different distances at the scene of the crime began with a tape measure and I had to draw a diagram of this place and its details. I did all this, trying not to look at the victim. When all the paperwork was finished, the prosecutor said that the body had to be carried to the helicopter and taken to Saranpaul. No one was prepared for such a turn of events and did not even take a stretcher with them. The second woodcutter, who brought us to the site, made an improvised stretcher out of two poles, they sat the victim on it, threw a rag loosely over his head and carried the stretcher up the mountain to the helicopter.

There were five of us, including the limping Drozdov Y.F. Four of us carried the stretcher, two people in front and two in the back. I got the seat in the back and the body was sitting facing me. Drozdov was walking at his side, holding him from falling off the stretcher. We had to walk on virgin snow, as the path was very narrow. As soon as we left the forest, we saw a helicopter on the mountain. Signal flares flew up from it several times - we realized that our time was up and tried to go faster, but the climb up the mountain was very difficult. After a short time, the helicopter engine was started and the blades began to spin up, a minute later the helicopter took off and began to move away somewhere. We rushed even faster with the last of our strength, on the last, steepest hundred meters we fell several times from exhaustion right into the snow, the corpse began to fall to the side, it was with difficulty put back in place, the rag from the face constantly slid off, and I tried not to look at it and turned away. With great difficulty, completely exhausted, we dragged ourselves up the mountain, and then we saw a helicopter that was coming in for a landing. The pilots were seething with indignation - we were half an hour late for them. During the flight, they told us that if the district prosecutor had not been with us, they would have left us here and would have flown away half an hour ago to their base. I can't even imagine how we would have spent the night there in that case! This also shows that every action in such harsh conditions must be well thought out and planned in time, especially if it involves the use of helicopter aviation, especially in winter, when daylight hours are sharply shortened.

Soon, the Kuleshovs also left the expedition. They really wanted to earn money for a car, but it turned out to be not so easy. In the fall, he also had trouble. He was leading a barge with food supplies for the expedition from Tyumen, but before reaching 60 km, in the area of ​​the Khurumpaulsky rapids, the tugboat broke down. He did not have time to find a new one, and the barge froze into the ice with all the cargo, since it was already late, and ice slush had been flowing along the river for several days. Everything would have been fine, but the cargo included a lot of wine, the bottles of which began to burst with the onset of frost. With the establishment of strong ice, it was necessary to spend a lot of time and money to take the cargo to the expedition base. From us they left immediately for Sakhalin, apparently thinking that the North would be less severe for them. But the North is the North everywhere, and from there they left after a short time and ended up in Dzhankoy, next to I.M. Sidoryak, who had recently left there. In the summer of 1964, he sent someone a letter in Saranpaul, where he wrote that he would rather crush stones with a sledgehammer in Crimea than live in the North - such were the deep impressions he had taken from there. This nevertheless undermined his health and about 10 years later, still very young, he passed away.

In fact, there were some interesting people in the North, brought here either by their own desire or by fate. One of them was the surveyor Kaigorodtsev, who a few years ago worked in Eastern Siberia in the expeditions of the famous writer Vladimir Fedoseyev, who wrote about those times the stories "The Evil Spirit of Yambuya", "The Last Fire", "In the Grip of Dzhugdyr", knew him well and told the true events of those years.

Unfortunately, there were also drunkards who had previously held high positions or worked near such people. I noticed a thin, toothless old man who was the stoker of the expedition office's kettle. It turned out later that he was the former chief inspector of the USSR railways. He once had his own salon car, but apparently as a result of numerous trips on inspections, he finally drank himself to death. His family kicked him out, and now he was whiling away his days in our backwater, regularly drinking away his salary.

Another interesting person I met at the drilling site was the driller's assistant, a relatively young man, just over 40. He turned out to be the former chief pilot of Marshal of the Soviet Union V.D. Sokolovsky at the time when he commanded the Group of Soviet Forces in Germany. He regularly flew on a LI-2 from Berlin to Moscow and back. He drank himself to death and sank down to us. He told me that his friends were inviting him to work as an air traffic controller in Krasnoyarsk, but he knew very well that he simply would not be able to resist and not drink anymore. That's why he didn't go anywhere. Like many of our other workers who can't go further than Berezov.

Saranpaul. In the foreground is the expedition village.

In the same month, the story of the moose hunt by chief geophysicist Oshev S.P. unexpectedly continued. As I was told, Vasiliev butchered those two moose shot from a helicopter and transported the meat to Tolya with something. Then, on Oshev's command, this meat was delivered to the field detachments of geophysicists at the usual price of 50 kopecks per 1 kg. Probably, everything would have gone that way, but one nuance intervened, which allowed this matter to be unraveled. The meat turned out to have a smell. It is possible that Vasiliev drained the blood from the carcasses too late, and it "caught fire" - in this case, the meat acquires a slight putrid smell. The workers in the detachments were outraged, and wrote a letter somewhere in the district complaining that their own bosses were poisoning them for their hard-earned money, and with meat obtained by poaching. It must be admitted that Oshev had quite a few enemies for some reason, I had heard unflattering reviews about him on numerous occasions, but I didn't attach any importance to it, and we rarely had any joint business with him at work.

Then someone came pretty close to the true picture of the events that had taken place, most likely from the words or hints of one of the participants. I'll say right away - just not me, because I always control my conversations, especially on such sensitive topics.

The reaction of the district authorities was surprisingly quick and efficient. An investigator flew to Tolya and searched the Vasilievs' house. Three moose skins were found. I don't know what Vasiliev said about this, but in December of that same year, a court from the district came to Saranpaul to hear charges against Oshev for illegally shooting three moose without a license. For some reason, I was also summoned as a witness. The conversation about the moose being shot from a helicopter was constantly floating around the office. Some of the employees tried to talk to me about telling the truth and everything as it was. Ilya Vernik, a senior geophysicist from one of the parties, was especially zealous about this. He heard something from someone about my presence during this hunt, and came up to me several times and advised me to tell the whole truth.

On the appointed day, I went to court. After going through all the procedures required in such cases, the judge began asking me questions. I answered everything truthfully. The key question was: "Are you aware of the case of citizen Oshev shooting 3 moose from an airplane?" I answered verbatim that I knew nothing about the cases of Oshev shooting 3 moose from an airplane. There were no more questions for me. Oddly enough, the court still found Oshev guilty of unlicensed shooting of 3 moose and sentenced him to some kind of suspended sentence. In addition, he had to pay a fine of 1,500 rubles. Although he himself did not admit this case, the court apparently had enough evidence without my confession.

The question arises: "Why didn't I tell the whole truth in court, but took advantage of the imprecision of the question formulated to me by the judge?" I answer: "Not at all because I didn't want to give up Oshev. Everything had been clear with him for a long time in this story. I didn't want to ruin the fate of a great helicopter pilot, who would have been suspended from flying for a long time or forever. As life showed, his talent was in demand, and after some time he retrained on the MI-4, and soon on the giant MI-6, and flew in the skies over the Tyumen region for many more years. Ervie Y.G., having learned about this story, showed extreme displeasure - Oshev S.P. was immediately removed from his leadership position and thrown into the "lower ranks". Instead of him, they sent Shmelev N.S., a good specialist and a very pleasant person to talk to. He was a participant in the war, and at the front, in the active army. He often talked about the hardest battles in the rainy autumn of 1944 in the foothills of the Carpathians, where he took direct participation.

Around the same time, in December 1963, the secretary of the expedition's party bureau suggested that I think about joining the party. In a year I would be 28 years old, and I could no longer be a member of the Komsomol due to my age. There were no objections from my side, and there could not be any. During my conscious life, I understood and learned well that the party is a kind of system of power. Without membership in the party, it was impossible in principle to occupy any leadership positions in any sphere of activity in our country. Naturally, as an engineer, I was interested in the problem of career growth, in which I could reveal my potential. The inevitable costs of this - expressing thoughts out loud that were in tune with the dogmas and postulates of the party associated with the construction of communism, were covered by a simple scheme - I think one thing, but I say another. The overwhelming majority of people behaved exactly like that. In all my life I have never met people, party members, who sincerely believed in the possibility of building communism in the future. However, I am convinced that such people were in our country in the first third of the century, but their number catastrophically decreased as the number of mistakes made by the party increased, and I think that under Nikita Khrushchev they disappeared completely. In my opinion, communism is a chimera, it is like a horizon line, which you can walk to for as long as you like and never reach. The paradox, however, is that some of the postulates declared by communism have long been successfully implemented in some capitalist countries. So the issue here is not in definitions, but in the ability of society and the people of the country to self-organize. If this is not the case, then no "correct" names for the future society, including those consisting of all sorts of "...isms" will help.

Mt Sablya

However, let's return from theory to the naked truth of life in those years. I immediately recalled the difficulties my cousin Lenya Vinogradov overcame when he tried to join the party in the late 1950s while working at Uramash. And in Sverdlovsk it was more difficult because there were a lot of engineers there. And there was a rule that in order to accept one engineering and technical worker into the party, two workers had to be accepted with him. Lenya made very serious efforts in this direction - he worked on a voluntary basis in the district committee of the Komsomol, did something else. And one day, when the lengthy procedure of his acceptance had already begun, some insignificant commission refused him, and the matter stalled. This was a very strong blow, which led to a jump in blood pressure and deep frustration not only for him, but also for his parents. However, he took into account his previous mistakes and tried again. And after two years he succeeded and everyone calmed down immediately.

With my admission, the matter was simpler and more complicated at the same time. It was necessary to present 3 recommendations from old party members. But for young people under 28, a recommendation from the Komsomol organization was required instead of one of the three. If the former head of the expedition Chepkasov V.A. and the secretary of the party bureau agreed to give me recommendations from the party members, then it was as if God himself ordered me to receive a recommendation from the Komsomol organization, since I myself was a secretary. However, I intuitively felt that it was in the Komsomol that I could have trouble. True, I did not yet clearly know from whom.

I gathered the Komsomol members for a meeting. We quickly ran through the entire agenda and moved on to the last question - about giving me a recommendation for joining the party. I spoke and explained what was required. And then Komsomol member Ilya Vernik appeared - a senior geophysicist from one of the parties. He diligently began to find out from me: "Why am I joining the party? And why now?" I tried to explain everything to him calmly. He probably expected me to tell him that I wanted to build communism while being in the ranks of the CPSU. Then he could have asked me: "Why don't you want to build communism without being in the party?", but I did not give him such an opportunity. When we were done with the ideology, he moved on to the results of the trial and began to accuse me of not telling the whole truth about the bad behavior of S.P. Oshev. I had to explain myself again. Now, and even then, his behavior was completely understandable to me. We were on good terms - he was an avid preference player, like me, we played together very often, and he joined the expedition soon after me. That's probably why he jealously watched my movements in various guises, although we had absolutely no professional contact. But I was the first to be offered to join, although he could have been too. This is probably where his pride got the better of him. I am absolutely convinced that he was accepted a little later. He is worthy. After listening to conversations on these topics, everyone voted to give me a recommendation. One was against - Ilya. But this incident did not spoil our relationship, and we continued to communicate normally.

Saranpaul 3rd village

The rest was a matter of technique - a party meeting and the bureau of the district party committee. In February 1964, I flew to Berezovo and went through all the formalities of the reception. I remember the first secretary of the district party committee, a Khanty by nationality, Savin K. Ya. It was obvious from the nature of the questions he asked and the literacy of his speech that he was a very smart guy. Later, I and others who knew him had to hear very flattering reviews about him. However, in the fall of that same year, he was suddenly relieved of his post as first secretary of the district committee, and a little later he found himself in an ordinary party job - an instructor for the district party committee. Ordinary people were at a loss. People in the know later said that he was trying to raise the status of the Khanty-Mansiysk Okrug in connection with the upcoming major expansion of work on oil and gas. I think that he was thrown into the background not even for trying to do this, but simply for asking a probing question on this topic somewhere in the regional party committee. In those years, it was hard to find a greater "sedition". I think he got off very lightly, if it was true.

This stay in Berezovo was memorable because the restaurant suddenly sold frozen sturgeon stroganina and so-called yastik black caviar. Since I lived there for several days, I ate my fill of these dishes. For lunch and dinner, I took several servings of both - the prices were very low, since the caviar had pieces of fat and they had to be removed before eating. And sturgeon stroganina was a first-class dish.

When I visit Berezovo, I always remember V. Surikov's painting "Menshikov in Berezovo". Once I was unable to get into a hotel and asked to spend the night with one of the locals on the street of private houses. It was a pleasant surprise that the owner turned out to be a history teacher at the local school, and of course, we got to talking about this topic. According to him, and he also referred to the memories of local elders, the cemetery where Menshikov was buried was located on the high bank of the Vogulka River, a tributary of the S. Sosva, and not far from their street. Since the banks were made of very soft shale, the river over the past 240 years has constantly "eaten" this bank in parts and washed away all the burials into the water. Although there was another point of view that claimed that the burial site, especially in the permafrost, should be preserved. It's just that no one knows exactly where to look.

With Nina at the new office, 1964

In February 1964, news arrived that Drozdov Y.F. was leaving us somewhere in Yakutia, and a new head of the expedition was arriving. In principle, most of the engineering and technical workers expected this event - the mass of mistakes he had made, and ordinary bad luck, exceeded the critical level. From the very beginning of his arrival at the expedition, it became clear that the man had ended up in the wrong place, both in terms of age and work experience. Often, talking to him, there was a feeling that he did not quite understand where he was, and what exactly he needed to do now. The working conditions in small, warm and paved Moldova, where before lunch you could go around all the geological parties on a child's scooter, were not at all like the harsh conditions of these places, and this expedition did not allow for training and readjustment on the go. Decisions had to be made quickly and competently. Any mistake led to negative consequences. I think that he quickly realized this and already started looking for a new job. But why he was rushing to the North again, I still don't understand.

Soon the new head of the expedition arrived - Valentin Nikolaevich Morozov, a large man with sharp, strong-willed facial features, with a completely gray head and age 65. For many years he worked as the head of expedition №101, located in the village of Novo-Alekseyevka near Sverdlovsk. The expedition was engaged in exploration and extraction of piezoelectric quartz, and we had already dealt with its representatives in Tolya.

He was a typical representative of the already departed Stalin era from the times "when the plan is the law, and for failure to fulfill the only punishment is the death penalty", and "when alcohol was eaten with validol" - as O. Kuvaev wrote in his brilliant story "Territory". He was from the same line of leaders as one of the managers of the Boksitstroy trust, F. Karlyukov from Severouralsk, and the head of the Siberian expedition, A. I. Polyakov from Yeniseisk. During Khrushchev's time, they were removed from their positions and sent like tumbleweeds across the country. Morozov had been retired for several years, and someone "dug him up" and suggested Y.G. Ervie for Saranpaul. I not only think, but I am sure that in his younger years he was a very strong leader, strong-willed, and in his place. An enterprise that was engaged in the extraction of strategic raw materials, and for many years in those years only such strong personalities could lead. But today he was a pale shadow of that old leader. I don't know what was the reason - either age or new times, but he did not show any special qualities in leading the expedition.

He lived mainly on memories of the years he had lived, the old days, and individual incidents from his work life. He occupied a separate three-room cottage, and he was clearly bored there alone. On weekends, he would gather several people, vodka and snacks would appear on the table - mostly dried cheese, and conversations would go on until 3-4 in the morning. Sometimes they would play cards, but without paying in cash. For some reason, he also introduced me to this circle of the chosen ones. The power plant stopped working at 12 o'clock at night, and further gatherings took place by candlelight. Of all his stories, one episode was memorable: back in Stalin's time, an inspector with a very "broad" mandate suddenly came to his expedition. He spent several days in different places searching for something. The expedition workers were at a loss, and those in the know could only guess. When he had finished his work and signed the report, only then did he tell Morozov that he had come on the personal instructions of the Chairman of the USSR State Control Mehlis L.Z. The latter had received a denunciation that Morozov V.N. was not handing over all the mined piezoelectric quartz to the state, but was hiding part of it somewhere. The inspector's goal was to find this hidden part, and then arrest Morozov. Mehlis L.Z. was such an odious and ruthless person at that time that there could be no doubts on this topic.

The trailer fell...

It's cold...

The most interesting thing was that the volume of crystal production by the expedition was small and amounted to tens of kilograms per month. Therefore, in order to fulfill the plan regularly, large overfulfillment was not shown, and the surplus was hidden, so that later it could be added to the plan in case of unfavorable results of the next month. In this case, there was also a stash, but it was in the personal safe of Morozov V.N., where the auditor did not think to look.

That same winter, a log 4-apartment house was completed in the expedition settlement, where we moved from Varvara Vasilyevna. The apartments were of the simplest design - one room, a kitchen with a brick oven and stove, a vestibule and a high wooden porch. In winter, they heated with wood, and after coming home from work and until night, the stove was constantly lit, and only at night it "rested". With this regime, even in severe frosts in the morning there was a plus temperature, though not much above zero, and you had to get dressed quickly.

This year's spring began as usual and nothing foreshadowed trouble. However, after the ice drift began, the water in Lyapin suddenly began to rise rapidly and Saranpaul began to flood, the 2nd and 3rd villages of the village turned into islands, some houses were flooded up to the windows. The water rose 2 meters in our iron warehouse. It was good that the cargo had been lifted to the upper racks. Even the road from the village to the expedition settlement was flooded. After a short time, a bathhouse was washed away by the stream near one of the houses. The local authorities began to appeal to all authorities for help - to the district and to the leadership of both expeditions. It was clear that somewhere downstream of the Lyapin an ice jam had formed, which became an obstacle on the river's path, and the water began to flood the low areas of the floodplain. After a short consultation, the local authorities boarded the helicopter, took me with them and ordered me to assess the possibilities of breaking the jam with the explosives we had in our warehouses.

Soon after takeoff, the machine went along the right bank and a few minutes later we saw the jam itself. At this point, the river made a sharp turn and an artificial dam made of ice blocks was clearly visible, many of which stood on their edges. The river was clogged with ice about a meter thick across its entire width - about 400 meters. The ice was packed to the very bottom of the river. We passed over the ice dam several times at low altitude, assessed the situation, and landed the helicopter on the left, unflooded bank of the river, right on the outskirts of the small village of Hoshlog. As a blasting specialist, I told the local leaders that such a powerful jam could only be destroyed with overhead charges with a total volume of at least 1 ton of explosives. There were about 200 kg left in the warehouses. In addition, the work of laying out charges on the swamped ice of the river required several blasters and was extremely dangerous. No one thought of bombing the jam from the air, calling in army aviation. Everyone began to think about what to do next.

The whole village consisted of 3 residential buildings and outbuildings. There lived 3 Mansi families. I went to the nearest house, and here I was surrounded by a whole brood of red-haired, about 2-month-old puppies of a real West Siberian (Vogul) Laika. Soon the owner came up - a short Mansi man, with whom I started talking. Then the idea came to me to ask him for one puppy for myself. He immediately agreed. I pointed to one that I especially liked, with a brighter reddishness than the others, since I knew for sure that this color is typical for the Vogul Laika. However, he refused me it, and promised to choose another. He felt the parietal tubercle of two or three more and gave one of them, saying that I should give him any money, otherwise the gift would be of no use. He rummaged in his pocket, found a three-ruble note and gave it to me. I knew before that only Mansi hunters have good purebred dogs. And in order to preserve their best qualities, they shoot all outsiders and stray dogs with unknown qualities, in order to prevent accidental mating. And this is done not only in small settlements of several houses, but also in large ones like Nyaksimvol.

In general, I have loved dogs, and cats too, since childhood. But if cats could be kept in an apartment, then we never had the conditions for normal dog keeping. As a child, I tried to feed and keep some stray puppies in a barn, but my mother and grandmother did not welcome my undertakings. I gained some knowledge of cynology later, when I subscribed to the magazine "Hunting and hunting economy" for several years. My first practical acquaintance with dogs of the Laika type took place in Severouralsk. Of course, these were not purebred Laikas, but crossbreeds. In general, a good hunting Laika, especially one that was used for large game, was a great rarity and cost a lot of money at that time. The number of good Laikas increased as we moved north of the Urals. Some specimens had simply outstanding exterior and hunting qualities. It is impossible to forget one dog that a hunter I knew bought in the village of Yasunt from another Mansi hunter for 50 rubles. It was an old Laika, with partial hearing loss, but you couldn’t take your eyes off its exterior – it was so proportionally and correctly built. In addition, the color of its back was dark-dark red, smoothly turning into lighter shades on the sides, simply attracted the eye. I have never seen more beautiful Laikas, either before or after. Not in pictures, not in real life. Sometimes I went to him just to look at the dog again. I think that the offspring of this male is still in Yasunt. I brought the puppy home and we named him "Sobol" (sable). At first we settled him in a closet, and later I built him a simple kennel next to the porch.

Hoshlog. Sobol

The flood suddenly began to subside as quickly as it had begun. Apparently, the jam could not withstand the pressure of the water and burst. However, it still managed to cause trouble - the water caused significant damage to many houses.

A new field season was coming up, and the geological department in Tyumen refused to supply us with cartridge explosives this year as well. Our neighbors were also in trouble, and they refused us. Then I suggested going to the Urals, to the Severouralsk bauxite mine, and asking there. With their volumes of mining operations, our need for a season of 1000 kg. would be completely unnoticeable for them.

Soon, I flew to Ivdel on a passing special flight, and from there I took a train to Severouralsk. The next day I went to the head of mining operations, V. Miroshnichenko, with the documents. He did not refuse, but asked me to go to the Sverdlovsk Economic Council and obtain permission to release explosives from the Severouralsk bauxite mine warehouse. That was my first opportunity to get acquainted with the brainchild of N.S. Khrushchev - the economic councils. That same day I took a train to Sverdlovsk.

In Sverdlovsk, I first went to the main building of the economic council on Lenin Street. This is a massive, beautiful building with columns, previously belonged to the Sverdlovsk Coal Plant, and now houses the State University. The entrance was free - no private security or security. On the second floor, where the leadership of the economic council was located, I noticed a sign on the door of the reception room of one of the deputy chairmen - V.V. Blucher. This, as I guessed, was the son of the famous Marshal V.V. Blucher, who was repressed by Stalin. I needed to get to the non-ferrous metallurgy department. It was not there, and I was sent to the second building - the House of Industry. I knew it from my student days, but I had never been there. It was a huge building with an enormous number of rooms and about 6 floors. It took up almost an entire block. I looked for the department I needed for a long time, found it, but only clerks were present, who were sitting on tables, smoking incessantly right in their offices, and discussing the latest football news. Some were gathering in the corridors and were also busy with similar matters. When the deputy head of the department appeared, he immediately went to see him. He signed our request without a word, only inquiring where our expedition was located. The next day I was already at Miroshnichenko, who allowed us to receive explosives from them - cartridge detonite D10-A. We took it out by helicopter, and a year later the Severouralsk bauxite mine gave us another 4 tons, which we took out along the winter road with tractors.

I had to go to Severouralsk not only for work, but also for personal reasons. Nina was pregnant and for safety it was necessary to give birth in a place with more or less decent medicine. In Severouralsk this was not bad. I asked my mother to take Nina in for this time - she agreed without objection. Soon I was already in Tyumen at the administration. There were some talks again about a change in our management. I did not find out the details and quickly flew to Berezovo, and from there home.

Only 4 months of Morozov V.N.'s work had passed, but he had already managed to bring some of his acquaintances from Novo-Alekseyevka to the expedition. The expedition's chief accountant, Troitsky S.A., arrived, a deep pensioner - a dandelion like himself, but an extremely competent specialist. The middle-aged married couple Manakov also arrived: she began working as the head of the expedition's planning department, as before; and he became the head of our drilling party, although in the 101st expedition he was its technical director. He had little understanding of drilling, since his previous expedition was mainly engaged in mining operations. However, his wife was a very competent economist.

The next weekend, at another evening get-together at Morozov's, I noticed that the owner began to speak disrespectfully of Ervie, saying something about his mistakes. I could not understand what was going on. It turned out that while I was traveling to the Urals, the boss had flown to the administration in Tyumen. I do not know for what purpose he went, but Ervie Y.G. did not receive him there. People of his experience have learned in their difficult lives to recognize their future not only from the look of their direct supervisor, but even from the slightest indirect nuances in his behavior. In this case, it was not an indirect nuance of behavior, but an expression of direct displeasure. And Morozov immediately made the right conclusion that his days in Saranpaul were numbered. His dismissal is still a mystery to me. He did not make any gross mistakes or blunders, and he simply did not have time to do so in 4 months of work. True, there were no special achievements either. The construction of the base continued. The building of the new expedition office was commissioned. Housing was being built. The low efficiency of the exploration work could not be blamed on him either. Or maybe the reorganization itch of the geological service for solid minerals or something else unknown to me had an effect.

Soon, the head of the Tyumen geological expedition, Shalavin Mikhail Vladimirovich, flew to Saranpaul, and brought all the necessary organizational orders from the department. According to one of the orders, the Saranpaul expedition was liquidated, and in its place remained the same Saranpaul group of parties with direct subordination not to the department, but to the Tyumen geological expedition, which had existed in Tyumen for many years, was located in the village of Parfenov and was engaged in exploration of building materials and other small things. Shalavin was recently appointed its head, and S.G. Karachentsev was transferred there from the Polar-Ural expedition as the chief engineer. N.V. Kobozev, who had previously headed the STU of the geological administration, was appointed head of the Saranpaul group of parties. The acceptance certificate was drawn up in a couple of days, signed, and V.N. Morozov flew to Tyumen with a small suitcase - he wanted to meet Ervie there, but, as far as I remember, he did not accept him again.

The day after Morozov's departure, Shalavin called me and ordered me to report on the state of affairs for all parties conducting drilling, mining, or drilling and blasting operations. We had not had a chief engineer since Drozdov's time, so I was the defendant, as a deputy, although officially only for drilling and blasting operations. I told him everything in detail, showed him the problems and possible solutions for these types of work. He listened to me attentively. Then he said that he was offering me the position of technical director of the Saranpaul group of parties. I agreed, and half an hour later he signed the order for my appointment.

Shalavin M.V.

In general, Shalavin M.V., as a leader and a person, made the most favorable impression on me. He was a large man, a very lively conversationalist, with an excellent command of oral speech. I certainly knew this name. And it was inextricably linked with the history of oil and gas exploration in the Tyumen region. I first heard and remembered this name in 1960, while still working in Severouralsk, when the very first oil in Siberia was discovered in the Shaim expedition. He was then the head of this expedition. In 1953, when the first gas fountain hit Berezovo, he held the position of chief geologist of the Tyumen Geological Exploration Trust, later reorganized into a geological department. However, in some publications of those years, the authorship of the discovery of gas was attributed only to the head of the Berezovo oil exploration, Bystritsky A.G. And the events allegedly happened like this: "a barge with a drilling rig could not moor in the area of ​​the village of Berezovo at the previously planned point for drilling a well. A suitable place turned out to be 3 km closer. Then Bystritsky sent a radiogram to the Tyumen Trust with a request to allow unloading and laying of a well 3 km from the planned point. And Shalavin M.V. allegedly categorically forbade this to be done. But Bystritsky, despite the ban, nevertheless moved the point of laying, and the well gave the first gas in Western Siberia." By the way, the well drilled later in the original place turned out to be empty. It can be stated that the forced transfer of the point of laying of the first well accelerated the process of discovery of this giant oil and gas province.

Just in the spring of the same year, a group of managers and specialists of the department was awarded the Lenin Prize for these discoveries. And Shalavin M.V. was not among them. Somehow, during those first days of his stay with us, he opened up about something - we were sitting alone, and he began to tell me about the events of those years. He denied that he had forbidden the relocation of the well to Berezovo. I remember exactly that, according to him, all his radiograms authorizing this topic had disappeared from the archive, i.e. it was as if work had already been underway to "push" him aside. He was certainly worried that he had simply been crossed out from the list of participants in the grand discoveries of those years. Of course, all the main participants in the geological discoveries of those years were large-scale figures, with very difficult characters, and their clashes were often inevitable. The awards and regalia due for these deeds were also the highest in the state, but as always happens in such cases - suddenly the lists of those involved begin to go off scale all conceivable limits and they must be reduced in some way. I don't know how truthful he was in his stories, but further communication with him and the events that happened later led to the idea that he was right in some ways. In the late 60s, he was finally "finished off". According to the story of Kamenev V.M., who came to visit us in Severouralsk, one day Shalavin M.V. in Tyumen was taken off the street by a police patrol and put in a sobering-up station, as if he was drunk. After this story, he fell seriously ill and soon passed away.

Kobozev Nikolay Vasilyevich, who became the head of the party group, before coming to Saranpaul, was the director of the vocational school of geological management, which trained driller assistants, diesel operators, clay solution laboratory assistants, etc. He had no experience in managing geological organizations, and did not know the technology of their work at all. However, the lack of appropriate education and knowledge in this area was fully compensated by the willingness to implement any instructions from above, and by his firmness of character. At the very first meeting of the management team, he uttered a catchphrase that he often repeated later: "Plans are given from above, and they must be implemented!" Moreover, in the word "plans" he stressed the last syllable. After spending about a week in Saranpaul, both of them, Shalavin and Kobozev, flew together to Tyumen, leaving me to act as the chief.

Vinogradov (the author) on the radio station

The hustle and bustle associated with yet another shake-up had died down, and then our union asked for permission to go on a group fishing trip to the Kempage River, using our 20-ton self-propelled barge "Kolkhoznitsa" for this purpose. I agreed and decided to go myself. There were many women and Nina also went with us, although she was already on maternity leave and had a big belly. We sailed early on Sunday morning. In addition to the gear, I also took a duralumin boat with a motor. There were rumors about the Kempage River that huge pikes were found there. After about 3 hours of sailing, its mouth opened and we entered the river. The water there was the color of brewed tea. Having moved up 5 km, we stopped, because the river narrowed and "ran wild", trees appeared lying in the water and there was a danger that the barge would not turn around normally for the return trip. The experts said that you need to go away from the river and fish in the numerous backwaters. We went to these backwaters, several people threw a spinning rod, but to no avail - there was not a single bite. The water in them was the same brown color. It was a left tributary of the Lyapin and it flowed exclusively among the swamps. What struck me there was the number of mosquitoes - they simply enveloped people in clouds and partially obscured even the sun. All the repellents used did not help, because in the summer heat sweat quickly washed them off. We decided to return to the mouth of the river. We turned the barge around, sailed back downstream and right at the mouth, closer to Lyapin, we anchored it. People set up fishing rods right on the barge and lowered them from the deck into the river. Very good bite of medium-sized perch began.

I decided to spin along the banks of the Lyapin. We launched the duralumin and the motor. I took two more volunteers and took the boat to the right bank of Lyapin. It is more convenient for one person to cast a spinning rod from the duralumin, so the two of us went ashore, and I, having driven about 50 meters from the bank, began to look for bottom thickets of grass in the riverbed. There were enough of them, and the depth of the river here was about 3 meters. In shallow water, I grabbed a few pikes and went further to the depth, where grass was also visible, not coming to the surface. After a couple of casts, a strong snag occurred and I began to row in its direction with an oar. But then the place of the snag suddenly began to move and it became clear that there was a large fish on the spoon. I led it on the line for about 20 minutes, then it began to pull itself up to the boat. And soon I saw it - it was a pike of about 10 kg. It floated almost to the surface and opened its mouth. I had nothing to grab it with, so I decided to pull it closer and throw it into the boat with a jerk by the line. Fortunately, the line was 0.9 mm thick. I managed to pull it about 1 meter away and at the moment when I pulled the line towards me, the pike dived under the boat - I had only the end of the line left in my hands. I looked at it and saw that the ring next to the snap hook was unbent. And the line held up. Before that, I had not caught large fish and had no experience in getting them out of the water. It was enough to have a landing net or a gaff. In addition, it is not advisable to get them from the side, but better from the stern or bow. In general, everyone was happy with the fishing and in the evening, well bitten by mosquitoes, they returned home. Already in 2010, I saw a film about tourist fishermen who were spinning in this area of ​​the Lyapin River. The river turned out to be simply filled with such a big pike, and they stacked it like a woodpile on the shore.

In the summer of the same year, we received a radiogram from the group committee of the management trade union that a cooperative house was being founded in Tyumen, the prices for apartments were reported and we were given 4 different ones. We discussed it and decided to take a 2-room apartment on the 3rd floor. Its price was 1648 rubles - this is an initial payment of 40% of the total cost. We only had 1000 rubles to spare, the rest was borrowed. True, they gave it back a month later. A few months later they again informed us that a 3-room apartment had become available and whether there were any of us who wanted it. There were some. Nina and I discussed it and decided to take it. The payment for it was 2000 rubles, but taking into account what we had already paid, we had to pay an additional 350 rubles, which we did. True, the floor was already the last, fifth.

Soon Kobozev N.V. arrived and brought one ticket to Moscow, to Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy, to the pavilion "Geology", where some seminar was supposed to take place. He suggested that I go there - to get some fresh air. Besides that, I had to take Nina to Severouralsk to give birth. The trip went well and I, though with difficulty, already at night, settled in one of the hotels, namely "Vostok", in a four-bed room. Around the administrator, as always, a crowd of people wishing to settle in, but it was impossible to do this in a normal way. Black-moustached brunettes managed to do this easily, but I was saved by the Exhibition of Achievements of the National Economy ticket.

The seminar, which was held in the pavilion "Geology", for me was more of a speculative interest than any practical significance. The discussion there was about diamond drilling, control and measuring equipment for monitoring and recording parameters - i.e., something that our expedition could achieve in many, many years. Therefore, I devoted almost all my time to getting to know the museums and galleries of Moscow. This was my third stay there, and the first two were short-term. I visited the Historical Museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, the Museum of the Revolution, had a good look around the center of Moscow, and decided to go to the Bolshoi Theater. But there were no tickets for sale at the box office. But the "bugs" standing nearby said that I should come at the beginning of the performance and I would buy them second-hand. Which is what I did. That day, one-act ballets were being performed with soloists unknown to me. I bought a ticket costing 4 rubles second-hand for 10 rubles and without any problems. I don't know much about ballet, just like opera, but I had to see the Bolshoi Theatre.

My original goal was to buy a decent suit and a hat. While I managed to buy the latter fairly quickly, I had problems with the suit. I went to many department stores, but couldn't find anything suitable. It was impossible to go back without a suit, since there was no choice at all in our province. I was advised to go to a specialized store called "Costumes" on Gorky Street, not far from the Belorussky railway station. All sorts of rubbish hung there, too. Apparently, I would have left empty-handed if one smart person hadn't told me that to buy a good suit you have to pay either the seller or the section manager. I've heard of such things, but I've never used them - I thought the seller would be offended by the bribe and might hit me in the face. I decided to give it a try. I put a tenner in my breast pocket and showed the corner to the seller. This made such an indelible impression on him that he immediately took me to the back room, where I chose a magnificent dark green suit from the Bolshevichka factory, which fit me like a glove. And it was exactly what I was looking for. For some reason, the salesman was not offended at all, he walked me by the hand to the exit, smiled like a polished nickel and invited me to come to their store more often.

After returning from a trip to Moscow, I found myself alone at home, not counting Sobol, who still lived near our porch. The card games between us continued as before, but now they had moved to our apartment, where we did not bother anyone. On Saturdays, from the evening it sometimes dragged on until the morning. At least 3 people always came. The street was always dirty, no one took off their shoes, and I had to lay more and more newspapers on the floor each time. In the end, their layer turned out to be so thick that when walking there was a feeling that you were walking on soft moss. Before sitting down at the table, it was necessary to eliminate as many mosquitoes as possible from the room. Everyone took a rolled-up newspaper and hit those sitting in all visible places. This took about an hour. However, after 3-4 hours there were as many again, although there was no window in the apartment. Apparently, they flew in through the gaps in the door and window frames. At 12 o'clock at night the power station stopped working. Then we hung a flashlight from the ceiling and played for a very long time. Today this can be considered a waste of time - it was better to tickle your nerves while fishing, at least in the fresh air, and not in a stuffy, smoke-filled room. Personally, I never sat down to play just for the purpose of winning. Although I know people who sat down to win. It was a kind of relaxation from the hard, not always easy, everyday life. The small amounts of winnings and losses also speak about this. Although there were rumors that some representatives of the Moscow cultural elite 'discharged' in a very large way, and the money was carried around in briefcases - there were no cases then.

On September 1, I received a telegram from Severouralsk that our daughter was born and her grandmother chose her name - Mila. We did not object. About 3-4 weeks later a letter arrived with a very good photo. Of course, most fathers want a son as their first child, but with two children, the eldest daughter is always better - she is like a tutor for the little fool. True, this theory is good and correct if the second child is a son. We were happy with a daughter.

Soon the expedition received funds to begin exploration work on the northern flank of the Tolinsky coal deposits. A new drilling rig was also brought in for this work. The drilling site was located south of Saranpaul, about 130 km, on one of the tributaries of the Yatriya River. This was even further south than the limestone exploration site. There was no summer road there and it was possible to get there either by air or by river, on amphibians. Aviation was unaffordable for us, and the route on amphibians was significantly longer and was about 180 km. In addition, we had only studied the Yatriya riverbed well for 120 km, and further on, and especially along its tributary, there was an absolutely blank spot.

The Yatriya River in its upper reaches

Limestone quarry on Yatriya

I decided to carry out this transport operation myself, especially since it was carried out over such a long distance to an unknown area. First, I studied the entire route on detailed topographic maps. No serious obstacles were foreseen. There was only one unknown link in this trip - whether the K-61 amphibians would survive or not. After all, initially they were supposed to be used in the army mainly as a means of transport for fording water obstacles, i.e. running and swimming short distances. We already had 3 of them. We decided to load two of them and leave the third at the base as a reserve. It was clear that if the landing of the party was successful, then all supplies would be carried out in the same way. The entire drilling rig was loaded onto one vehicle in bulk - the machine, diesel, pump, pipes and tools. A container with diesel fuel and other small items was loaded onto the other. Each vehicle carried approximately 5 tons of cargo, and in total there were about 15 more people of different professions.

K-61 amphibious floating tracked transporter

Medium artillery tractor ATS-712

One day we set out early in the morning. First there were 4 km of land road to the village of Shchekurye, and then the car, in front of the amazed local aborigines from the village, smoothly entered the river and calmly floated upstream. In the lower reaches the river was full-flowing, and only after 20-25 km sand and pebble spits began to appear, which we used for movement on the tracks. In the area of ​​the so-called "White Mountains" the speed of the river flow increased and on a sharp turn there were quite large waves, which sometimes splashed over the front wave-breaker shield of the car. Waves, among other things, also arose from boulders of different sizes lying on the bottom. We once felt what this could lead to when one of the tracks ran over a boulder - the car suddenly tilted to the side and scooped up some water - at that time we were moving on propellers. And in general, during the journey we realized that boulders hidden by water and invisible in deep places pose a very big danger. Therefore, further, everyone who could, watched the riverbed and tried to notice the boulders in advance, by the weak breakers.

On the very first day, we went up about 100 km. The nature of the river changed - it became shallower, the current was faster. On the way, several people threw spinning rods directly from amphibians - they grabbed five taimen up to 1 kg. But it was still inconvenient - if you throw forward, in the direction of the car, you had to pull the lure very quickly. Throw back - and there a car passed and scared everything. Only the sides remained, but the river was already narrow. Around 8 pm we decided to stop for the night. We chose a wide and long spit, drove the cars onto it and started to settle in.

The people were divided into groups - one part started to make fires and cook fish soup, the other part, who wanted, pitched tents. It was very hot - the last hot autumn days. I started to put up pegs for a gauze mosquito net, and chopped spruce branches on the pebbles and put a sleeping bag on it. It took only a few minutes to stretch the net over the ready-made pegs. The drivers and their assistants decided to sleep on the amphibian platform next to the warm engines. During this coastal bustle, everyone suddenly began to feel the appearance of some new unpleasant factor - mosquitoes. It began to seem that they were just waiting for our appearance and had flown in from all over the area. Perhaps this was a mistaken opinion. Their density was no less in other places. Just while driving in open cars, and even on the river, the wind simply blew them off us.

About an hour later, several buckets of fish soup were ready, but the cooks said that they couldn't do anything about the mosquitoes and that each eater should fight them on their own plate. During those couple of hours that we had already spent on the spit, from the constant fight with mosquitoes, I and some others had completely lost the feeling of hunger. No repellents helped - I wanted to quickly crawl under the canopy. There, I knew for sure that these creatures would not get me. But before that, I had to have at least a little snack. I looked into the bucket of fish soup - a thick layer of mosquitoes was floating on top, and they were constantly arriving. They flew in from above, apparently lost consciousness from the smoke and fell in packs into the bucket. I didn't eat the fish soup, I poured myself a cup of tea and drank it with biscuits. At least it was easier to remove them from the tea. Everyone was given half a glass of wine, and people started snacking on the fish soup, some of them not even cleaning the mosquitoes out of it. One of my main tasks was to prevent the uncontrolled transportation and consumption of alcohol on the way, which I successfully managed. Otherwise, on such a road, and on water, any trouble could happen.

Yatriya River

After dinner, people began to settle in for the night. I tucked the canopy under the bag on one side, quickly climbed under it and tucked the other side. Now I had to knock out all the mosquitoes that had gotten inside during installation. This operation took me a whole hour. Afterwards, I calmed down and was about to fall asleep, when I felt bites and buzzing. I started looking again, found them and lay down again. Half an hour later, the story repeated itself. I started looking for them again and knocking them out. And time goes by and there is no sleep. Behind the canopy, outside, there was a continuous buzzing from mosquitoes. Not far from me, someone was also lying under the canopy. I glanced at him and was horrified - all the folds of the canopy were filled with solid black ribbons of mosquitoes sitting in many layers. This had never happened even on the river Kempazh, in the kingdom of swamps, in July.

I couldn't fall asleep because mosquitoes were constantly getting under the canopy from somewhere. Around 4 a.m., the engine of an amphibian parked about 10 meters away from me suddenly roared, then the speed was turned on and the car moved backwards towards the river. I immediately jumped out from under the canopy and went to the car to find out what was going on. The driver and his assistant explained to me that the mosquitoes were completely preventing me from sleeping, although they were located near the engine, from where the smells seemed unpleasant to mosquitoes were coming. Then others began to approach, having heard the noise of the diesel engine. After consulting, we decided to drink some tea and move further up the river - there were almost no mosquitoes on it while driving. I removed the canopy and decided to carefully examine it on the way to check for integrity. Upon careful inspection, I discovered a small hole in it, smaller than the head of a pin. That's where the mosquitoes were constantly coming in.

I had about two hours - the riverbed here was well known to us, since there was a limestone quarry ahead and a drilling rig there. I, and other people, slept soundly for those couple of hours on the platforms of the moving amphibians. But beyond the quarry I had to track the route, mark the rivers we had passed, and compare them with the topographic tablet. This turned out to be not as easy as I thought, looking at the map. After all, there were no signs with their names at the mouths of these rivers, and no one had ever been here before. I had to compare the true relief of the area with the map and only in this way identify the tributaries. It was absolutely impossible to make a mistake and turn into another tributary, since this would lead to large additional costs and a loss of time.

Finally, somewhere after lunch, we began to approach our river - the right tributary of the Yatriya. Yatria itself had already become very shallow and narrow - we were moving almost exclusively on tracks. Finally, we turned into the tributary we needed. Quite unexpectedly, it turned out to be narrow but deep, with water the color of medium-brewed Georgian tea. We went on propellers for several kilometers, and then there were frequent sand and pebble spits, which made the further journey easier. At the end of the route, a team of carpenters and drillers worked, who were dropped off a week earlier by helicopter. We arrived at the place by evening. We found a good exit to the shore and drove up to the base camp. The night under the repaired canopy passed normally and in the morning routine work began - unloading, dragging the drilling rig to the installation site, etc. I tried to throw a spoon into this river - there was a very powerful bite, but did not manage to hook. The workers told me that they sometimes caught large taimen here, but my visit was fruitless. Maybe we scared them all away with the noise of the propellers and tracks, or maybe we should have moved further away, but I didn't have time.

As further work experience showed, the supply of K-61 amphibians by river completely justified itself. The machines turned out to be reliable, and only went in pairs. It should be said that the Army also noticed the positive qualities of these machines, and today they are in service. However, the last trip in October ended unsuccessfully for one of them - while moving, the teeth of the conical shank of the main gear were torn off. The second machine in tow pulled it onto a large sand spit and everyone left on the first. This happened about 40 km before reaching the limestone quarry and 10 km from the winter road. The part was dismantled on the way back and brought back with us.

We asked the geological department and they replied that we would have to wait a long time. But we didn't even think that it would take that long. It was getting closer to spring, but there were still no spare parts. We were already talking about saving the car. If it remained there on the spit, the ice drift would smash it to pieces. There was only one way out - to go to the limestone quarry along the winter road in a light floating GAZ-47 tractor, then along the frozen bed of the Yatriya to the amphibian 40 km, then from the amphibian to the winter road break through 10 km of road. Return to Saranpaul and from there in a medium-sized ATS-712 tractor drive along the winter road, then 10 km of newly broken road to the amphibian. Take it in tow and pull it away from the river bank as high as possible and tie it to the trees with a rope, just in case. I went myself in the GAZ-47 and cleared a road to the winter road. Everything went as well as planned. Only when moving along the river bed from the limestone quarry to the amphibian, the ice collapsed under us several times, but we managed to jump out onto the whole, because the GAZ-47 has a good speed. The fact is that in the fall, when the river freezes, the water level is always higher than in the spring. Therefore, in some places, when the water level drops, the ice is as if in a suspended state, does not rest on the water, and its bearing capacity decreases sharply. This is especially typical for mountain rivers. The choice of the GAZ-47 for moving on ice was absolutely correct. Any other tractor would have simply fallen through the ice. Clearing a road from the winter road directly to the amphibian through a whole forest would have been much more difficult than the return trip. In general, the tailstock arrived from Tyumen only after the ice drift, and it was delivered to the emergency vehicle by motorboat. In two hours the vehicle was running, after which it went to the drillers, unloaded, and returned to Saranpaul normally. The measures taken to save the vehicle from the ice drift turned out to be correct and timely. And all summer these vehicles worked successfully for us to supply the drilling sites.

Around October 14, 1964, as always, I came to the office in the morning, went into the production department, and the employees told me that N.S. Khrushchev had been removed from all his posts. I didn't believe it. Then one of them took a small magazine portrait of Khrushchev and tore it to pieces. It was impossible not to believe it any longer. My entire post-school life - my studies and work - took place during his reign. What can I say about that time? In the first years of his leadership, the people somehow lost their daily fear of existence, which was invisibly present in every home and every family under Stalin. A gradual increase in the circulation of political jokes began, including many about the General Secretary himself, especially in the last years of his reign. His major achievement should be considered the beginning of the widespread construction of large-panel cheap housing for the people in all the cities of the country. As a politician, he was a typical representative of his time, and in the struggle for power he did not disdain any methods. With the help of Marshal Zhukov G.K. first removed Beria L.P., then a group of old members of the Central Committee - Molotov V.M., Kaganovich L.M., Malenkov G.M. Immediately after that he removed Zhukov G.K. Moreover, he did not bother himself with any plausible explanations of the reasons for their removal. Beria L.P. was accused of espionage for Japan and England, although everyone knew that it was his organizational talent and will that allowed the creation of nuclear missile weapons in a short time. Zhukov G.K. was accused of "Bonapartism", and there are serious doubts that Khrushchev knew the true deeds and role of Napoleon in the history of France. In international affairs, he often bluffed, mostly unsuccessfully. He got involved in the nuclear missile arms race, as a result of which the standard of living of the population began to decline. The annual reduction of retail prices under Stalin ceased. On the contrary, a centralized increase began for the most important food products - meat, milk. In 1962, under his rule, a demonstration of workers in Novocherkassk, dissatisfied with the price increase, was shot. In 1963, he reduced student stipends by 25%. Three years earlier, he removed many benefits for workers in the Far North and effectively stripped these areas of specialists. He himself took on the reorganization of the country's agriculture. He began to force everyone to sow corn. In between "major" projects, he managed to cut plots of land adjacent to private households to 6 acres, even in the Northern Urals, where there was no centralized agriculture.

Within the country, one can also note the general decline in discipline during his leadership, the growth of drunkenness among the population. At the same time, the emergence of the so-called dissidence is noted - people who supposedly fight communism, but in fact strike at the foundations of the state and destroy it. From today's heights of time, it is easy to see where some dissidents came from. Most of them are people to whom, in their opinion, the government did not give something: someone's parent was not given an award for an anniversary, someone was denied admission to the party, someone was not given a prestigious apartment or a dacha. Of course, there were also ideological opponents of the government. All these people in the overwhelming majority were and lived in Moscow or around it. There were practically none on the periphery, and I learned about their existence only from foreign radio voices. But this was a microscopically small fraction of the people, standing in open or semi-open opposition to the government.

There was much stronger opposition to the government among the masses on the issue of land, but it did not come out into the open. The absolutely stubborn unwillingness of the authorities to allocate land for individual housing construction and private farming to all who wanted it still causes surprise. And this situation lasted until 1992. Land was allocated with great difficulty. At first they gave 12 hundred square meters, then they cut it in half. Only in the early 70s did they begin to allocate land for garden plots. If this issue had been resolved earlier without any delays, then many people would have acquired their own housing long ago, would have fed themselves and their neighbors from high-rise buildings. And the government itself would not have collapsed to the ground in 1991, like an overripe pear. Returning back to Khrushchev N.S., I would evaluate the 11 years of his rule as a period of searching and marking time. And it did not cause much harm, but there is no visible benefit either.

By the end of November, I began to get ready to go to Severouralsk for my family. This year, new comfortable turboprop aircraft AN-24 with 48 seats began to operate on long-distance routes from Tyumen to Berezovo and Salekhard. True, in the summer, a tragedy occurred with such an aircraft in Khanty-Mansiysk - it caught fire during landing on the runway. About 50 people died. Among the most famous was the manager of the Khanty-Mansiysk Geophysical Trust, E.F. Sutormin. In the autumn of the previous year, I came to his home while I was there on a business trip to resolve some issues. The brother of our village council chairman, I.N. Malyugin, also died.

However, in mid-November, a letter arrived from the geological department asking me to fly to Moscow, to the TsNIGRI mining exploration institute on Varshavka. There they developed a new self-propelled drilling rig for exploring placer deposits by drilling holes with a diameter of 715 mm and a depth of 25 m. My task was to assess its suitability for our working conditions. The trip was memorable for two events. First, I was taking a taxi to the Zarya Hotel and got the driver to talk, but at that moment he was making a left turn and did not notice the oncoming taxi. There was ice on the road and the oncoming taxi did not have time to brake. The impact fell on the back door of our car. I hit my head hard on the door frame and got a huge bump. Second, I met a man from some Volga republic in the hotel room, the chairman of a collective farm. Two months ago he was expelled from the party for refusing to sow corn in the spring. A month ago, Khrushchev was removed and now the same comrades who expelled him said that he did not sow it correctly and offered him to be reinstated again. And now he has come to the party commission in the Central Committee. Today he came to one of the buildings for the first time and went to the buffet - he says that there are huge red apples there and they cost only 30 kopecks per kg, he had a net-bag with him, that's what he took. And tomorrow I'll go there again and take a big bag with me!

At the end of November I arrived in Severouralsk and took the family. Nina and Lyuda felt fine. They got to Tyumen by train, and then by plane. The journey, needless to say, is not short, but everything went well. Nina went to work, and for the daughter they found a nanny - a middle-aged Zyryanka, who came to our house and sat. During my absence, Sobol was taken from the yard and taken somewhere to the plot. A month later they brought him and said that he had chased an elk in the taiga. And this at the age of only 8 months. It should have grown into a very good dog for hunting large animals - elk and bear.

We had a very old man of about 70 working as a skipper on an oil barge. He had sailed Siberian rivers all his life in this capacity. Once he told me how in the early 1930s, large parties of exiled peasants with their families and children, kulaks as they were called then, were sent by water from Tyumen to the North. They were loaded in batches onto barges and, accompanied by guards, sailed to the North. As a rule, they moored in completely deserted places, unloaded everyone, gave them a few saws and axes, a few sacks of flour and some other products and left them to survive. Winter passed and the following year they sailed again to the same places - to check what and how. In some landing places there were no living people left at all - everyone died during the winter. In others, they survived, though with great losses. Apparently, this depended on the experience of the group's elder. If he managed to prepare them for wintering in such poor conditions, then the group survived, even with losses. If people had no experience, everyone died. This was news to me, because I thought that they had never sent anyone further than the Urals.

In September 1964, after the end of the field season, we sent a group of geologists to office work in Tyumen on a special flight of the AN-2 aircraft. They flew away on Friday before lunch and were supposed to be there by evening. However, on Saturday morning, the RD came from Shalavin with the question: "Why didn't the plane with people take off?" Since I personally sent them from the airport, I answered when they took off. He again told me that the plane had not arrived, and it was not at any airfield in the region. After that, everyone realized that some kind of accident had occurred. All air services along the route of his flight were raised to their feet, search helicopters took to the air. The turmoil lasted for 2 days. There were 13 people in the plane, including the crew. Only on the 3rd day did the RD come to the fact that the plane was found in the forest, south of the Ivdel-Ob railway, all the people were alive and they were being airlifted to the village of Lugovaya by helicopters.

Later, one of the participants in the flight told me what happened on the way. They took off normally, but they needed to refuel en route. They contacted Berezovo - they refused, somewhere else along the way they also refused. Then the pilots decided to hang on to Lugovaya airport. About 2 hours into the flight, my narrator noticed that the plane began to descend, and the engine began to misfire. Soon the flight mechanic began to disconnect and drop the engine exhaust pipes to the ground to reduce fuel consumption. A railway passed under the wing. Ivdel-Ob, the engine finally stalled, the cabin became quiet and the flight engineer told the passengers that they were making an emergency landing. The plane slowly glided and descended to the ground. The pilots chose the only correct landing option in these conditions - using the remaining controllability of the machine, they directed it to a young pine forest. During a smooth descent, the plane began to knock down the tops of young pine trees, greatly losing speed, and at some point its forward movement stalled and it poked its nose into the ground, tearing off its wings. Everyone remained alive and without serious injuries. One drunk passenger immediately sobered up, another suffered a broken arm. The rest escaped with abrasions of varying sizes. If the pilots had started to land the plane in a swamp or a clearing, then major human casualties would have been inevitable, since its landing gear does not retract, and when landing on an uneven, unrolled surface, a very strong impact with an inevitable nose-over on the back would have occurred. When the first rescue helicopter landed not far from the crash site, and the pilots saw all the people alive and unharmed, they simply cried with excitement. As they said, it was the first time they had seen such a happy outcome to an air accident. The AN-2 pilots were given a very tough hearing at the airline in connection with this incident. But considering their professionally competent behavior in these conditions and the absence of casualties, they were not deprived of their pilot licenses, but only temporarily suspended from flying - they were forced to roll barrels of gasoline at the airfield.

The holidays of November 7 were approaching. I was left alone - Kobozev had flown to his family in Tyumen. And at this time you always have to expect some trouble. And this time it was not without its consequences. The day before I received a notice from the drilling site from the head of the party Manin A. that their senior drilling foreman Kuznetsov had committed suicide after drinking himself into delirium tremens. I reported this to Tyumen. A day later a very strict notice came from there, so that I would personally ensure the delivery of the deceased's body from the site and its loading onto a special flight of the AN-2 aircraft, which was supposed to come for it from Nizhny Tagil to Saranpaul. I was surprised by this turn of events, but I had nothing to deliver it from the site with - there were no helicopters. Tyumen responded very quickly, and on November 6 a helicopter arrived from Berezovo. As the airport manager told me, all civil aviation flights except passenger flights are prohibited on November 7. However, on the morning of November 7, permission was received for our MI-4 to fly, and it left for the area.

Soon, the airport manager told me that the AN-2 plane, which was heading to us from N. Tagil, had been in the air for 2 hours, which surprised him quite a bit. The docking happened like a fairy tale - the plane had just landed and was taxiing to the parking lot, when a helicopter immediately appeared. Kuznetsov was reloaded, and both sides took off. Tyumen very strictly controlled the course of events, and they calmed down there only when I immediately gave the RD the order to complete these matters. Everything became clear a little later. It turns out that Kuznetsov was a relative of fairly large party functionaries who, through the Sverdlovsk and Tyumen regional party committees, managed to organize this unprecedented transport operation on the non-flying day of November 7.

During my negotiations with Manin, he asked me to fly with the same helicopter to Saranpaul, to his family. I forbade him to do this until the end of the holidays. However, he could not resist, sat down at the controls of the S-100 tractor and drove it to Saranpaul. On the 9th in the evening, he came to my house and told me that he really needed to come here, but on the way, 3 km before reaching the expedition base, he sank the tractor in a swamp. He came to work for us from Ivdel, from the Northern Expedition. So, he seemed like a serious guy of about 30, and you can’t call him a slob, but he was often still in a frenzy. I scolded him properly, gave him a reprimand, but nothing more. We never received bonuses.

To the south, in front of Saranpaul, there was a large round swamp - an overgrown old lake, impassable in the summer by any means of transport. As soon as the frosts came, we began to make a winter road along it - first with light trucks, then with heavier ones, including tractors. The route was marked with poles, and it was always necessary to drive only in line with these poles. The ice was always much thinner away from the route, especially at the beginning of winter. This time, we had already driven a medium-sized truck there and back. Manin left late, and somewhere in the darkness he lost sight of one or two poles, and the tractor, having moved to the side, broke through the ice and sank into the slush to the full height of the tracks. Only the cabin and the engine remained on top. It was impossible to pull it out right now, since the ice around was still very thin. And I gave up on him, making a gross mistake, which will be discussed further.

One of the pleasant moments of life in Saranpaul must be recognized as going to the bathhouse. But not to the public one, which we visited in the first years, but to a private one. Polshchikov N.I. and his family lived not far from us and built a bathhouse for themselves. And in the most simple way from scrap materials. He made a wooden frame, covered it with boards, and poured sawdust inside. For the stove he used a 200-liter barrel, lined it with stone and built a simple shelf. The dressing room was cold and there was always ice on the floor in winter. But when you go into the steam room and soap room, you forget about all the ice. The large stove from the barrel heated the small space so much that when water was supplied to the stones, the ears began to curl into a tube. I had been to small private bathhouses before, but I had never experienced such bliss as in Saranpaul. Apparently, the intensity of the sensations was increased by the fact that at that time it was below 40 degrees outside. When I had the opportunity to build my own bathhouse, I basically took it from this Polshchikov bathhouse, only I used timber for the walls and welded the stove from steel sheets.

At the end of November, I flew to the "Turman" site on some business. I walked around the sites with the site manager and in the evening, Mansi Vasya Kurikov from the village of Ust-Manya approached me. We got to talking about something and he offered me to eat an elk lip. I knew that it was a great delicacy, but I refused. He took me into some kind of log shed and showed me a box of dead hazel grouse, moose meat, and what struck me most was that there were four fresh skins of huge polar wolves hanging on the wall. Their noses were near the ceiling and their tails were touching the ground. As he told me, he had gotten them that night. Before that, he had found an moose that had been torn to pieces by wolves and had set up an ambush there. He had a gun called "Olen" - the upper barrel was rifled, small-caliber, and the lower one was a smoothbore 28-caliber. By nightfall, seven wolves had approached. Vasya chose the moment when two animals stood parallel to each other and shot a round bullet from a smoothbore barrel through and through them. He immediately killed the third one with a rifled barrel. The wolves started to run, so he managed to reload one barrel and killed the fourth one in pursuit. Then for each wolf killed they gave a bonus of 50 rubles, plus the cost of the skin. And then, if three were killed at once, they gave a gun as a bonus on top of the money. That coming night he was again going to lay in ambush - he was sure that the remaining three animals would come. That night they did not come, and during the day I flew to Saranpaul. However, later I learned that he still shot them a few days later. He was a first-class hunter, and especially successful with wolves. I have already written about how he caught up with and shot wolves on skis. Unfortunately, I use the word "was", because about 4 years later, as I learned, he got drunk to delirium tremens and shot himself.

Here I would like to touch upon the topic of drunkenness in the North once again. Unfortunately, it was a terrible scourge. Many people of working age died because of it. I have no statistics for the region, but our expedition can give some approximate figures for human losses. Over the 4.5 years of my work, the expedition lost 22 people. And this is with a total maximum number of workers of about 500 people during the summer field season. Of these 22 people, only one died as a result of an industrial accident. All the rest, mainly as a result of immoderate consumption of alcoholic beverages and the reasons associated with this phenomenon: fights, suicides due to delirium tremens, drowning in water. We were given a place for burials behind our mechanical workshop and it quickly began to fill up. Alcohol was not centrally delivered to the work sites, but many came to the expedition to get drunk to their heart's content. It was almost impossible to stop such people. To stop this, they drove the transport to the hostel and loaded the drunks into the back of the truck like firewood. On the way, they sobered up and worked normally in the fields for six months. Then they came back again. One miner came and immediately bought a box of pepper vodka. In 2 hours, he drank 7 bottles, lay his head on the table for an hour and, almost in a normal state, went to the club to dance.

Closer to autumn, many, having saved up a little money, are going to leave for the "mainland". Some have families there. But the overwhelming majority are not able to go further than Beryozovo - soon telegrams from them begin to arrive to the expedition asking to take them back to work in the winter. The most persistent manage to get to Tyumen - and ask to go back. The reason is the same - after receiving money on the expedition, drinking begins, the same upon arrival in Beryozovo, etc. All the money is drunk away on the way and there is nothing to go further with. For the same reason, in the North, more than anywhere else, there are all sorts of accidents and incidents, especially during transport operations. The abundance of rivers and lakes in the summer, and most winter routes on ice require only a sober approach to these things, which was not always the case.

In December of the same year, preparations were underway for elections to some Soviets. All the leaders were gathered by the chairman of the executive committee, I. N. Malyugin, with a representative of the district party committee who had flown in from Berezovo. Previously, these problems had not affected me or worried me. This time, Kobozev had flown to Tyumen, and I had to organize this matter. The conversation was strict and we were warned that there should be no refusals to vote, or voting "against". As a newcomer, I was left behind and asked how I thought I would organize this matter. In my simplicity, I said that I would use two helicopters: one MI-4 would fly with the commission and the ballot box over large areas, and a small MI-1 would carry the ballot box to the points where the clearing cutters walked in pairs. They nodded their heads in agreement and asked: "What else will I bring them?" I answered that letters, fresh newspapers, and, where necessary, food. They looked at each other and someone asked: "Aren't you going to bring some vodka?" I answered that I would never do that! We don't bring alcohol to the polling stations. Then they shook their heads and looked at me as if I were a young and unreasonable child. One of them said quite firmly that along with the ballot papers and the ballot box, it was absolutely necessary to bring vodka, at the rate of a bottle per "nose". Otherwise, most people would simply refuse to vote. And they gave me an example of how last year at the Neroika polling station, expedition №105 failed to elect our club manager, V. Klyapyshev, solely because they didn't bring alcohol on election day. Then I promised them to do it. True, I had heard requests from polling stations before about bringing alcohol on election day, but I considered these conversations to be humorous. It turned out that this was not a joke at all.

On election day, I sent a large MI-4 helicopter to large parties and polling stations with one of the leaders from Saranpaul. I myself got into the MI-1, put two boxes of vodka in it, took a map of the area with site marks and flew to the clearing cutters. They had already been warned in advance about the voting day and everyone had gathered at their sites. We landed on the first one. Two shaggy guys came up and held out their hands. I tried to hand them the ballots, but they didn’t take them and kept holding out their hands. Then I realized what was going on. I took out two bottles of vodka and gave them to them, and they signaled with their hand for me to cast the ballots myself. The same story happened at other sites where I landed. The large helicopter also flew around the other sites, and people voted everywhere. This business ended without incident everywhere, with the exception of one of the geophysics teams. They drank everything quickly, someone thought it was not enough - and such things always happen in nature, and some incident happened there. Today I can’t even remember, but it happened. And otherwise, you can consider it a breeze.

In March, I went to the ATL to the Izvestnyaki site. I took a MK rifle and Sobol with me. On the way, I saw a wood grouse on a tall larch, we stopped the tractor and I shot right from the open hatch in the cabin. The distance was large - about 120 meters. The bullet hit a non-lethal place, and the bird began to glide into the forest along a gentle slope. The snow was deep, but I decided to release Sobol. He watched all this from the back of the truck and immediately rushed in the direction where the wood grouse landed. It was hard for him to run, he was literally plowing a furrow in the snow. But soon we heard his loud barking and growling. I ran to him and saw the following picture: Sobol was holding a wood grouse in his teeth and trying to tear it with his paws and teeth. I started to take it away, but he wouldn't give it up. Then I started to lightly beat him with a stick I found nearby and tore the bird out of his teeth. What I took from him already hardly resembled a beautiful hunting trophy. A dog should be trained from an early age to give up game. I didn't have such opportunities, since I went hunting with Sobol for the first time. We arrived at the site and went straight to the food pantry. The menu included borscht with wood grouse, and cutlets also made from game meat. This area, as I wrote earlier, is exceptionally rich in birds, and getting them is no longer of hunting interest.

Once we were sitting on a fallen tree near a log house where the site office with a radio station was located. At one point in the conversation, I suddenly clearly heard the sounds of Morse code. I asked the site manager when they had their next communication session with Saranpaul. He replied that it would be in 2 hours. Then I told him that I heard Morse code. He said that it couldn't be. I went into the house - the radio was turned off and the radio operator was busy with other things. I went back outside again. After 10 minutes, I heard Morse code again. I went in and looked - the radio was turned off. This story repeated itself for the third time. I never heard these sounds outside of radio stations again. And those events remain a mystery to me to this day.

We left early in the morning. The day was already very long - in the North it gets light very early in the spring. As soon as we reached the main road, I saw several dozen medium-sized birds sitting on one of the larches ahead. At first I couldn't make out what kind of birds they were. We drove closer and I saw that they were black grouse. They stopped and I knocked one down with my rifle. I went and picked it up, and it turned out that they really were black grouse. But I've never seen so many of them on one tree - neither before nor after. Then interesting things started happening. We suddenly began to notice wood grouse, black grouse, and partridges running along the hard crust between the trees. They were almost not afraid of transport, and without taking off, they tried to hide on foot behind the tree trunks. All the snow was covered with traces of their wings - this was already the birds actively preparing for the spring mating season. We tied the sable in the back of the truck, and I started shooting through the open hatch. I shot about 10 birds, enough for everyone, including the neighbors in the house. I remember well a huge beauty - a wood grouse, weighing more than 4 kg. He was running, spreading his wings on the snow. The bullet hit him right in the heart and he immediately poked his head into the snow and froze, not moving. A bullet from a small-caliber rifle kills a large wood grouse immediately only if it hits the killing place - the heart or head. In other cases, the bird flies far away and without a dog, as a rule, it cannot be found. And the wounded bird that is not found in most cases dies, hiding in the thicket, or from predators.

In general, this route was well used by ground transport in winter - first by tracked tractors, and then by high-cross-country vehicles. Its length was about 120 km, and we even produced single vehicles. However, there were also troubles. In April 1964, I went out in a ZIL-157. This is a powerful 3-axle vehicle with all driving wheels. We drove there normally, and in the evening we drove back. During the day, the bright sun and warm air softened the road greatly, and about halfway through the road, the wheels cut through the snow and began to dig deep. After some time, the wheels dug deep, the car almost sat on the bridges and stopped. There was no point in jerking forward and tearing the car - you could burn up all the gasoline or break the chassis. The driver, a local Zyryan named Fedya Khozyainov, began to scratch his head. I didn't know what to do either. It was useless to walk back or forth - 60 km back and forth. We had no food, and it would be easy to become prey to a pack of wolves or a bear that had risen from hibernation. There are always plenty of predators in such wilderness. I decided that it would be better for us to stay in the car for the night, and in the morning we would think about what to do next. Fedya sat down in his seat and began to doze off, and I climbed into my sleeping bag and tried to fall asleep while sitting. Occasionally he started the engine and warmed up the cabin. But sleep never came because of the cold, hunger and uncertainty of the situation. At about 4 am it was already light and we climbed out. Here we suddenly discovered that all the snow that had gotten wet during the day had been firmly frozen overnight and looked like stone. Fedya immediately started the engine, made a couple of jerks, and the car drove out onto a flat road. We immediately understood what our salvation was. We had to manage to get to Saranpaul in time for the morning frost, before the sun softened the road. Which we successfully did. In fact, this was a good lesson for us for the future. And the saying - "The morning is wiser than the evening" turned out to be completely appropriate.

That same month, we somehow got into a conversation with the chief mechanic Sergey Aleksandrovich Kalenov about hunting. He told us that he had learned of a wood grouse mating place not far from the village. We decided to go the following Saturday, although neither he nor I had ever been to a wood grouse mating place. At 3 a.m., he himself started the ATL, sat at its controls, and we drove out to the place. About 50 minutes later we arrived at the intended location and dived off the road into the forest thicket, turning off the engine. It was already light enough and we, having broken up one by one, each went our own way. The place for the mating ground was really quite classic. Two wide ribbon pine forests stretched across the road, with a large swamp adjoining them on the side. Having moved forward about 100 meters, I stopped and, without moving, began to listen to the sounds of the forest. And then I definitely heard the sounds made by a wood grouse at the mating ground. Its song consists of several parts, and only during the performance of one of them does it close its eyes and ears for a few seconds - at this moment you need to jump up to it. But I did not know exactly to which part of the song I should approach, and I began to move to one of them. Then, about 80 meters away, on a pine tree, I saw the bird itself. It suddenly fell silent and turned its head in my direction. As soon as I moved, the wood grouse immediately took off and went somewhere far away. I started moving in the direction of another song. The result was the same - the bird flew away again. Thus, more than ten birds left me, I finished the circle and saw Kalenov standing under the tree. I approached him, and he said that he also could not approach any. Then we decided to try to shoot the birds flying away. And also unsuccessfully - they all took off far away, beyond the range of the gun. After the first shot, about ten birds took off from the nearest trees. We went even further and scared off several dozen more. In general, not a single aimed shot was made. Discussing this incident later with experts in this hunt, we came to the conclusion that we began to approach the birds too early. They had not yet begun to display normally, and did not perform the knee of the song, under which you can stalk them. We should have sat in the car for another hour. A mating ground with so many birds and the fact that they were not scared by the roar of the tractor engine and did not fly away, indicates that this is a land of completely unafraid forest game. Even in the 50s in the Northern Urals, finding a capercaillie mating ground with ten birds was considered a great success.

Spring was quickly approaching, and I had a "splinter" in the form of a tractor drowned in a swamp by A. Manin. Although we managed to remove the engine and cabin during the winter, more than 10 tons of pure metal weight remained. I brought in 2 ATS tractors and 2 S-100 tractors to pull it out. With all sorts of pulls and tugs, we tore this piece of iron, which had previously been a tractor, from its place, but we did not have enough strength to pull it to the surface. Then I went to expedition N105 and asked them for a heavy ATT tractor and a couple more tractors. It was an exceptionally powerful machine weighing 25 tons, with a diesel engine of more than 400 hp and a traction winch with a force of 50 tons. We hooked it with a winch cable and pulled. It was not the tractor that started moving from the swamp, but the tractor began to be pulled towards the tractor. Then, in order to hold the tractor in place, I coupled 4 S-100 tractors in front of it instead of an anchor and attached them to the front hooks of the tractor. The anchor turned out to be reliable. The tractor began to slowly crawl out of the hole under the force of the ATT winch. After a while, it was already half pulled out and its bottom was visible. The sight that appeared before us was impressive - the entire bottom of the tractor was a single block of ice that had frozen around the metal over the many months of winter. Its weight had increased several times, which is why our efforts were not enough. There remained a turning point when the tractor could end up on top. But at this very moment, maximum efforts are developed. And then a loud shot rang out, and the tractor slid into its hole. We looked around. It turned out that the armor with the hook of one of the tractor-anchors had come off six very powerful bolts, and the ATT, deprived of the anchor, was immediately pulled to the drowned man. In addition, a strand of rope with a diameter of 28 mm. on the winch had snapped. It was no longer possible to use the heavy tractor for this operation for another reason - water had already appeared on the ice around, since such a concentrated concentration of equipment with a total weight of about 200 tons led to a deflection of the ice cover and a weakening of its bearing capacity.

The ATT left, and I had to wrap up this operation before winter began. I decided to pull the hitch of two ATS-712s and four tractors once more. At the moment of pulling, the first ATS broke through the ice and began to sink into the ice. Attempts to pull it out immediately also failed and it sank deeper than the height of the tracks, the cabin was flooded with water and the driver-mechanic climbed out through the upper hatch of the cabin. The operation ended in a major failure. To prevent the tractor from sinking too deep over the summer, we brought round timber there, laid a raft of logs around it, put two posts with a crossbar on them and tied the tractor to it with cables. Of course, I made a mistake in retrieving the drowned tractor. It was necessary to freeze it out of the ice right down to the bottom of the tracks at the beginning of winter, put the removed engine back in place, start it and it would come out on its own, or with minimal help from a tug. Just like I did in Tolya. I relied on the principle "There is strength - no need for brains!" and brought in a lot of equipment. It turned out to be in vain. By the way, this is how - by freezing - we got this equipment out the following winter.

The downgrade of our status from an expedition to a group of parties did not reduce our work at all, but on the contrary - added it. Geological survey parties were added, and the volume of heavy drilling and mining operations increased. The BSK-2M100 drilling rig was thrown into the "Turman" section, the UKS-22 percussion-rope rig started working in the Khobeinskaya party, and a new Otorinskaya drilling party for coal was opened. All the aviation was based in Saranpaul, and we also provided the delivery to the field. But we must admit the benefit of such subordination - in the absence of free money in Saranpaul to pay for aviation services, one could always count on the expedition's help in this matter. A new field season of 1965 began. We prepared for it well. We carried out the delivery of all field parties normally. Of the year-round ones, Khobeinskaya and 2 parties in the upper reaches of the Yatriya River - coal and limestone - continued to work. In the summer, they were again supplied by K-61 amphibians without much trouble. Only once, near the mouth of the Oika-Khuyan-ya stream (translated as a stream where a bear spent the night), one of the machines ran over a rock with its track while moving afloat, scooped up water with its side, and sank. However, the second car, having reached a shallow place, took it in tow and pulled it onto a pebble spit. Having dried the engine and given it a little maintenance, the caravan left for its destination.

The summer was hot and this increased the number of mosquitoes. For our daughter we bought a small crib with sides and backs so that we could put her to sleep under a gauze canopy. We also pulled a canopy over the bed, otherwise it was impossible not only to sleep, but even to fall asleep. In the morning we got up and the whole room was simply buzzing with mosquitoes. People somehow managed to escape from this miracle, but animals had an even harder time. Especially in the fall, when midges were added to the mosquitoes. These ate all open, unprotected places. They especially stuffed themselves under tight cuffs on sleeves, legs, watch straps. Experienced dogs hid their muzzles in specially dug earthen holes and sat in this pose for hours. The young and inexperienced were simply subjected to merciless insects eating their noses and eyelids, scratching these places, they constantly bled and attracted even more bloodsuckers. Some dogs that were unable to find ways to protect themselves simply died. Deer also suffered.

At the beginning of September, I was called to a seminar in Khanty-Mansiysk, to the district party committee, where some of the first or second leaders of enterprises and organizations of the district were gathered.

Seminar at the Khanty-Mansiysk Regional Party Committee

There we were informed about current affairs and plans for the next 10 years. Most of the information was simply a revelation to me, because the newspapers did not mention it. It turned out that with the start of large-scale exploration for oil and gas in the Ob floodplain, sturgeon catches had decreased by 10 times. The fish factory in Khanty had long ago switched to producing canned "Karas v Grechnevoy Kashe" (Crucian Carp in Buckwheat Porridge) because there was no more other fish. They were planning to increase industrial oil production to 125 million tons by 1970, and to 250 million tons by 1975. In 1964, only 1 million tons were extracted and transported by tankers. Knowing the local conditions and the complete absence of land transport highways in the area, I considered these plans an absolute utopia. Another very useful thing I managed to do there was get a license to drive a car and a motorcycle. The head of the district traffic police was with us on an expedition in the summer, and told me to come to Khanty and take the exams externally. Which I did. And then a new emergency happened - in one of the field parties in the Turman area, a student of the geography department of the mining institute got lost on the route. Massive searches were undertaken - detachments from Saranpaul were sent on foot search operations, two helicopters with observers flew - everything turned out to be in vain. They searched for a long time - about 2 months. And they didn't even find any traces.

What started to worry us was our daughter's frequent colds. Somewhere in August, the doctor told us verbatim that if we didn't want to lose our daughter, she needed to change the climate. We couldn't take her somewhere to her grandmothers and leave her there. So the question arose about moving all of us somewhere to a new place of work.

Then I also got sick - after Khanty I went by motorboat to the Izvestnyaki site. The mornings were already cold and I got a chill. My temperature immediately jumped - pneumonia. I was out for a long time, more than 4 weeks, but I often went to work, which was completely unnecessary. As a result, I got a scar in my right lung for life. I felt very weak in my body for another 3 months. After the illness, I took a week off and flew to Severouralsk. I was well received by both Rivkina V.A. and Atayev A.Ya. They immediately suggested that I return to them and go to the Karpinsk party as a technical manager. There were no problems with the apartment either. First they suggested that I live in an ordinary house, and then buy me a private house with an estate of my choice in Veselovka or Karpinsk. It turns out that the purchase of such houses at the insurance price was included in the estimates of exploration work. I immediately agreed and they gave me a letter addressed to Shalavin M.V. with a request to transfer me to the Severouralsk expedition. Two days later I was in Tyumen on the expedition. Shalavin M.V. agreed with my arguments for dismissal and was glad that I found a decent place for a new job, signed an application for a vacation for 4 years with a subsequent transfer to Severouralsk, ordered to inform him when I bring my family to Tyumen so that he could help us settle in for a few days.

I flew to Saranpaul and began getting ready for the trip. As soon as the news reached here that we were leaving, the next day Sobol was stolen. Many knew that the dog was real. And they repeatedly asked to "give" it away or sell it. But I always refused.

In general, at that time I turned out to be the "oldest" worker of the expedition - everyone who remained there came after me. The preparations were not very long - all the heavy and unnecessary things were sold on the spot, and the most valuable things were packed into parcels and sent to different addresses. Nina was pregnant and this time they decided to give birth at her parents' place, in the south of the Tyumen region in the village of Uporovo.

Around the end of November we flew to Tyumen by plane and Shalavin M.V. sent us a car that brought us to the village of Parfyonovo, to one of the private houses. Our cooperative apartment in Tyumen was already ready, and the house was supposed to be occupied in a few days. In principle, we could have stayed to work in Tyumen, since we had housing, and there was an immeasurable amount of work there - in connection with the expansion of work on oil and gas, new organizations related to the development and operation of oil and gas fields were springing up there like mushrooms after the rain, almost every day. The need for engineering personnel was very high in those years. I could have stayed to work as someone in the expedition itself, or I could have gone to work in oil and gas. I did not want to work in the Tyumen expedition, since she worked mainly for building materials, the level of the applied core drilling technology was extremely low and it was impossible to learn anything. For me in those years, the Severouralsk expedition was a model for the organization of geological exploration work and the latest technologies. And not at all because I was born there, but in essence. I have long been inclined to think that at that turning point it was necessary to abruptly change my profession - go to work in an oil and gas organization, in 2-3 years of correspondence study get a second diploma in oil industry in Tyumen. After all, I was not yet 30 years old. However, there was no smart advisor nearby, and I myself did not guess. My subsequent experience of managing drilling operations using heavy oil rigs even without a second diploma was successful, and showed that this path would be correct.

We decided to sell the apartment and as soon as I said this in the group committee of the trade union, and that I was selling my contribution of 2000 rubles. for the same money, they asked me almost in a whisper and in my ear not to tell anyone about it. And tomorrow a woman will come who will bring me the money to the place that I will indicate. This woman was waiting for me the next day, apparently, from early morning, not believing such fairy tales. But I came and took the money from her, and wrote a refusal of the apartment. I simply did not guess then and no one told me that a ready-made 3-room apartment in Tyumen that year costs much more than 10,000 rubles. And so you have to study all your life. Four days later I took Nina and my daughter Lyuda to my parents in Shashova, and I myself went to Moscow to try to buy a car, and then start working in a new old place.

Somehow it happened that with the beginning of the Saranpaul expedition - since November 1961 in the Tyumen geological department, exploratory wells during testing often began to show industrial oil. The first oil of the Shaim expedition in 1960 and after that almost a year's break. And then the oil went in droves - Ust-Balyk, Megion, Salym. Then there was an open gas fountain in 1964 on the river Pur. Then giant gas fields Urengoy, Medvezhye and others were discovered. Our expedition was not directly affected by these discoveries, but we monitored the current course of events through orders from the geological department, which we also received.

Several expeditions conducted oil and gas exploration - Berezovskaya, Narykarskaya, Surgutskaya, Ust-Balykskaya, Megionskaya, Yamalo-Nenets. Later, Tazovskaya and Pravdinskaya appeared. In 1961, 7-8 drilling teams worked in all expeditions together, and in 1965 there were already about 30. Considering the complete absence of summer dirt and railway roads in the places of exploration, each working team had to maintain several drilling rigs in assembly, which were transported by water in the summer and by winter roads. Such an excess of drilling equipment greatly increased the cost of exploration, but there were simply no other options. The fleet of transport units in each oil exploration expedition was astounding. Once an order came from the department to check the condition of transport in the Berezovskaya expedition - about 200 units were out of order.

The management of the expeditions usually consisted of young engineers from 30 to 40 years old. Ervie Y.G. relied on the youth and was not mistaken. True, he also demanded quite a lot from them, but if they made mistakes, he did not "trample" them into the mud, but pulled them out of there. True, as the "victims" themselves said, they remembered for a long time who pulled them out of there and by what method.

The most interesting story was with the head of the Surgut expedition Salmanov F.K. At the end of 1961, a financial audit was carried out there and, as always, a bunch of shortcomings were found. Salmanov was removed and transferred to the position of chief geologist of the Ust-Balyk expedition, and the head of the labor department, Karamov, was thrown all the way to us, to Saranpaul. Soon, oil began to flow everywhere around Salmanov and he was appointed head of the newly organized Pravdinsk expedition. And there he had oil everywhere.

Eyewitnesses of those events told me about his amazing sense of smell, namely Kamenev V.M. There was a famous scientist in Tyumen at that time - geologist Rudkevich M. A very literate person in this field, who also knew 3 languages. Based on the analysis of the materials, he recommended the locations for laying new wells. Salmanov F.K. often disagreed with him and determined the locations for laying according to principles known only to him. Oil was almost always obtained at the points determined by Salmanov. Drilling several wells in the places recommended by Rudkevich turned out to be fruitless. What is more here - analytical abilities, luck or intuition, probably no one will say, including Salmanov F.K. I like the version of developed intuition based on subconscious analytics more. In the end, he went the whole way of Ervie Y.G., first heading the geological service of the region, and then becoming Deputy Minister of Geology.

However, the driving force behind the entire geological service of the region was always Ervie Y. G., who was always aware of all the affairs and ruled with an iron hand. All more or less important decisions were made by him himself or in agreement with him. Once a week, he read all the radiograms from expeditions to the administration, no matter whose name they came in. With the beginning of the big oil discoveries, he began to visit Moscow often, solving numerous issues. At the same time, high-ranking visitors from the Government, Gosplan, and the Central Committee of the Party began to come to Tyumen. It was felt that the region was at the forefront of some major decisions in Moscow. And they were made in the mid-60s. It was decided to invest heavily in the development of the region's oil and gas complex, building a wide range of infrastructure for this purpose - railways and highways, cities, river and sea piers, and creating the necessary production, scientific and educational organizations.

Already in the spring of 1963, when it became clear that the discoveries had taken place, two seemingly independent groups were nominated for the Lenin Prize for this work. The first consisted of employees of the Geological Department headed by Ervie Y.G., the second group consisted only of scientists from the Novosibirsk Geological Institute plus Ervie Y.G. and the chief geologist of the Tyumen Department Rovnin L.I. The scientists believed that this discovery had taken place only thanks to their scientific forecasts. A scandal was brewing. Then Ervie and Rovnin publicly refused to participate in the list of scientists. Moscow, apparently, did not find a compromise this time and removed both groups from the list of contenders for the prize. However, Ervie Y.G. was awarded the title of Hero of Socialist Labor. They received the Lenin Prize in 1964. The list was based on the geological department plus two scientists from the Novosibirsk Akademgorodok.

To be fair, it should be noted that not all geologists welcomed oil and gas exploration in this region. Many considered this a futile undertaking, convinced high-ranking Moscow officials of this, which significantly complicated the work of Tyumen geologists and, I am sure, delayed the start of discoveries for several years. I myself read their skeptical articles in the periodicals of those years.

However, what happened was, and the right decisions were made at the top. The Tyumenneftegaz production association was immediately organized, then Tyumenneftegazstroy and a whole bunch of contracting and subcontracting construction organizations. Educational, design and research institutes began to open, and the volume of construction work increased sharply everywhere. I think that in the history of the country there has never been such a large turnaround of work with huge investments. It seems to me that the entire budget of the USSR at that time was divided into 3 parts - social, the Ministry of Defense, Tyumen.

Naturally, a huge stream of people immediately poured into Tyumen from all regions of the country - major production organizers and engineers, adventurers and commissioned writers, beginning scientists and dropouts, card sharps and prostitutes, young people wanting to test themselves in the harsh conditions of a new business, and mid-level engineering and technical workers with career aspirations. An apartment boom began - and there was a complete shortage of housing. Immediately, a kind of unspoken competition began between geologists and miners. Geologists turned into a main department - Glavtyumengeology. Immediately, miners and builders also turned into main departments. One of the main departments built itself an 8-story administrative building. Another immediately laid the foundation for one floor higher - a 9-story one. No one wanted to give in to anyone. Soon, suddenly, controversy opened up in the open press. The miners began to accuse the geologists of sitting for a long time at already discovered deposits, that their job was to go into the wilds and discover new ones, while the mining department could conduct additional exploration at already discovered ones. In general, they tried to make the geologists understand in plain text where their place was. Although this did not affect our expedition, attempts to trample our colleagues naturally caused our indignation. But the geologists turned out to be a tough nut to crack. And they have remained in working order to this day.

In those same years, some kind of fashion began to write some literary opuses, where the main characters were some of the participants in those events. These "writers" were enrolled in the staff of the expeditions in working positions and they framed the stories of the main characters with all sorts of artistic conjectures and fictions. In addition to newspaper and magazine articles, individual literary works began to appear about what was and was not in the lives of some leaders. These "writers" and some of the customers at that time did not understand that their wretched opuses were completely incommensurate with the scale of the geological discoveries made by these people in the 20th century. And even today I think that their work has not been adequately appreciated to this day.

However, the region began to develop rapidly. Oil and gas production increased year after year at an unprecedented rate, and what we were told at the seminar in Khanty-Mansiysk in 1965 was achieved and later blocked. There were also some mistakes. The largest Samotlor oil field, as a result of super-intensive extraction, was heavily flooded a few years after the start of operation. The situation with gas turned out to be better. Several powerful pipelines were laid from the north of the region, through the Ural Mountains, which are still in operation.

In the 35 years since these fields began to be exploited, about 7 billion tons of oil and several trillion cubic meters of gas have been extracted and pumped. About 180 billion dollars were received for exporting these raw materials until 1990 alone. And where did they end up? Apparently, some of it went to investment in industry and agriculture, some to social needs, and the bulk went to the manufacture of military equipment and weapons, often obsolete, which are now rotting at airfields and storage sites.

And what has been done to improve the lives of specific people? I don’t even want to take the country as a whole, but only the residents of the Tyumen region, from where so many natural resources were taken. Very little. I visited the rural areas in the south of the region for the first time in 1964, then came again 12 years later, and today my relatives live there - absolutely nothing has changed over the years. Stoves are heated with wood, drinking water is taken from the river, there is no natural gas in the villages. In the North, among the local Khanty and Mansi peoples, there is no particular improvement in life either.

Conclusions. Work in the Saranpaul expedition turned out to be extremely useful for me and my future production activities from many points of view. I studied the technology of mining and drilling and blasting operations well. I gained good experience in organizing work in new areas and mastered transport operations on various equipment in hard-to-reach areas. For the first time, I began to deal with issues of a specific economy, and began to understand people better. The disadvantages include negative experience in drilling wells in areas with permafrost lenses - we were never able to find acceptable technologies for their drilling. But the real mess with the frequent replacement of the first and second leaders of the expedition also interfered with normal work. From stories and literature, I know that in the North, frequent changes of leadership are the norm. But 5 heads of the Saranpaul expedition in 5 incomplete years is clearly too much. And later there was the same mess, to which was added the transfer of this expedition from Tyumen to Vorkuta, and then its return back to Tyumen.

R.S. In 1969, the two of us, together with the head of the Cheremukhovskaya geological exploration party, Rodchenko Y.M., flew from Ivdel on vacation to the settlement of Ust-Manya with our outboard motor "Vikhr", took a large wooden boat there and sailed down the Northern Sosva to the settlement of Nyaksimvol. From there we began to climb up the Nyais River to the point where it was no longer possible to turn on the outboard motor. We climbed up more than 100 km. and returned back to Ust-Manyu.

In 1970, already three of us - the chief mechanic of the expedition Shaparev V.K. was added - we again flew to Ust-Manyu with the same equipment and sailed to Nyaksimvol on the same boat. From there we first went down the Severnaya Sosva to the settlement of Verkh.Nildino, and from there up the Volya River for 200 km to the mouth of the Tolya River. There was a hut there, where we stopped. We fished for about 10 days, then went up 25 km along the Tolya River to the village of Tolya. When leaving, the Vasilievs left us a radio station there, which we used to contact geologists in Ust-Manya, and they picked us up from there by a passing helicopter and then brought us to Severouralsk by a passing plane. During this trip, we met our former musher Martin Anyamov and his father Ilya Anyamov - he was still alive, although he was already 90 years old. A very rare age for the Mansi people.