The forest tundra expedition

Abstract

The first Western mycological expedition to the forest tundra in the Arctic regions of Siberia, took place in the summer of 1992. We met in Moscow on the 16 of July. The members of the expedition were Dr Henning Knudsen from the Danish Natural History Museum, Mikako Sasa, Peer Corfixen and Henrik F Gotzsche from Denmark; Heikki Kotiranta, a Senior Research Scientist from the Finnish National Board of Waters and the Environment and myself (see below). Two Russians would be joining us later. After a short stroll through the streets of Moscow, we caught the evening train to Ekaterinburg. The journey from Moscow to Ekaterinburg (formerly Sverdlovsk) took 28 hours. The train crossed European Russia up to the Ural Mountains and beyond. It seemed an excellent opportunity to get a panoramic view of this country but, actually, you can see very little from a window of a passing train. Trees and more trees. A lot of forest. A few towns and villages, not too impressive. We crossed the mighty Volga river. More trees. The grasses along the railway are cut for hay. The travelling people we met in the corridors of the train and in the buffet all spoke nothing but Russian, a language that I do not understand. We also met old women who sold us peanuts, wild strawberries and other fruits whenever the train stopped at a station. On the second day, past midnight, we arrived at our destination: Ekaterinburg. After spending the rest of the night in a private flat, we had breakfast and met the leader of the expedition, Dr Viktor Mukhin, from the Institute of Animal and Plant Ecology. After a day of rest and a short stroll in the town and a banquet in the evening to celebrate our arrival (it may well be that the Russians don't have enough to eat, but there is no question that they have more then enough to feed their friends), we were driven to the airport where our helicopter was waiting. We climbed into the helicopter with our luggage, tents, enough foodstuff to last us for a month and off we buzzed into the air, northwards, to the tundra. Flying low, below the clouds, we trailed the Ural Mountains on our left and the vast expanses of the Taiga Forest on our right. Six hours of helicopter flight over pine, larch and birch. I have never seen so much forest in all my whole life. The forest was dotted from time to time with towns, villages or the occasional bald patch of fallen trees. Our destination at that time was Labitnangy, the capital of that part of the tundra, a fair sized town of wooden houses where the river Ob joins the bay of Obskaya, that opens into the Kara Sea of the Arctic Ocean. Labitnangy is the main town of North West Siberia just inside the Arctic Circle (66°6' east, 66°37' north). It is the logistic supply centre of several coal mining settlements, oil wells and refinery complexes further to the north. We unloaded our stuff from the helicopter and stored it in one of the houses that belong to the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology. We then prepared ourselves for a banquet (this seems to be the custom anywhere in Russia). Here I had my first taste of fresh sturgeon