As soon as they began to turn off the tent, the snowfall increased doubly. By lunch it is possible to overcome 30 km. Passed the Gulf of Middendorf. The climate here is severe, nine months of the year the bay is frozen and even in summer it is never completely ice-free. On the shores of the tundra gulf. The Gulf of Middendorf is a separate site in the Great Arctic Reserve of which we have already talked.
Khariton Laptev explored the banks of the Middendorf Gulf for the first time in May 1741 during the Great Northern Expedition. On this promontory, he discovered “old fires”, that is, traces of ancient fires. Consequently, long before the members of the detachment Khariton Laptev, people, probably Russian explorers of the 17th century, visited the district. However, the name of the bay Laptev was not appropriated. In 1900 Edward Toll’s expedition explored the bay in detail on the vessel “Dawn”. It was Toll who named this bay as part of his teacher, the famous scientist and explorer of Taimyr, Alexander Fedorovich Middendorf. Here is how Edward Toll described the bay in his diary:
On the southern side, on the background of the pink-red sky, the wavy dark blue contours of the continent’s mountains stood out sharply, reddish and golden cirrus clouds floated above their tops, like the pillars of flame that the wind had burned. In the foreground, the narrow, brown strips of the tundra, colored by places in light purple tones, gleamed, shining through the clouds, At the foot of the rocky promontory, which is a chaotic heap of piles of rubbish-brown, weathered gneiss, one on top of another, the ice covered by wind was lying motionless, but the ice floes, coming from the other side of the promontory, came out with a melodious mournful sound. The slightly disturbing huge sea reflected on its surface the low-hanging leaden-gray clouds, which, as they approached the bay, turned purple. In the cold gray-steel waters, the Zarya anchor is moving at an anchor, the solar disk slowly disappears behind the flaming on the horizon-sea, where my native land is far away! … The fjord that we discovered and which we have been standing for eleven days, I named Middendorf. I believe that I had the right to do this: first, because we determined the coordinates of this place; secondly, because the study of the surroundings and fauna of the fjord is successful and, consequently, the name of the fjord is quite justified. Whose name deserves more than others to be immortalized here, if not the name of Middendorf, the first scholar-explorer of the Taimyr land, authoritative researcher of Siberia?
During the parking in the Gulf, Toll ordered a grocery store, suggesting to explore on dog sleds during the polar winter of the coast of Taimyr. But he did not use it himself. Here’s how he wrote about it in his diary:
… Here I ordered to bury a box with 48 cans of canned soup, a sealed box of 6 kg of breadcrumbs, a sealed box of 6 kg of oatmeal, a sealed box containing about 1.6 kg of sugar, 4 kg of chocolate, 7 bars and 1 brick of tea. The pit was … marked with a wooden cross.
In 1973, the Komsomolskaya Pravda expedition unearthed the Tolle treasure. The products were in full preservation and edible. The find allowed to prove practically that products in the conditions of the Far North can be stored for many decades. This fact was of interest to the Ministry of the meat and dairy industry of the USSR, and in 1974 and 1980 scientific expeditions were organized to store food for long-term storage. The case was continued by Rosrezerv and the Rosselkhozakademie, and similar expeditions went to the Taimyr peninsula in 2004 and 2010.
We are slowly moving towards our goal – the Sterligov Weather Station. We reach the goal by 10 pm local time. Today we spend the night with comfort!