This month's "Tumbleweed" question....
 

Has anyone tried to ride from Magadan to Petropavlovsk?

It's called a tumbleweed question because I'm not expecting any responses and you'll be ale to hear the tumbleweed blow through here soon. :-)

Not me....

Can't resist the tumbleweed theme
 

Wiki says that there are no roads on the peninsula .................................................. .......................................that will be interesting then!

Can you hear the tumbleweed yet?
 

I'm not worried about there being no roads as it's an adventure and my off-road skills are good. What I want to know is if there's a route?
I don't want to keep stopping to make a dug-out canoe so a route that has minimal river crossings would be good. By minimal I mean less than 10 per day during a 200 mile day.

Not sure which wiki you looked at. Judging from Google maps though there are in fact roads on the Kamtschatka peninsula.

Cheers
Chris

Google earth is our friend
 

Well it wasn't wikileaks, just the bog standard wikipedia for "Petropavlovsk".
Anyway, I have been looking at google earth, and it does show a road running more or less northward out of Petro, but only for a shortish distance as far as some other town. It's labelled as the P474.
The P474 does the usual thing of roads the world over = it takes the line of least resistance through the landscape, following a river in the main.
North of that town where the P474 appears to terminate, the geography appears to be quite rugged and I didn't notice any obvious roads, or tracks for that matter - much less signs of habitation.
But, I haven't looked in detail at the whole area which gives every appearance of being remote and for anyone travelling along the length of the peninsula it would involve cross-graining a lot of the geography.

That's my 10 minutes worth of research :innocent: I didn't look at google maps in any detail - I prefer the photographs.

ps
Panning out in G E, I imagine the Russians could be quite sensitive about this piece of their real estate, given it's location viz a viz both continental USA and Japan (China and Japan are at each other's throats at present about contested islands some way to the south).

I did look at the section at google maps, not google earth, and then switched to satellite view. The yellow line marking the road ends where you say it does, but the road is clearly going up north further without any end being obvious to me.

Cheers
Chris

I think the Google views are the same no matter which bit of google is used. Anyway, I agree, but I didn't express myself too well; by "further north" I mean that I was looking at the narrowest neck of the peninsula - it is there that I can't see anything other than green along the rivers and brown for the mountains (with the occasional cloud :innocent:).
Within G E there are quite a few photos posted for the areas with habitation but there are no pics in the isthmus at that narrowest point.

The OP will just have to go there and let us all know.

Purely desk based and theoretical.

There is a 'line' running along the coast up as far as Karaginsky Island from the Petro end. However this is broken in places as you head north. I would assume that there are inhabited fishing villages and the roads heading away from the coast are just local and don't go anywhere in particular.

From Mag there is a 'line' as far as the Magadan/Kamchatka regional boundary. which is fairly solid but it does pass through what looks like low lying and deltaic environments.

All of this leaves a gap of a good 600km.

I wouldn't have thought there is a viable way through for one man and his bike, Unless you have an army :D

Old Russian Military maps may be the way forward and I wouldn't be surprised if google got these 'lines' from old maps. Google has a number of ways it sources its map info.

G

EDIT: Looked at my Russian 'Road Atlas' tonight and there are more 'dashed' lines than I could see through Google which closes the gap a little but there were still 2-3 sections of around 100km gaps around the sound.

All of this assuming the roads are still passable!