Friday, 24 August 2012


Cloudberries, photo: Christoph Müller

Moroshka, the cloudberry, is of particular importance for the residents of the Muostakh island (and thus also for the expedition team). They not only delight your eyes with strong yellow-orange-red tones in autumn color filled tundra. The vitamin-rich and very tasty cloudberries also represent a fresh and welcome addition to our daily food, whether it's freshly picked during a short break on the way, fresh or sweetened in the morning oatmeal or wheat porridge, the Russian “kasha” or as a freshly cooked jam.

Cloudberries are very common at Muostakh and the individual berries may well grow to considerable size (up to three centimeters in diameter have already been spotted and eaten immediately). Nevertheless of its presence on the island, the cloudberry is rather rare in the region and therefore it is for example very special for the residents of the city Tiksi. This led to an incidence, which was very important for our expedition team.

Russian helicopters around Tiksi usually arrive a few hours later than originally scheduled and then quickly, sometimes only after few minutes ("bystro, bystro") they fly out again from the island. This time, the helicopter, which came to pick up the German film crew from the German TV station RBB (Rundfunk Berlin-Brandenburg) arrived three hours before the scheduled arrival. This particular helicopter was not only to take the TV crew on board, but also to deliver two boxes of frozen ice samples to Tiksi. So, when the helicopter arrived, these samples were still in the fridge and the team, responsible for the samples, was about two kilometers from the camp (and from its samples).

This unexpected situation led to the design of a new sport in Muostakh: Long-distance sprint on the beach and through the tundra - in waders. Everybody who knows how waders are, knows that they are indeed very useful here in the Tundra, but not suitable for a long distance run. Actually, we would not have made it back to camp to pack the boxes with the samples, if there had been no cloudberries. The helicopter crew had scheduled for 45 minutes for berry picking and when I reached the camp after about 20 minutes, the helicopter was still there, thanks to its cloudberry picking crew.

So, ultimately, the cloudberries were responsible for ensuring that the boxes, filled with frozen samples, were transported by helicopter to Tiksi and the freezer was filled with new samples.

Thanks a lot to the cloudberry or how it is called in Russian: Bolshoe Spasibo Moroshka!

Greetings
Thomas

 

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Main page of the English translation of the blog "Tundra Stories": http://page21.org/blogs/59-samoylov
Original German blog: http://www.awi.de/de/go/Tundra-Stories