In 1640 Dimitry Zyryan (also called Yarilo or Yerilo) went overland to the
Indigirka. In 1641 he sailed down the Indigirka, went east and up the
Alazeya. Here they heard of the Kolyma and met
Chukchis for the first time. In 1643 he returned to the Indigirka, sent his
yasak (tribute) to
Yakutsk and went back to the Alazeya. In 1645 he returned to the
Lena where he met a party and learned that he had been appointed
prikazchik (land administrator) of the Kolyma. He returned east and died in early 1646. In the winter of 1641–42
Mikhail Stadukhin, accompanied by
Semyon Dezhnyov, went overland to the upper Indigirka. He spent the next winter there, built boats and sailed down the Indigirka and east to the Alazeya where he met Zyryan. Zyryan and Dezhnyov stayed at the Alazeya, while Stadukhin went east, reaching the Kolyma in the summer of 1644. They built a
zimovye (winter quarters), probably at
Srednekolymsk, and returned to Yakutsk in late 1645. In 1892–94
Baron Eduard Von Toll carried out geological surveys in the basin of the Kolyma (among other Far-eastern Siberian rivers) on behalf of the Russian Academy of Sciences (Barr, 1980). During one year and two days the expedition covered , of which were up rivers, carrying out geodesic surveys en route. The Kolyma is known for its
Gulag labour camps and
gold mining, both of which have been extensively documented since
Joseph Stalin–era Soviet archives opened. The river gives its title to a famous anthology about life in Gulag camps by
Varlam Shalamov,
The Kolyma Tales. After the camps were closed, state
subsidies, local industries and communication dwindled to almost nothing. Many people have migrated, but those who remain in the area make a living by fishing and hunting. In small fishing settlements, fish are sometimes stored in caves carved from
permafrost. The last Americans to visit the Kolyma during the Soviet era, before
perestroika, were the crew of the sailing
schooner Nanuk in August 1929, whose visit was captured in a film taken by the
Nanuk owner's 18-year-old daughter, Marion Swenson. The first two Americans to visit the Kolyma after the
Nanuk's visit were writer Wallace Kaufman and journalist Rebecca Clay, who traveled by cutter from Ziryanka to Green Cape in August 1991. Kaufman and his daughter Sylvan and CPA Letty Collins Magdanz also travelled part of the Kolyma in August 1992, the first American visitors since the collapse of the Soviet Union. Both trips were arranged by North-East Scientific and Industrial Center: Ecocenter to try out an ecotourism route which was found to be impractical. In February 2012, the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reported that scientists had grown plants from 30,000-year-old
Silene stenophylla fruit, which was stored in
squirrel burrows near the banks of the Kolyma river and preserved in permafrost. ==Settlements==