“I’ve got some good news: we’re going to Duvannyi Yar tomorrow!” That’s how John informed us of our imminent departure for one of the most famous sites we visit on this trip. None of us knew quite what we would find. We’d all heard stories aplenty about the mammoth bones sticking out of the ground and dangerous sinkholes in the mud. But of course none of us really knew what we would find.

So excitement ran high as we packed up our equipment, loaded it onto the barge, and headed out. The ride down lasted about 18 hours, and convinced me that travel by barge is by far the best way to go. We used some of the time to catch up on sleep and work, but the best hours were spent wandering the deck, watching the river roll by or singing to John and Andy’s guitar. The Zimovs and André (a boat driver helping on the trip) spent the time wrestling our huge barge downriver on the power of a motorboat. We owe them a lot of gratitude for our easy trip.

We arrived late in the afternoon of the 16^th of July. Looking out we saw one bank rising slowly from green marshy wetlands to lowland brush. The near bank was the one we had come to see: a steep cliff of ice wedges interspersed with crumbling yedoma and crowned by larch forests. We waited until after dinner for our first expedition into this thawing landscape – it’s a good idea to load up on fuel before facing hordes voracious predatory mosquitos. As Brian put it: “Ow! What do they eat when they can’t get hobbit?!”

But neither the gentle pitter-patter of a mosquito rain on our head nets nor Claire and Kiril’s close encounters with mud-based sink holes (rescued from disaster by log bridges and memories of Sergei Zimov’s safety lecture) could diminish our enthusiasm for Duvannyi Yar. Zimov took us up the bank for a short walk along the ridge while he explained how this landscape – now a larch forest – was once a grassland steppe maintained by mammoths, bison, moose, horses, hippos and rhinos. He pointed out the grass sprouting from the crumbling river banks that grew from 10,000 year old seeds. As the bend of the river washes against this bank, it melts the permafrost causing the banks to collapse, but also freeing the remains of a long dead ecosystem. You could say it’s a preview for the future feature-length film “Climate Change and Arctic Thaw” (coming soon to an ecosystem near you).

It’s also a re-run of “Charismatic Megafauna.” The beach was littered with skulls, ribs, teeth, thigh-bones and countless other Pleistocene relics. Ten paces were enough to find bones from at least three different long-extinct animals. My favorites were: mammoth teeth and thigh-bones, a bison shoulder-blade, and a horse hoof. And just to prove that Siberia hasn’t completely lost its charisma, when we turned back for the barge we found four sets of much more recent footprints leading the way. Sometime not too long ago this beach had played host to both adult and juvenile moose and wolf.

The solitary footprints on a beach littered with bones were a poignant reminder of Homo sapiens’s role as an ecosystem engineer: first silencing the thunder of mammoth feet over a frozen steppe then melting the ground from between the roots of the silent forests.