Vilyui

For truck drivers in this part of Siberia, The Plate, the truck stop that marks the Vilyui highway’s northern end, is an island of comfort in a sea of snow.

In the dead of winter, drivers at The Plate said, shipping companies pay about $500 for a one-way run over the Vilyui highway.

The wife of one truck driver on the Vilyui highway wrote a book about his life with the title, “Territory of Risk.”

In 1996, an unexpectedly warm spring stranded dozens of truckers along hundreds of miles of the Vilyui highway.

TAS-YURYAKH, Russia — At a truck stop at the northern terminus of the Vilyui ice highway in northeastern Siberia, drivers make small talk not about life on the road but rather the life of the road.