The Ket River was once a major Siberian thoroughfare. Though serpentine and relatively small, it connected two of Russia’s biggest river basins, the Ob and Yenisey. In a region where extremes of weather turn overland roads from inaccessible ice to muddy rubble and back, and where driving distances are measured in days and weeks, the corridor the Ket River created was a key resource. But when the Trans-Siberian railway was built, at the start of the previous century, west-to-east traffic on the Ket River – the farmers and traders and Tsarist troops – began to dwindle. Fewer and fewer travelers needed the Ket, and today its banks are home to just a few scattered and solitary settlements.

The prisoners brought the road, and then the road brought more prisoners. Thousands of inmates of Stalin's gulag labor camps died building a highway across the icy, far-flung Russian region of Kolyma. The route became known as the 'Road of Bones'. It would bring over a million prisoners to work in the area’s gold, tin and uranium mines. For many, the journey across this vast landscape of harsh beauty, where winter temperatures average minus 38° Celsius, would be their last. After the camps were closed following Stalin's death, the route was used mainly by workers drawn to Kolyma by the promise of high wages. But today, fewer and fewer people come to work in this desolate region. Their settlements, scattered along the length of the 'Road of Bones', fade, and along with them fades the memory of the prisoners of the past. The scale and severity of the suffering of the camps, located in one of the most inhospitable environments known to mankind, becomes increasingly difficult to fathom.