19.07.2018

The trip to Kapchagai proceeded without complications - the route was perfect with no police, the weather was great, although was hot. Our companions were sleeping in the back seat, while we are having an intellectual conversation with Pooh about the trip to Sary-Shagan and other interesting places. In Kapchagai we saw that the legendary "Robot" plant was demolished to the ground, there was not a wall left standing, although it was possible that the underground was intact. There are fewer and fewer objects left, just as people participating in our hobby in Kazakhstan, this is such a shame.  Little by little it started to get hotter - when we reached the post at the Kapchagayskaya HPP, an even layer of dust and sunburn covered the hand that I stuck out the window.
 
After the Kapchagai Changeldi followed, and then the Arkharly pass loomed on the horizon. Just 5-7 years ago it turned into a impassable snow trap each winter and needed to be cleared by military vehicles. But since then the genius of civil engineering made a cut straight through the mountain and the resulting road was good enough even for my tiny car. 

The steppes around are scorched by the ruthless summer sun with yellow and brown colors prevailing among the weathered rocks, and the hot wind reminds one of an oven. The descent from the pass was short, and then came the intersection with the cherished letters that I so longed to see in 2010 when I first visited this region:

Sary-Ozek, translating to Yellow Back, got its name from the ocher shaded rocks and the golden wheat fields under the bottomless blue sky.

It would seem, what does Ukraine have to do with the last photo? Honestly nothing at all) Going on. We got slightly lost on the junction. A perfectly normal road ran through the city, but I was guided by the old maps and dragged the people on a detour. As a result, we had hurt our asses bouncing on a very bumpy stretch of road and possibly damaged the car too.
 
Forty kilometers later, finally, there was a turn to the desired settlement, beyond which was a broken asphalt road leading to our unfinished construction. The village, though in the wilds, was quite nice and well-groomed, a decent Lexus stood at the gate of one of the houses, and in another courtyard the locals painted a tractor and a trailer with a spray gun. The straight road was washed away by a steppe rivulet in the 90's, and we had to storm a shallow fork in the middle of the village. The car got covered with a layer of dirt, while we sweat, because the prospect of getting stuck in a stream inspired no one. Immediately after the village, the asphalt became a little straighter, but it was still clear that no real road was ever constructed here, so our destination was definitely something never finished.  Herds grazed the hills, and the shepherds showed an absolutely obscene degree of curiosity with the car with Almaty numbers. The standard situation for any outing, helping my paranoia and social phobia to bloom in full. Shepherds were motorized, by the way, under the bush in the shade a quad bike and a pair of cans of petrol attached to it. it's understandable - driving a herd along the steppe is handier on a quadro cycle than on foot. The last turn of the road, and we saw the purpose of our journey:

Our emotions were mixed. On the one hand, the scale of this block of crumbling concrete was very impressive. On the other hand, we realized that we would not find anything special here, not even anything underground. Construction was abandoned during the Soviet Union, apparently because of the decisions of Gorbachev's perestroika. The agonizing and flailing state did not need a radio center for 45 or more rooms so far away from anywhere, the costs were much higher than the possible profit, and they simply left it, like the millions of similar objects throughout the Union.
 
To be frank, the design itself was primitive to a fault. A deep pit below the ground level, where the first floor was to be located, with equipment and hardware rooms, then the second floor, already above ground level, had to be dumped with a huge land cap with some grass on top for camouflage. Concrete and fittings for all the facilities were clearly not spared, but this is all that we expected here:

The severe steppe climate did not spare the construction, the snowstorms with summer heat covered the concrete with a network of shallow and deep cracks, in some places it simply disintegrated to such a degree that the boundaries of the steps on the stairs could not be seen.

An incredible number of birds nestled in the ruins, deafening us with their chirping. The birds, outraged by the invasion of their territory, covered the lower floors with an incredible amount of guano from years of living there, and our task, in addition to researching the complex, was not to bring souvenirs of natural origin on our shoes to Poohs car.

Most likely, the construction was planned to be completely autonomous, the seal doors were installed and the foundations were filled with powerful diesel engines and other equipment. Not much was left too look at::

My friends quickly got tired from walking around rooms and corridors filled only with bird poop, but I’m a photographer and I was busy with documenting everything and anything. As a result, everyone but me returned to the car, while I shared the abandoned radio-center with the birds. I could have kept taking pictures for hours still, but the guys let me know that a shepherd was headed my way. My paranoia took control and I ran off with my equipment to join my friends. The shepherd turned out to be absolutely disinterested, but we still had a lot of time and didn’t get enough from just one object. We decided to go to Sary-Ozek itself to the R-14 rocket shafts. As we were pulling away from the radiocenter, we passed by a immaciated local guy who waved us goodbye: 
 

We got to Ozek without trouble, but there accidentally turned around and everyone had to endure my whining about wasted petrol. By that time the sun was in zenith, and we wanted to go to the cooler underground away from its scorching rays.

The unusual geological formation is the so-called “Cap of the Monomakh”, a tall rock with a flat top, aka “Gengiz khan camp”. Nobody truly knows if the famed conqueror actually ever visited it, but we found the road we needed nearby, deciding to visit the rocket shafts first and the service village second.

While the guys were setting up camp I walked around the territory making sure we were alone. I found the slanted entrance, half-covered with soil and a narrow manhole leading inside. Pooh launched a quadrocopter and made a few photos from above, including one of me near the manhole. The quality was not on par with my camera, but the angles are definitely cool enough to be added to the story here:

Climbing down was a team effort, grabbing at the metal armatures and slipping on the clay.

The condition of these shafts was definitely worse than the similar structure on the 13th kilometer (we were on the 45th). Destruction seemed to be a deliberate effort by the soldiers leaving this place many years ago.

In general, there was only one positive feature from the actions of the demolishers: they had made so many small and large holes in the walls and ceiling of the complex that in some rooms a pretty drafty, the air was fresh and the mold that hit me in 2016 was not was in sight.

The upper floor was used to house command, residential and storage facilities, as well as ventilation and toilets with showers. It suffered much more than the lower floors, since all the walls here were made of ordinary brick, and they were blown to bits. The lower level is monolithic reinforced concrete. Having wandered in vain through the ventilation compartments, having photographed the surviving pipes (on some, even the tug-gage meters were preserved), I descended down the fallen slabs. A convenient metal ladder, characteristic for the first positions, is not preserved here. All this time my companions moved somewhere beyond the walls, without interfering with my shooting and walking for my own pleasure. Having met them at last, I went to one of the rocket shafts:

But as for the mines themselves, here they are much better preserved, surprisingly. Less flooded, better illuminated, air not as damp and heavy, as in the first positions. It is here, in the technical compartments around the head of the rocket, where you understand the full power of this complex and products that once were in service with our Motherland:

Despite the preserved metal balcony around the mine, photographing the vertical trunk downward is scary and stressful. I'm very afraid of heights, the booming giant room under the multitone concrete hood of the mine resonates from the flapping of the bird's wings, because there are full of pigeons, and the furious imagination paints me with a horrifying picture of how the rotting bridges separate from the wall of the glass with a screeching grin, dragging me down into the dark thick slurry. There are a lot of feathered inhabitants here, they nest on the beams, in numerous manholes and technological crevices, everywhere are piles of their litters, feathers and even whole corpse. Squeamish people won’t feel comfortable in there.

Having walked a lot along the footbridge around the mine, I got out and sighed freely - the solid monolithic concrete under one's feet is still much better than the rusty gratings. Then I went to take pictures of the headline around the mine:

Walking with my camera in the technical room, I witnessed a sad accident: my comrades, climbing the "glass" scared a baby dove, almost an adult bird, but still young and stupid.

Having departed with considerable speed from its nest, the bird bumped against the concrete wall of the mine, losing its orientation for a moment. This was enough for hysterically flapping lump of feathers to fall down into the stinky dense water, where it began to fiercely fight for his life. He struggled in the water and tried to fly, but his wings were covered with sticky debris, eventually dragging him to the bottom. Convulsive attempts to save its life lasted for about twenty minutes, then there was silence ..

All three mines are generally the same, and one of them was already damaged by an excavator, so I will not cover them in detail, I will show only those moments that I took pictures of in other parts of this very large complex .

Along the way, I found a very interesting filter for a gas mask, I have never seen such a filter before. A large fragment from the top resembles the standard EO-16 (Unified Combined-Arms), khaki color, the increased army version of this GP-5, and below it was another one smaller, kinda green. Apparently, they are either handicrafts of some soldier (although the threaded joint of the large and small filter looks like factory work), or we have stumbled on a rare filter for work in the heptyl-containing medium, since this was what the tanks in the underground complex were filled with.

Above you can see a selection of photos from the premises where the tanks with heptyl and oxidizer were kept, as well as the nozzles along which this infernal mixture was fed to the missiles themselves. Few things have survived, and I'm not too strong in the chemical processes of refueling rockets with fuel and oxidizer, but at least photos for descendants will remain. In general, the underground complex is incredibly huge, interesting and since 2010 this place was included in the top 5 of my favorite objects, I never seem to get tired of driving here, walking and taking pictures.

During a leisurely walk, I again lost my companions, who climbed to the surface and already called me to go to the next point, but then I noticed that I had forgotten my shoulder bag in the long run, and I had to run alone alone, grab it and go up to the surface. Along the way, I made the last few frames:

The last photo is noteworthy for the fact that it clearly shows how, as a result of a powerful explosion, a thick concrete slab, which was the ground floor of the first floor, fell to the second floor, as well as the completely destroyed side walls. I suspect that the looters couldn’t have caused such damage. Maybe the complex was damaged by engineering charges. Actual real Americans lived in the nearby town at the time of the Soviet disarmament and they are very pedantic with removing the weaponized teeth of their former enemies. 
 
After rising to the surface, I saw that my heat-striken friends were preparing for lunch. The desert temperature peaked and after bright light of the sun dazzled and irritated us after the cool underground. We ate a little, sipped our tea, collected our equipment and rode to our next goal - the town.

At first glance, the town seemed uninhabited, but that was an illusion. Approaching the former main entrance and checkpoint, we noticed a whole flock of watchdogs  of different size and ferocity. On the territory inside we found a car, and everywhere there were traces of total abandonment - with removed earthen embankments, many hangars generally disassembled into tubing, almost all of  the buildings were demolished to the foundation, asphalt gouging, garbage and piles of excavated earth everywhere - looters were digging for cables and pipes. The barking of dogs attracted a dirty, disheveled local, nervous and looking suspiciously at us. Our polite requests to take photos and videos for an article were met with obscenities, sending us away on an erotic quest of no return and telling us that this was private property. Classic. We decided to not escalate the conflict, especially since he began calling someone frantically as we were driving off. On the way we saw a looter caravan - a few Ural trucks pulling wagons with pipes and cables. Seems like in a few years they will clear everything out there, the bastards.

Since there was still a lot of time, and we still had strength to climb, we decided to visit near positions, on the 13th kilometer, but not on the mines themselves, but just in the town.

Despite having no water left and it being hellishly hot, we did get there. The town made the opposite impression to the disgrace we had just witnessed. The proximity to the highway and the relative civilization definitely affected the premises. Some people live both here and there, but here they did not hinder our exploration of the location, and have shown  me the most brilliant example of the conversion of the territory, that I have ever seen.

One of the two small bunkers, standing by the road, was carefully cleaned from the earth embankment and turned into a warehouse / barn. But it is not barbarously scattered, and all the land removed is evenly distributed around. The roof out of plexiglass was erected above the bared room. On the jamb, which remained from the hermetic door, an ordinary door was installed. Practically all the hangars, except for the storage of ready-equipped missiles, were equipped with wickets welded to the doorposts again with hermetic doors. All the garbage, that had accumulated there for decades, was carefully cleaned, floors were swept up to bare concrete. And all the broken brick and pieces of slabs were not just pulled out of the hangars and abandoned, not at all - they were gently assembled and pressed into every pit in the territory, and the top was sprinkled with earth. Thanks to this, in a year or two the whole location will be covered with even grass, no piercings and ugly trenches from the dug out cable and pipes! In addition, the historical appearance of hangars and their appearance did not suffer. I want to believe that these cleaned premises, turned into cattle pens, will remain accessible to visitors in the future, as well as the location itself. In the meantime, let's see the photos: 

The group of structures in the photo above is an impressive storehouse for finished products immersed in transport-loading machines and waiting to be transported and installed in mines. These storages are protected by thick reinforced concrete sliding doors, which are retracted into special grooves in the walls. And then there's a pleasant echoing boom, a clean and even concrete floor and an emergency exit, once equipped with hermetic doors, out of each such storage. Currently, these are the only structures in the complex not yet used by locals for hay stores.

Having inspected the above storage facilities, we split up. Two of our comrades, more tired than the rest, were left in the car, and I with another friend dispersed in the area of our interest - he went to the ruins of a residential town, and I to the command center and a hangar for routine maintenance of the GBS (the main military unit, with warheads).

I started with the command center. Its main entrance, devoid of the massive seal door once gaped like a huge hole, but now it has welded neat gates, tied with a wire. I did not open them, going through the emergency exit from the side instead. Inside, everything is more or less tidied up, huge rooms for observing the tactical situation are empty and echoing just like the corridors:

There was not much to see here, and I went to the hangar for routine maintenance. Once it was divided by brick partitions into many compartments, but now they were all demolished, and the bricks were cleaned and cleared, only the walls and the ceiling, painted in different colors at different heights, remind of the former number of rooms. In the middle of the hangar there remained one massive concrete pillar, which, apparently, too lazy to break. The most interesting feature of this structure was the existence of surviving inscriptions telling how to properly service a missile, load it and operate it. Took pictures ofl the most interesting and complete inscriptions, they can come in handy someday:

Interestingly, the secrecy was in everything. Even inside the hangar, where everyone clearly knew where they were and what they were working on, a powerful nuclear warhead was simply called  "cargo", and a transport container with a climate unit "container with cargo".

Leaving the hangar, I hurried to the car, where my satiates were waiting for me in a stuffy state. Along the way, I quickly took pictures of the remaining landscapes, which would also be good to save, because who knows how much this object will change in the coming years ..

As you can see even this last hangar for rocket construction didn’t escape the fate of becoming a cowshed. A refueler cistern was lying in the long grass behind it. For some reason it was not taken for scrap metal yet - maybe the locals knew something dangerous about it. Why else would a huge chunk of metal be just laying around in the ground.
 
We gathered our things, drank the last of the water and slowly started back towards the city.

We were just entering the highway when Pooh’s wife called and warned us about road police ahead, so we took a detour by an old road, picking up cold cola and ice cream on the way.

No police crossed our path for the remainder of the day so we ended up coming home without any problems except for a small traffic jam. 

I’d like to thank everyone who came with me on this trip, especially Pooh for driving 600 km in a day.

It was awesome, thank you so much!