In 2010 Walter Colebatch returned to host the first commercial motorcycle tour on the Road, in which Sherri-Jo Wilkins became the first foreign female rider to ride the road. In 2009 Walter Colebatch and Tony Pettie on the Sibirsky Extreme Project completed the new road, from Yakutsk to Magadan via Ust-Nera, in three and a half days. In 2007 the Polish Motosyberia team completed the Old Summer Road.
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In 2006, the Hungarian talk show host, Sándor Fábry, and the painter András Wahorn made an assisted trip on the road from Magadan to Yakutsk (using the Tomtor road) on a 30 years old Cadillac Eldorado Convertible car, as part of their Cadillac Drive TV show, driving from Los Angeles to Budapest. Simon Milward completed the road in 2001 by motorbike and it was cycled in the 2004 winter by Alastair Humphreys and Rob Lilwall, followed on foot by Rosie Swale-Pope in 2005 and ridden solo on motorcycle by both Adrian Scott and by Russian woman Sasha Teplyakova (via the Old Summer Road) the same year. They instead joined a Russian freight convoy, whose trucks were able to ford the still swollen rivers. However, due to the timing of the journey and the condition of the road, it was not possible for them and their support crew to complete the traverse unassisted.
Subsequent notable traverses by motorcycle include Ewan McGregor and Charley Boorman's round-the-world motorcycle journey in 2004, made into a popular television series, book and DVD, all named Long Way Round. In 2006, two french adventurers (Cyril Delafosse-Guiramand & Guillaume Tourlourat) walked to Yakutsk on the old road.
Shortly afterwards a Norwegian wanderer Helge Pedersen also completed the road, starting from Magadan. After the fall of the Soviet government, the road was first traversed by Western motorcyclists in summer 1995, when the British Mondo Enduro team completed a crossing from Yakutsk to Magadan. The Old Summer Road has become a challenge for adventure motorcyclists. During winter, frozen rivers may assist river crossings. While the highway itself is generally excellent, with a surface of compacted gravel or clay, the Old Summer Road is in a state of disrepair and is a challenging 4WD track, with washed-out bridges and sections of road reclaimed by streams in summer. The average temperature in Oymyakon in January is −50 ☌. The town of Oymyakon, approximately 100 km from the highway, is believed to be the coldest inhabited place on earth.
The area is extremely cold during the winter. This section is known as the Old Summer Road and remains one of the great challenges for adventuring motorcyclists and 4WDers. The old 420 km section via Tomtor is now largely unmaintained the 200 km section between Tomtor and Kadykchan is completely abandoned. When the road was upgraded, the route was changed to bypass the section from Kyubeme to Kadykchan via Tomtor, and instead pass from Kyubeme to Kadykchan via the town of Ust-Nera. In 2008 the road was granted Federal Road status, and is now a frequently maintained all-weather gravel road. As the road is built on permafrost, interment into the fabric of the road was deemed more practical than digging new holes to bury the bodies of the dead. The road is treated as a memorial, as the bones of the people who died while constructing it were laid beneath or around the road. Inmates of the Sevvostlag labour camp started the first stretch in 1932, and construction continued with the use of gulag labour until 1953. The Dalstroy construction directorate built the Kolyma Highway during the USSR's Stalinist era.