The valley walls were narrow, with sides that were close to vertical in places, and the skinny pine and birch trees swaying in the rotorsвЂ™ downdraft were so thickly clustered that there was no chance of finding a spot to set the aircraft down. A helicopter sent to find a safe spot to land a party of geologists was skimming the treeline a hundred or so miles from the Mongolian border when it dropped into the thickly wooded valley of an unnamed tributary of the Abakan, a seething ribbon of water rushing through dangerous terrain. Thus it was in theВ remote south of the forest in the summer of 1978. Karp Lykov and his daughter Agafia, wearing clothes donated by Soviet geologists not long after their family was rediscovered. Siberia is the source of most of RussiaвЂ™s oil and mineral resources, and, over the years, even its most distant parts have been overflown by oil prospectors and surveyors on their way to backwoods camps where the work of extracting wealth is carried on. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden worldвЂ“not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming.

It stretches from the furthest tip of RussiaвЂ™s arctic regions as far south as Mongolia, and east from the Urals to the Pacific: five million square miles of nothingness, with a population, outside a handful of towns, that amounts to only a few thousand people. This forest is the last and greatest of EarthвЂ™s wildernesses. The snows linger into May, and the cold weather returns again during September, freezing the taiga into a still life awesome in its desolation: endless miles of straggly pine and birch forests scattered with sleeping bears and hungry wolves steep-sided mountains white-water rivers that pour in torrents through the valleys a hundred thousand icy bogs. Six members of the Lykov family lived in this remote wilderness for more than 40 years-utterly isolated and more than 150 miles from the nearest human settlement. The Siberian taiga in the Abakan district.

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