Siberian summers do not last long. 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. This forest is the last and greatest of Earth’s wildernesses.
-Smithsonian
