In 1978, Soviet geologists prospecting in the wilds of Siberia discovered a family of six, lost in the taiga
- By Mike Dash
- Smithsonian.com, January 29, 2013
The Siberian taiga in the Abakan district. 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. (Wiki Commons)
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. It stretches from the furthest tip of Russia’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.
When the warm days do arrive, though, the taiga blooms, and for a few short months it can seem almost welcoming. It is then that man can see most clearly into this hidden world—not on land, for the taiga can swallow whole armies of explorers, but from the air. Siberia is the source of most of Russia’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.
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bearspawprint 
Truly Unbelievable !
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…and I think myself isolated. Oh the strength of that family!
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You are over crowded!! 😉
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There are things to be said for living in such isolation. There are days when I’d gladly go far far from the rest of our kind.
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There are costs what ever life we live. Guarding one rye plant from mice and birds night and day is not so different from the more urban rat-races. Except maybe more stressful and painful and the consequences of non-success more dire. ???? Can you afford a vacation ?
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A vacation from my own mind is in order.
Yes, there are costs everywhere–some make more sense than others though.
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What would you be unwilling to do without? In the wilderness, as those people, there is no escape from one’s own mind. The only escape is through one’s own mind. It does sound as if they were prepared for what befell them with skills and useful items and seeds. …. Ha! Hemp. That we should try that now !
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Unwilling–good question.
hola
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