The Taiga Nobody Touched

Scientists working in this reserve have catalogued eight hundred and sixty-six species of lichen. Three hundred and sixty-four of them exist nowhere else on the planet — not in another country, nowhere at all. That's where the story of the Pechora-Ilych Reserve, in the Komi region of Russia's far north, begins.

The reserve was founded in nineteen thirty, with one job: save the sable. Its fur was a major export, the animal mattered enough that a vast stretch of taiga on the northern Urals was sealed off just to protect it. Today it's the only place in Europe where sable still live wild, going about their business like any other forest creature. In nineteen ninety-five, this whole territory — together with the neighboring Yugyd Va National Park — became Russia's first natural site on the UNESCO World Heritage list. More than six hundred and twenty thousand hectares of unbroken, untouched forest — the largest stretch of its kind anywhere in Europe.

Here, European and Siberian plant life meet. Siberian pine — cedar, as it's known locally — grows here in real stands, not stray outliers. It's about the only place on the entire continent where that happens at all.

And in the middle of all this untouched wilderness sits a moose farm. The first one in the world. It was a Soviet-era idea: turn the moose into a taiga workhorse, use it to haul loads across swamp and deep snow where a horse would simply sink. A moose doesn't. The economics of it never quite worked out, but the farm is still running today — and it may be the only place in Europe where you can walk up to a full-grown moose and rest your hand on its shoulder.

Eight months of snow a year, drifts two meters deep by winter, and a short summer where everything that needs doing gets done in just a few weeks. The forest here has never seen a sawmill or a tractor. Once, long ago, this is what all of Europe looked like — before people got to work reshaping it.

What should we tell you about? Your own street would do. moygid dot online.