Word: taiga
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...crew got tired and quit after a week of firefighting, but the remaining men underwent a slow mental transformation. They began to live as if civilization had never existed, if they had always eaten C-rations, lived in a simple tent, sported a dirty beard, and swaggered through marshy taiga. As the sun floated over Mount McKinley and the Alaska Range each morning, their bodies would drift into effortless ax-swinging--a muscular rhythm now as familiar as walking. When the helicopter failed to meet them on time after a day's work, they would sit on a mountainside covered...
...bottom, raised at the edges by a saucer-rim of mountains, with few barriers against wind or sun. The flat landscape is banded by four distinct regions-the icy northern shelf of the tundra, where nothing grows except moss, lichen and dwarf shrub; the dense forest zone, or the taiga, where arctic birches sprout beside palm trees; the steppe, a black earth meadowland which, when properly farmed, is among the most productive soils in the world; and farthest south, the deserts. In this overwhelming setting, Russia made its way much as the U.S. did in its Far West. In each...