Ever heard of the Taiga?

I didn’t… up until I saw a video of a drone flyover in Russia with a seemingly endless flat plane filled with evergreen trees, and got curious.

The Taiga (or “land of little sticks” in Russia) is a biome that dominates a large portion of the northern hemisphere.

All images are from this fantastic video which covers the Taiga in depth

If you’re thinking of biomes in Minecraft it’s basically the same principle. The nutty thing about this region is that it only inhabits about six varieties of trees, and spans across large portions of Siberia.

It’s an endless carpet of the same tree

And each tree isn’t much older than a century. Fluctuations in temperatures make these regions prone to forest fires roughly every 10 years, accounting for some of the largest forest fires in the world.

Temperatures range from 70F down to -65F. This makes the Taiga home to mammals that are slightly larger than in other regions, cause that’s kind of the only way to deal with those kinds of temps.

So if you’re looking to hike but hate hills, here you go. A Costco pack of a few hard-weathering trees, spilled over some of the flattest land I’ve ever seen.