![]() ![]() It was hard to believe that anything could inhabit this moonscape. When Sarana and I at last reached the top of the mesa, we were confronted with a bleak winter scene-an expanse of treeless plateau whose surface was studded with snow-covered boulders. The sheep's fondness for end-of-the-Earth locales led me to this precipitous slope, struggling to find a way up without somersaulting 600 feet (183 meters) down a field of jagged basalt rocks. Both rams and ewes are clothed in a gray-brown wool that provides extraordinary insulation on the plateaus, where winter temperatures plunge to minus 85 degrees Fahrenheit. The biggest rams weigh up to 220 pounds (100 kilograms) and have thick horns shaped like commas. The sheep, Ovis nivicola borealis, are rare-estimates range from 2,500 to 6,000 in all-and among the hardiest of animals. ![]() ![]() Sarana and I were searching for Putorana snow sheep, as we had been for nearly two weeks, with no success. Snow had fallen in the night, throwing into sharp relief the striated flanks of nearby plateaus. We were 200 miles (322 kilometers) north of the Arctic Circle in early September. Standing tall, he turned around on the vertiginous slope and scanned the horizon of his favorite corner of Russia-the Putorana Plateau, a wild, uninhabited tableland the size of Nevada, cut by canyons, rivers, and waterfalls. Vasily Sarana, the 33-year-old chief of the Russian Geographic Society's Putorana expedition and a mountaineer who seemed capable of bounding up vertical walls, was not in such an undignified position, however. ![]() The view was magnificent-mile after mile of flat-topped mountains receding to the Artic horizon-though it was difficult to appreciate if you were on your hands and knees on the side of one of those plateaus, clinging to shards of scree. ![]()
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