Walk into the produce section of your average supermarket, and you're going to see a lot of different varieties of apples.

Honeycrisp, Macintosh, Golden Delicious, Red Delicious, Fuji, Granny Smiths, Reds, Greens, Yellows.

But believe it or not, all of these apples can actually trace their roots back to a common wild ancestor.

And to the wild apple forests where it grows.

I'm Amanda McGowan, and this is Atlas of Skura,

a celebration of the world's strange, incredible, and wondrous places.

Today, we're heading to the Tianshen Mountains between Kazakhstan and China,

in search of wild apples.

That's up to this. It was May.

And we were up in the mountains in the national parks.

It was a rugged drive to get to these locations on bumpy roads. This is Gail Volk. She's a scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture,

or USDA. In 2018, Gail traveled to the Tianshen Mountain Range in Kazakhstan along the border

with China. This is an area known for its wild apples. In fact, the nearest city in Kazakhstan along the border with China. This is an area known for its wild apples.

In fact, the nearest city in Kazakhstan is actually called Almaty, a name which comes from the word

apple. And that is exactly what Gail was looking for, wild apple trees. And the trees were beautiful.

You saw bright pink and white blossoms.

When you looked off onto the hillsides, you can see these big swaths and valleys of blossoms, of pink trees.

In spring, there were just flowers on these trees, but a little over a year later,

Gail returned to Kazakhstan, this time in the fall, where she could actually reach up into

the trees, twist off apples, and taste them.

In the forest, there's a huge range of fruits.

There's tiny apples, just an inch or two in diameter, big apples, green, red, yellow, even purple apples.

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