#ala-kul

Something Long And Complicated visits Ala-Kul, Kyrgyzstan 🇰🇬

This guide contains everything you need to know about hiking in Ala Kul Lake in Kyrgyzstan, from the history of the lake, to the best places for trekking and horseback riding in Uzbekistan and the most important places for hiking and riding on the back of the horse in the country. Sources: 3, 4

Ala Kul is an alpine lake in the…

The trail begins by crossing this slightly dodgy looking bridge spanning a raging torrent due to huge amounts of meltwater at this time of year and entering the forest (2480m).

Soon enough there is a nice gently rising alpine meadow. It is guarded by a marmot, it doesn’t seem too tricky so far.

By 3000m the duck is level with the snow line on the north side of the mountain opposite, note the ice on the bushes next to me. Also the path has taken a very verticle direction and is best described as fucking steep at this point. Apart from a couple of flat-ish sections the gradient was around 30% on average.

Now the concept of a path has been farcical for some time, first the massive field of large boulders and now this is the “path”. Basically just some loose rocks on an incline next to a stream.

Nearing the top there were several stretches like this. If I didn’t have a guide I would have turned back ages before, this is just snow, pretty deep in places too around 30cm and still fucking steep. I was really struggling to breathe enough for this altitude.