Unraveling the Snow Leopard Track Part 1
Summer of 2019
After five unyieldingly terrifying days of negotiating lethal terrain in the neglected belly of the Great Pamir's Yazgulom Valley, Johanna and I stand on the lapping shore of an unfordable river. A numbing wave of derealization washes across me, and my head feels as though it has been submerged in tepid water for days. I can't breathe, yet the strange calm of forfeiture hangs over us both. There is no way forward, and no way back. Beaten and dejected, frayed and tormented, we both know that this is truly the end of the road.
"How did we get ourselves here?" I wonder to myself. And Why?" To answer that, I need to revisit my first introduction to Central Asia, when first was sewn within me the promethean concept of a thru stitching together all of Asia's great mountain ranges.
Equipped with thirty some blurry printed sheets of paper, each detailing a different quadrant of mountainous terrain between Tajikistan's Great Pamir and the Terskey Alatoo in northern Kyrgyzstan, I arrived in the sleepy town of Karakol for the first time. An impressive line of peaks rose up behind rows of faded blue Russian dacha and columnar poplar. I set about amassing enough foods for the two-week trek to come in the busy central bazaar - a more or less self-contained sprawl of tinmetal shanties and plump, cheery babushkas peddling stale cookies in bulk, ripe local fruits, and traditional kaymak, ayran, and kuruts - fresh from the summer jailoos.
I'd just come off a four day circuit around Kazakhstan's Ili Alatoo, over the course of which I'd gotten more than just a taste for the terrain of the Northern Tian Shan, with its signature spilling, fractured glaciers, cracked, black pepper summits, vertiginous mountain ramparts steeped in dark spruce, and meadows of astoundingly diverse waist-deep wildflowers. Airy, verdant valleys and plateaus contrasted against heavy ravines whose walls blotted out the sun. I was spellbound. Never before had I been anywhere even half as poetically, fundamentally beautiful. Throughout that experience I felt as though I had stepped into a Bierstadt original, oil on canvas. I wanted more.
I met Akane, Aska, and Yusei, with whom I'd share the coming days, on the porticoed stoop the Center Hostel, a property now abandoned in the surge of more competitive accommodation offerings. The first part of our plans aligned and, bags burgeoning, we boarded a Sprinter marshrutka to the trailhead. By the time we were on the move the Issyk Kul basin had already grown hot, but the spruce that lined our path tempered the sun, and as we climbed the mild cool of the mountains overtook the swelling valley heat. As we all walked, our conversation hardly faltered.
To this day I still vividly remember the final moments as we crested the last rise before the Altyn Arashan Hot Springs. There was a small, uneven picnic table, hewn from raw logs, where we sat and gulped water and looked out. Beneath the snowbound pyramid of Peak Palatka, groupings of white yurts spotted the green valley floor. Horses milled about unhobbled and untethered, and cows bedded amidst them, chewing contentedly on the grasses wher they lay. A row of outstructures, telling steam rising from gaps in the rafters, lined the shore of a gray river. That evening we soaked in these hot waters and played cards with a deck depicting scantily-clad Mongolian wrestlers. These the girls giggled over, and ranked from least to most attractive. Before bed, we planned out our next moves.
In the four days that followed we worked our way slowly over the Ala-Kul Pass, from the top of which opened panoramic views over a great extent of the Terskey Ala-Too. Though I had initially planned to continue onward alone over a series of passes westward, when it came time I made the call to descend with the group. It wasn't a tough decision; after hitchhiking solo for upwards of three months across Mongolia and Xinjiang, it had been a far too long since I had truly socialized, and I was captivated by these charming new friends.
We descended back down to Karakol and savored our robust post-trek shaurma together. Saying farewell to the others, who had stricter time constraints, Akane and I continued on together, down the south shore of Issyk-Kul. In the quaint lakeside hamlet of Chychykan a grandmotherly lady lavished onto us several kilograms of fresh apricots, which were in the height of their season. For two days we cowboy camped beside a crackling fire on the lake's sandy littoral, and in this time we ate almost nothing else but these.
Our hitching route, winding and flexible, took us to the beaches of Barskoon and the cerulean Kol-Tor Lake before finally depositing us back in Bishkek, weary and road-tired, yet still unwilling to lose our momentum. We quickly set about negotiating a fare for a shared taxi down to the aging village of Toktogul beside the eponymous reservoir, then onward to the vaulted green shade cast by Arslanbob's expansive groves of Persian Walnut. Our ultimate destination was the deep south - the Batken Oblast. There, behind deep canyons carved by thunderous glacial river through desert basalt, lay hidden a deep realm of precipitous granitic peaks and fantasy spires.
The evening before departing, we listened to the Muslim call to prayer echo out over the dusky expanse of Osh, its streets illuminated with stars, the flat western horizon fading out from crimson to royal purple. I found the Adhan deeply moving, hauntingly melancholic and sobering. I stood transfixed throughout it until the loudspeakers crackled and cut and the spell broke. Though it is formally a call to prayer, to me it served as a sendoff. It reminded me of my station as a foreigner in a strange land, but not in a manner unpleasant.
Batken, though more religiously conservative and riven by periodic bouts of cross-border violence, is an incredibly hospitable place. By chance, we lodged with a warm and maternally inclined host who had initially beckoned us over to the ornate tapchan centerpiece of her shady patio, then promptly enticed us with gifts of fresh fruits, leproshky nan, and hot black chai tinged with genreous spoonfuls of sweet raspberry preserves. Out in town, the locals would often shoot us quizzical glances, sometimes stopping to inquire what we could possibly be doing there, but we both felt that this was acted out of curiosity, not suspicion.
Out the window of the marshrutka that links Batken to Ozgorush, we meditated over the barren arid landscape zipping by. The road wound in and out of vermillion canyons, wherein lay sleepy little agricultural oases. When it climbed onto the rocky piedmont, we admired to the north the shimmering, vast expanse of Uzbekistan's Fergana heartland. The earthtoned desolate lands over which we cruised stretched out to meet with an ocean of fertile farmland, so strangely incongruent with the desert environment. To the south rose abruptly the ramparts of the Turkestan Range - naked, black gneiss bisected by dizzying ravines which offered glimpses to the greater peaks, eternally snowbound and blued by the atmosphere that lie between.
For much of the drive the international border was often just a stone's throw away. A macabre fascination gripped me when we passed through the Sokh enclave corridor, which permits Uzbek citizens to access the mainland via a singular artery without requiring them to navigate the tiresome bureaucracy of a border crossing. For a moment, we were in another country, but throughout the duration of the drive it felt as though we'd come into a new world entirely.
The enclaves in particular fascinated me. In the 1940's the Kokhand Khante ceded Sokh to the Uzbek Soviet Socialist Republic, though the demographics of the territory self-identified as primarily Tajik. After the disintegration of the USSR, Sokh became a hotbed for extremist Islamics ideaologies, though it had since settled, and was then formally connected to Uzbekistan.
Even more fascinating to me, and more relevant in the contemporary geopolitical arena, was Tajikistan's Vorukh enclave. In recent years it had been the source of much international tension and open conflict. Regularly, shepherds clashed with border guards on both sides over incongruencies in the perceived, yet wholly underfined, border. Tensions over water resources also abounded, and Kyrgyzstan had begun construction on a system of irrigation ditches that bypassed Vorukh altogether, upsetting the natural course of the river through the enclave, as well as Vorukh residents and magnates. There was a significant military presence in those valleys adjoined with the lower Karavshin, and the situation was anything but amicable. When I later returned to the region in the spring of 2021, the situation had deteriorated, 60,000 residents of Batken had been displaced following a bout of intense shelling, and UN Peacekeeper trucks rolled around the streets of the capital. Upon my first visit, I had little notion that such events would soon transpire.
Ozgorush is locked into a steep gorge, at the confluence of three valley systems. The eponymous river runs a pallid gray from the friable soils through which it cuts and from the fine silts plucked by the bowing glaciers that pool in the valley heads. It tears at its banks with a deep, booming roar, right through the bucolic orchards and pastures that constitute much of the village. The walls that encircle the village are rocky and bare. It is a beautiful contradiction, for a place so lush to exist in a valley system so bleak.
Exhausted from the long, hot drive, we ambled up the rough main street. A dusky film had begun to settle into the verdant understory. The last light of day filtered throught the canopies in dazzling ribbons. Over the din of the river, the evening chorus of birdsong and crickets cut through the soft air. We found our way to the only guesthouse in town, and settled in for the night.
In the morning we hoisted our heavy packs and set off. Though early, the day had already grown exceedingly hot. In the narrows alongside a river congested with stray boulders and seething cataracts, with scarcely any trees to cast shade, it was positively sweltering. We dipped our hats into eddies to cool off, but the air was so torrid that before long we'd soon find ourselves once more drenched in sweat. As we climbed, we passed into another orographic zone, where a steady cool wind offered intermittent relief from the unflinching sun. Junipers began emerging around us, first sporidacally, then densely across the hillsides. We caught our first glimpse of the the central range - a glacial blue horn standing proudly above all else. That evening we camped in a great meadow at the foot of Ak-Suu Peak, its center tower - one of the largest rock faces on earth - shielding a great pyramidal ice summit riven by countless looming seracs. It was, and still is to this day, one of the most magnificent mountains I have ever seen.
The Ak-Tubek Pass came into focus as we neared Ak-Suu Peak. Walls looming to either side, ice and serac spilling over their uppermost reaches, it looked like an immense halfpipe, as its Kyrgyz name suggests. Behind us, two twin summits ripped and tore at furling clouds like a pair of carious teeth, the left strikingly canid, and the right indented like a molar. The summit appeared from below to be deceptively close, but this was an illusion of the thin, dry atmosphere, and it took us until the late evening to reach the top. For Akane, who had never done a trek of this scale, it was a monumental feat, and we both grew teary at the top. How immensely beautiful it was to share in one another's joy and accomplishment in that otherworldy place of rock and ice and wind.
A horn of rock, illuminated golden on one side and a deep blue on its shadowy face, loomed over the broad saddle. For a spell we marveled at the gentleness of soft light and the immense intricacy of the rock sculptures all around us. Then, compelled by rapidly fading daylight and the onset of a frigid wind, we began to sprint in long leaps down the soft shale dunes that composed the upper reaches of the pass. We camped at just over 4000 meters on a shelf of crushed stone, shivering throughout the night.
Over the coming two days we navigated similar terrain around the flanks of intoxicatingly beautiful granitic peaks, to a pass overlooking the Kara-Suu cachement, which feeds the voluminous and throaty Karvshin River. A row of summits, defiantly vertiginous and sharp, appeared before us. During the Late Paleozoic ancient batholiths had been folded and thrust upward to drain the Turkestan Ocean. These were subseqently whetted to fine points by the attrite grinding of deep ice glacier. Softer marine sedimentary and ophiolitic rock was stripped away, leaving only the harder granites behind. The results left us staggering at the summit, wondering how a place of such magnitude and verticality could exist.
Incidentally, this is the very same valley where Tommy Caldwell had been taken hostage by a band of IMU (Islamic Movement of Uzbekistan) extremists. Much time divorced that experience from ours however, and the region had since recovered most of its standing peace. We descended a great distance toward the valley floor, where we met two kindly shepherds surveying their flock from above. Both wore the characteristic ragged military surplus jackets of the shepherding people and, armed with binoculars and rifles, (which were chefly used to frighten away bears,) they invited us into their summer home for the evening. They slaughtered a sheep and prepared a lavish meaty feast with the scant ingredients they had on hand. Their gruff exteriors belied their immense kindness. We fell asleep content that evening, tucked away in the fire-warmed interior of their stone waystructure.
In the morning we evaluated our inventory of food, and were alarmed by the distinct lack thereof. In total we had perhaps three days of reduced rations, yet our original route would require at least another week. The shepherds, recognizing our distress, offered advice on how to retreat via the Karavshin Valley. One of them drew for us a rough map of the bridges and their relative locations along the course of the river, ensuring that they were all still in place and crossable. As we said our farewells and expressed our deep gratitudes, they presented us with a hefty bag of dried apricots which, in the coming days, would prove indispensible.
We retraced our steps from the day prior and began along the Orta Chashma gorge, which eventually intersected the Karavshin. The trail took us along sheer river cliffs, over loose shale traverses above roiling water, and across broad, arid bluffs. As we descended, the terrain around us grew increasingly hostile and desolate. Shortly after the confluence between the Orta-Chashma and Karvshin Rivers the trail passed tenuously through a vertical gorge, utilizing stones protruding from the reiling current as its course. It then made its way through a military encampment, where we were pressed to detail our intentions out there. This outpost, as we would later find out, was the last oasis in the valley system, though we'd expected to soon encounter a full-scale settlement. This, as it turns out, was misidentified on the maps. We camped that evening on an bleak, windtorn promonitory high above the river, with only a bottle of water remaining between us.
The shepherds had been adamant that we give Vorukh a wide berth, and we heeded their advice. A bridge over the Karavshin led us up a narrow path toward the canyon's north rim. The hot sun parched us, and we were sparing with the last of our water, as we had no idea when a water source might next present itself. At least, we reconciled, we would reach a military base beyond the canyon wall well before our situation became anything more than uncomfortable. A drilling troop passed us in the other direction, and we signaled that we could use some water. One recognized our pleas, and withdrew a dromedary from his pack, from which we filled our bottles.
From the apex of the 1300m climb came immense views of the greater Karavshin knot. Spiring, ice summits and deep rock gorges now stretched out to meet the sky, which was heavy with a knit of wind-frothed stratus peeling to meet a lowering band of dark stormclouds. To out north lay a bleached, sunny valley, wherein we were delighted to see the olive green tarps and high-clearance tarpaulined jeeps of the military encampment. We approched it and were halted, then questioned. They sat us down on a nearby rock while they drilled some exercises, instructing us to remain there until the commanding officer arrived. He pulled up not long after in a black, plateless jeep, gave some orders, and ushered us into the back of the armored vehicle. The rest was a blur, but it wasn't long before we were cruising along the shady, poplar-lined streets of Batken, the sun streaming in low, and dreaming of shashlik and shaurma in the security of the valley.
After a thorough recovery period spent between Osh and Khujand we continued on through the Fann mountains of northern Tajikistan riding a dinky little commuter scooter. Though we set out with the intention of taking it through the Pamirs, after a long series of mechanical mishaps we abandoned the idea altogether and set off as hitchhikers once more.
The severity of the Pamir struck me down with awe. From the plateau's desolate brink empty space pooled out beyond our capacity for sight. Light illustrated the subtleties of the land, as minimalist brushstrokes on a blank canvas, and lakes of pure crystal mirror and of blues as deep as the sky shimmered under a hard sun. In the slender ribbons of grazable pasture, a hardy mix of people nurtured fields of golden wheat and tended bony livestock along vast braided river systems, gray with glacial silt. I marveled at the strikingly verdant oases, meticulously cultivated from, and in spite of, the baked muds, dunedrift and rock that enveloped them. We spent many nights lodging with friendly and curious locals. Their foods, like the landscape from which they derived, were untroubled by excess. It was a plain and simple fare. The heart of the people here, I felt, was underpinned by reactionary and innate generosity - kindness in the face of adversity.
In the dearth of biotia, my mind expanded to fill the empty space. The Pamir seemed to meditate like the wind that pulsed constantly over it, breathing deeply. At a cursory glance it first appeared lifeless - a bleak, skeletal space - but when I climbed up into its openness, I felt myself full to the brim with raw emotion. All things were brought intimately close, magnified by the intensifying effect of absence, and the small details grew large. It aroused within me a silent acuity so palpably felt on the dry wind, smelled as the crush of wild oregano underfoot, glimpsed in the scintillation of hard blue sun on the energetic surface of a singing river. We drank yak milk from a reused Coke bottle on the side of a weary highway, and it was delicious.
When we left Central Asia by way of a passenger ferry across the Caspian Sea, I was already desperate for more. We spent a rapturous month exploring the mountains, foothills, and cities of Georgia, which, alongside Central Asia, I fell deeply in love with. From the hypermodern Batumi we bussed it along the northern border of Turkey, along the Black Sea, eventually maneuvering our way down to the Lycian Peninsula, where we walked the entire length of the Lycian Way. I felt my heart break when it at last it came time to part ways with Akane, but we both knew it would not be the last we'd see of one another, or of Central Asia.
At some point while home I realized, now emboldened by real experience, that my original plans for several long hikes were not only feasible, but that they could realistically be connected to form a single continuous route across Kyrgyzstan. This has since been expanded to include Tajikistan, Kazakhstan, Pakistan, Afghanistan, India, and Nepal, for a total of rougly 10,000km of central route and another 5000 at least of peripheral side-quests. Eventually I'd like to continue through Xinjiang, Sichuan, and Mongolia to complete a full circuit of some of the loftiest mountain ranges on earth. Such a route, utilizing chiefly trails as described above, would prove the ultimate challenge for an aspiring thru-hiker. As it now stands, the core route is approximately halfway scouted, while half still yet remains.
And so this brings us back to the Yazgulom. There Johanna and I stand, defeated, on the brink of a valley left abandoned for over 70 years. We had come here to scout a potential link through Tajikistan's Central Pamir - one of the least visited backwaters on the planet, but had found no such route. Instead, we'd been met with a valley sundered by countless mudflow ravines that composed a terrain so inhospitable it was a marvel that people had once herded flocks there. Climate change and the passage of time had long since reclaimed the valley system, rendering it nearly impassable. We were trapped on one side by the days of suspense that came before, and on the other by an uncrossable river. With no other options remaining, we pressed The Button. Two days later a band of youth in haphazard military fatigue came whistling up the trail, ferried us across the river, and whisked us out the mouth of the Yazgulom.
