Tag Archives: altay-2025

Having completed the hiking leg of our summer vacation, we really wanted to take a last good look at the mountain scenery from a bit higher up – like, for example, from a helicopter window. But since we couldn’t check out everything that way, we instead had our drone take flight for a look around from up there. And the results are great! But of course they were; drone-pilot-extraordinaire DZ was at the controls! ->

Buttes at the crests of ridges. By the way, you can roughly see the direction of our route here: along (or near) the ridges. And notice how the terrain is quite gentle here – very few steep ups and downs ->

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A walk through the Yarlu River valley is an absolute must if you ever find yourself at Lake Akkem. The valley is unique in two ways: first, there’s some kind of crazy underground magnetism/energy here (which I mentioned in yesterday’s post), which makes you feel just great. Second, the colors of the mountains here are sublimely beautiful – just fantastic:

The valley is approximately three kilometers (along the trail) from the Akkem River and Lake Akkem – here:

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Having arrived at the start-point of our hiking-rafting adventure it was time we got this show on the road path. The mission for the day: climb up to the ridge we’ll be hiking along the top of. The weather was perfect, which meant the views up top promised to be simply magical…

No need to hurry – the distance this day was pretty short, so we had a leisurely breakfast. Then we crossed the bridge over the Akkem and set off on the hiking part of our route.

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All right folks – here we go: finally, my series of posts on our Altai summer vacation begins!…

Now, as everyone knows only too well, backpacking across mountains and valleys is always a good idea. But to do so far away from civilization over five days (or even a week or two) isn’t just good, it’s exceedingly good – especially if the route is surrounded by OMG-beautiful views and assorted unusualnesses. I once even compiled a short list of such amazing best-in-the-world mountain-and-valley treks – here. Well that list needs a +1 for sure – and it’s well overdue: the tracks/paths across the Altai Mountains…

I’ve hiked around here on two routes: between Tyungur village and Akkem Lake (in 2016), and between Belyashi and the same Akkem Lake along the Argut river  (in the summer of covid-stricken 2020). The latter was wonderful; but since it rained for several days in 2016 and we didn’t get to see any beautiful views on that route whatsoever, we decided to do a second pass this year – and we don’t regret it at all!…

You can get to Akkem Lake via different routes; we chose not the shortest but probably the most contemplative (in good weather). In total we walked around 45km, but with ups and downs of more than two thousand meters. We completed it in go-slow mode over four days. It’s generally not the most difficult of treks, but office plankton does need to put in at least some pre-training beforehand.

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