We drove about thirty minutes outside of Bishkek to get to Ala-Archa National Park. It’s an alpine national park with the park entrance at about 5,000 feet elevation but the park extends upwards to peaks over 16,000 feet. The whole park is around 77 square miles. It’s part of the Tian Shan mountain range. The park has over 20 glaciers and around 50 mountain peaks. The park also includes the Ala-Archa River gorge.

We only hiked a bit over a mile up the trail but it was cool and refreshing weather and felt good to be in such beautiful surroundings. The first photo was taken near the park entrance, so about the 5,000 foot level.

Looking up some of the gorges, like in the second photo, it looked like it would be challenging hiking. Much of the ground looked like it might be unstable, though there are trails to the higher elevations.

Mountain peaks in the park are 16,000 foot or more and stay snow-covered all year long.

Nora is testing the river temperature in the fourth photo. That blue color denotes that the river comes from glacial melt.

The last photo was hiking back down the canyon. You can see that the valley below was clear with mostly blue sky. We weren’t looking forward to going back to the heat of the valley.