Horses, Sore Legs, Lightning, and Lightning

Zack and I spent six days in the Kyrgyz mountains, hiking and horseback riding, truly getting a sense of this extremely green region of Central Asia.

If you look at the satellite view of Central Asia, you’ll see that it’s mostly desert. But this one region, around Issyk Kul, is brilliantly green, filled with fertile valleys, glacier topped mountains, wildflowers, beautiful blue alpine lakes, glacial streams, and families of nomads who know these valleys and passes as well as I know Ann Arbor.

We began our trek at the town of Boz Uchuk, where a horse guide took us and our two horses on a 9 mile journey up 5,600 ft to our first camp site. Boz Uchuk is a small town, most consisting of some houses. a school, and a stable. As we took the road out of town and into the mountains on our horses, all signs of sedentary civilization disappeared, and instead, life transitioned to nomadic. Families stationed in these deep green valleys lived in yurts, using their dogs as help to domesticate their horses, sheep, and cattle. We continued to climb, past the tree line, where the valleys turn into endless seas of bright green. At this point, our guide said some word and our horses took off. It was first a decent amount faster, but that soon turned into a full on gallop. There were two parts of me at the same time—one which thought this was the coolest thing ever. I looked out, with a smile on my face and light in my eyes thinking that I’m really living the Central Asian experience. Out in the wild, moving as fast as that horse could possibly take me. I felt free, happy, and exhilarated! Funny enough, the pace of the gallop was actually a lot easier on my butt than the standard walking pace. But the other part of me was terrified. I had this 15 pound bag on my back flying into the air slightly out of sync with my own body, and I was hanging on as hard I could to the handles so I didn’t go flying!

After a while, I managed to pull the horse in and get it to slow down. At which point, Zack and I both realized we’d lost our water bottles. Trying to communicate that fact to the horse guide was nearly impossible, and it took me getting off my horse and leaving it with him to go look before I could actually get it back.

We got to the yurt camp where we’d be sleeping at around noon. We had a quick lunch and went up to explore the Boz Uchuk Lakes—a set of alpine lakes not far from the camp. This is when we met Lightning.

That wasn’t her name at the time, she was just the friendly camp shepherd dog addicted to ear scratches and climbing. Lightning guided us up to the first lake, at which point she turned around to go back to camp, presumably to fulfill her very important shepherding duties. Zack and I explored the lakes until it got rainy, then we headed back as well.

The next day was our hardest—first because it was the longest, with us skipping a camp, and also because we had three passes to cover, whereas the rest of the days had one at a maximum. When we left camp at 8 am, Lightning guided us happily up and over the first ridge into the next valley. And when I say guided, I really mean it. She was in front of us the entire time, showing us the path she wanted us to take. At the top, we looked over into the three treeless, brilliantly green valleys around us. We also expected Lightning to turn around. But she didn’t. She continued downwards with us and across into the next two valleys.

In this third valley we encountered our first serious pass (the one from the morning wasn’t that crazy), and as her name would suggest, Lightning took us up, speedily showing us exactly where we should follow to get to the top. This climb was not easy… it was pretty rocky and quite steep. But she made it look like a walk in the park. In fact, Teddy gets more fussy on a 45 minute walk than she did in the hours of up and down we did.

We reached the top, at which we’d found a friend we met from dinner the night before from the Netherlands, who took another path to the same peak we reached. The four of us, including Lightning, continued on through the next valley and next pass.

At this point, I was in a pretty bad mood… this trekking was excruciatingly hard with that heavy backpack on and the 10,000 ft of elevation we were at. But Lightning kept us positive and kept us chugging along. But at the top of the pass, everything changed. We were enjoying our lunch when I looked to the next valley and saw nothing but storm clouds. I told the others to get their rain gear on ASAP and finish eating now. Now, mind you, Lightning was nameless at this point—her ability to climb mountains at a pace unbelievable to a human is not the reason for her name. Instead, as we descended only a few hundred feet from the pass, we saw lightning nearby. Not the dog… the storm kind. We were the tallest conductive things around; we were well above the tree line, and it was essentially only rocks on this trail. We had to do something. So we all found a patch of rocks below a little pond we’d passed, sat on our backpacks, and waited for the storm to pass. This storm wasn’t a rainstorm, thankfully though. It was hail. Which hurt like heck when it fell, but I was incredibly thankful that it didn’t get everything I had with me for the next five days sopping wet. Lightning cried the entire storm, but we kept her safe under a pile of rocks. The storm passed right over us, striking nowhere in the pass area we could see, but clearly and obviously nearby. The thunder was the cracking, sharp kind of thunder, not the far away boom. It sounded scarily nearby. From counting the gap between the lightning and the thunder, we could tell the storm was less than a mile away. At that point, all pain, exhaustion, and fatigue I had went away. I was only concerned about surviving. I genuinely don’t know if I’ve ever been more scared for my life, but we did exactly what you’re supposed to do in a storm out in the wild—stay as far off the ground and as far away from conductive things as you can.

The whole time, I was thinking that I'd end up as a headline. "Two American Tourists Die in Hailstorm in Kyrgyzstan," and as a listicle title "10 Reasons Why Hiking More Dangerous than Most People Think." I thought that people would be talking about me saying "who in their right mind would go to Kyrgyzstan? It's his fault anyways." Maybe I got a bit ahead of myself, but I can surely say that I was not at all that positive about the situation.

After 20 minutes that felt like 2 hours, the storm passed and the sun came back out. We headed down the muddy trail into the valley, admiring the ice all over the ground. We trekked along that valley for a little while, ending up close to the glacier-fed river that runs down the center.

Something I wasn’t expecting about this hike was just how much mud there would be. Basically every valley has a river through it, and the land within dozens of feet of that river is mostly mud. We’d learned by this point that the mud was no big deal; it’ll get your shoes wet but nothing else. But this mud patch I just hit was different. As we all tried crossing this bog at different points and with different routes, I fell straight in, waist deep into the mud. I was wearing my only pair of pants I brought on this entire trip, let alone the only pair I have to get up to over 12,000 ft later on… Luckily we were close to the camp, so I didn’t have to go too far in my mud soaked pants, but it was certainly not the most amazing thing they could have happened to me after 12 miles of trekking and nearly 4,000 ft of gained elevation on the day.

The path down to the campsite was the exact opposite of what I was hoping for. It was a steep downwards slip and slide of mud into the valley. I took my sweet time going down, and despite that, I feel several times and got even more covered in mud. It was also quite disheartening to see Lightning take the whole descent with ease and grace, easily beating all of us to the bottom.