Bolshoe Almatinskoe Lake Area

Introducing Bolshoe Almatinskoe Lake Area

West of the Malaya Almatinka valley lies its ‘big sister’, the Bolshaya Almatinka valley.

Coming from the city the first thing you will encounter is a gate where a guard collects 200T per person for entry to the Ile-Alatau National Park. The nearby Sunkar eagle farm (327-255 30 76; admission 150T; daylight hr), which also keeps hunting dogs, is worth a look. At 4pm except Monday, an entertaining display of several species of trained raptors in flight is staged (1000T). A couple of kilometres further is the bus stop at the GES-2 hydroelectric station, also called Kokshoky. The road forks here, with the right branch heading to the settlement of Alma-Arasan (4km), and the left branch following the Bolshaya Almatinka River.

The track up the Bolshaya Almatinka valley passes another small hydroelectric station, GES-1, after about 8km, and brings you after a further 7km or so to the picturesque 1.6km-long Bolshoe Almatinskoe lake (2500m), resting in a rocky bowl in the Zailiysky Alatau foothills. The lake is a hike of four or five hours from GES-2, with a rise of nearly 1100m. This is a starting point for many trekking routes in the mountains and across to Lake Issyk-Köl in Kyrgyzstan. The lake is frozen from November to June and only takes on its famous turquoise tinge once the silt of summer meltwater has drained away. It’s a good bird-watching spot, especially during the May migration. A supposed 4WD track heads south from the lake and over the Ozyorny Pass (3507m) and eventually to Lake Issyk-Köl in Kazakhstan, but at the time of writing this was in impossibly bad condition for motor vehicles, though OK for mountain bikers.

Two kilometres up the track to the west from the lake (about a 40-minute walk), at 2750m, is the outlandish Tian Shan Astronomical Observatory, sometimes still referred to by its Soviet-era acronym, Gaish. The observatory has the second-biggest telescope in the former USSR, with magnification of around 600 times, installed in 1991. The telescope only operates at part-capacity due to lack of funding but is still used for research into the active nuclei of galaxies. A former radar dish is now used as a satellite TV receiver. It’s possible to stay here and take tours of the working sections (in Russian) for 500T.

At the head of the Zhusalykezen Pass (3336m), 6km southwest from the observatory, is the Kosmostantsia, a group of wrecked buildings belonging to various scientific research institutes. Some research into solar radiation is still carried out here.

Last updated: Feb 17, 2009