Day 6 – Sept 5 – The Tiüz river valley

Today was a relatively easy hike along the Tiüz river, a side valley up the inclined plane to the south. Tiüz means flat in Kyrgyz, and the valley is indeed flat in its lower reaches, climbing only 200 meters in 12 kilometers. The river is braided in its gravel course.


Looking forward, we could see the snow mountains of the Saryjash range and sometimes the higher mountains of the range beyond. We will cross the Saryjash range two days from now at a narrow 4000-meter pass that is not yet visible in the mountain wall.



Looking back, we could see the hills we had crossed over the first five days, with the snow mountains on the horizon back near Karakol. We saw no one except a pair of Kyrgyz horsemen. They would turn out to be the last humans we would see for the next 13 days.

The weather remained beautiful. In Kyrgyzstan, September often has much nicer weather than August, which may not be saying much since this year's August was especially wet and cold. But in hopes that it will continue, we moved up the date of our resupply point so that we could maximize our time on the glacier.

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