Charyn Canyon: Geological Time and the Steppe Landscapes of Southeast Kazakhstan

Stand on the rim of Charyn Canyon and the ground at your feet is almost level: dry steppe running away to the horizon. A few steps further it drops into a gorge of red, ochre and cream rock, with a fast river working at the bottom. That contrast is the key to the place, because the canyon is not a mountain landscape at all but a plain that a river has sawn open, laying bare millions of years of buried history in its walls. On Day 25 of our small group tour through Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Turkmenistan, the group stops here on the drive from Altyn-Emel to the Kolsai Lakes.

How to read Charyn Canyon

The canyon lies within Charyn State National Nature Park, which the Kazakh government created on 23 February 2004 and enlarged in 2009 to 127,050 hectares, according to the park itself. Geologists place the Charyn River about 195 kilometres east of Almaty. Our itinerary puts the essentials in one line: the canyon “is being carved by the rapidly flowing Charyn River into a flat and barren steppe.” Every part of that sentence matters. The river is still at work, the surface it cuts into is a plain, and the plain is dry.

Charyn is often called the “little brother” of the Grand Canyon, a popular nickname that our own itinerary repeats. It is best taken as a comparison of colour and form, the layered red walls and the river far below, rather than as a measurement. What the canyon offers is a clear demonstration of how landscapes are made. Any canyon wall answers three questions: what the rock is made of, how it got there, and what has been taking it away since. Charyn answers all three with unusual clarity, because its walls are bare, its climate is dry, and its river is still cutting.

For wider orientation, our introduction to travelling in Kazakhstan and our answers to common questions about the country cover the practical background. This article stays in the canyon, with the river, the rock and the steppe above it.

The Charyn River: the force that cut the canyon

The Charyn is a tributary of the Ili, the great river of southeastern Kazakhstan that our article on Altyn-Emel and the Ili River corridor follows towards Lake Balkhash. Kathryn Fitzsimmons and Giancarlo Scardia, two of the geologists who have worked in the canyon, describe the Charyn as a branch of the Ili flowing north of the Tien Shan, and write that the river and its tributaries “have cut canyons up to 300 metres deep” through rocks of different ages, some as old as 540 million years.

A river cuts down in much the way a saw does. Its water alone does little to solid ground; the work is done by the stones it carries. Fed from the mountains, the Charyn rolls cobbles and gravel along its bed, and each flood grinds the channel a little deeper. Where the ground is rising, or where the river’s base level falls, the cutting keeps pace, and the channel sinks into the plain rather than wandering across it.

Why are the walls so steep? Because little else is wearing them back. Fitzsimmons and Scardia describe the canyon’s present climate as cold and semi-arid, with dry summers and cold winters. In a wet climate, rain and soil creep would soften a gorge into a broad valley with sloping sides. Here, with little rain, the river deepens its channel faster than the sides can collapse, and the result is a gorge with near-vertical walls. When you look down from the rim, you are looking at the balance between a river that cuts and a sky that rarely rains.

Two kinds of rock in the canyon walls

The first thing to look for is that the canyon walls are not all one material. A 2021 study of the Charyn canyons in the Geo Journal of Tourism and Geosites, by Saida Nigmatova and colleagues, describes a river valley cutting through Paleozoic rocks and through loose sandy and clayey deposits of the Cenozoic, the most recent era of the Earth’s history. Two worlds lie in the same cliff.

The older one is hard. The national park describes a block of volcanic lava and tuff dating back about 330 million years, to the Carboniferous period, and notes that the canyon follows faults in the Earth’s crust. These are dark, massive rocks with little visible layering. Above and against them lie much younger sediments: the park lists clays, marls and sandstones laid down in lakes during the Neogene, the period that began about 23 million years ago. Where soft layered sediment rests directly on old volcanic rock, the contact marks an immense gap in time, an interval in which the record was eroded away or never laid down.

Nigmatova and her colleagues add that these deposits hold fossil animals and plants, and preserve evidence of unusual tectonic movements in the region. Years of fieldwork have allowed them to describe the canyon’s sequence of layers in detail. For the visitor, the rule of thumb is simple: dark, blocky rock is the ancient basement; banded, crumbling rock in shades of red, buff and cream is the young fill that the river has been cutting through.

Five million years in eighty metres

The young fill turns out to be one of the more remarkable climate archives in Asia. In June 2021 an international team led by the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry published a study in Communications Earth & Environment based on an 80-metre-thick sequence in Charyn Canyon. The researchers describe it as a “virtually continuous record of five million years of climate change”, and they collected their samples by abseiling down the canyon walls so that no layer was missed.

An earlier conference abstract from the same research group explains how to read such a wall. The sequence alternates between river deposits and loess, the fine wind-blown dust that settles across dry country, and the loess layers grow thicker towards the top. Gravel means a river once flowed across this spot; pale silt means the wind was doing more of the work. Within the old soils, small nodules of carbonate formed as water moved through the ground, and the chemistry of those nodules preserves a trace of how wet the soil was.

The team dated the layers with palaeomagnetism and uranium-lead dating of the soil carbonates, and used isotopes in the carbonates to reconstruct soil moisture. Their conclusion is that the region has grown progressively drier over the last five million years, from an early Pliocene that was markedly wetter than today. The drying was not smooth. Short swings interrupted it, which the authors link to the changing balance between the mid-latitude westerly winds and the Siberian high-pressure system, and they identify a sustained wet phase shortly before a major glaciation around 3.3 million years ago. The Pliocene, from about 5 to 2.6 million years ago, interests climate scientists because carbon dioxide levels then were last comparable to today’s.

Read this way, the thickening dust towards the top of the wall is a record of the steppe itself taking shape: a country growing drier, windier and more open across five million years.

The Valley of Castles: how soft rock becomes towers

The best-known part of Charyn Canyon is the Valley of Castles, a side gorge whose walls have been carved into towers, turrets and buttresses. The national park describes it as about three kilometres long and between 200 and 700 metres wide, and attributes its strange relief to water eroding clay, crushed stone and gravel. Nigmatova’s study calls the canyons “amazingly beautiful”, and notes that the Valley of Castles draws visitors from around the world.

The castles are a lesson in uneven erosion. Some layers in the young sediment are better cemented than others. When the rare heavy rain falls, run-off finds the weaker material first and cuts gullies into the wall. The gullies widen, meet and isolate blocks of rock; a harder layer on top acts as a cap, protecting the softer material beneath, and the block stands as a tower until its cap finally fails. Look across a gap between two towers and you will see the same bands at the same height on each side, proof that they were once a single continuous deposit.

The colours tell their own story. As in most red sedimentary rock, the reds and browns come from iron oxides coating the grains, while the paler bands are richer in silt and lime. In low evening light the layering stands out sharply, and the whole valley reads like a cross-section through the plain above.

How physically demanding is the visit to Charyn Canyon?

The itinerary does not set out how much walking the canyon stop involves, so ask a Tour Specialist how it is paced. The tour as a whole is rated Level 3, Moderate to Challenging: our itinerary says participants must be in excellent health, extremely mobile and live an active lifestyle, with up to six hours a day of continuous strenuous, moderate to fast-paced activity over varied terrain. For context, the national park describes the main trail through the Valley of Castles as descending to the bed of the Charyn River, so any walk down into the canyon means a climb back out.

A relict forest on the river: the Sogdian ash grove

Not all of the canyon’s history is in its rock. On the floodplain of the Charyn grows a forest of Sogdian ash, Fraxinus sogdiana, protected as a natural monument since 19 March 1964. The park describes the species as a relict of the Paleogene, the period before the Neogene sediments in the canyon walls were laid down, and records some 50 rare and relict plant species in the grove. The park gives the protected grove an area of about 5,000 hectares, and a 2024 botanical study describes a floodplain of roughly the same size.

A relict is a survivor: a species left behind in a small refuge after the conditions that once suited it have moved on. The park describes Sogdian ash as moisture-loving but able to tolerate salty soils and drying, which explains where it grows. On a steppe that the canyon’s own dust layers show has been drying for millions of years, the river floodplain is one of the few places where a water-loving tree can still find enough to drink. The green ribbon along the canyon floor is, in that sense, another part of the record. The 2024 study warns that felling and uncontrolled grazing are degrading the grove and narrowing its genetic diversity.

Is the Sogdian ash grove on the tour’s itinerary?

No. The Day 25 itinerary does not name the ash grove. It does include a stop on the way to the canyon at Aulie-Agash, which our itinerary describes as a 700-year-old tree in the settlement of Kieli-Agash. If the grove matters to you, raise it with a Tour Specialist before you travel.

The steppe above the rim

Climb back to the rim and the steppe makes more sense. The Max Planck team describes Charyn as a deeply continental, semi-arid site, its landscape shaped by the westerly winds, by polar fronts and by sediment carried down from the nearby Tien Shan. They note that its climate resembles that of the steppe further north, which feeds great Siberian rivers such as the Irtysh and the Ob. The wind-blown dust in the canyon walls belongs to the same story as that open country.

The flatness of the plateau is itself a clue. It is the top of the young fill, the surface of the plain before the Charyn cut into it. Everything you see in the canyon walls lies beneath ground that, from a short distance, looks entirely featureless. The park records gazelles, steppe eagles and golden eagles along its routes, animals of open country rather than of the gorge. For the larger story of that open country, our article on the great grasslands of the Kazakh steppe follows them north, across the land that nomadic peoples crossed for millennia.

How long does the tour spend at Charyn Canyon?

Part of a single day. On Day 25 the group leaves Altyn-Emel after breakfast, stops at the Aulie-Agash tree, visits Charyn Canyon, and then drives about 150 kilometres on to the Kolsai Lakes for dinner and the night. The itinerary does not give a set number of hours at the canyon.

Where does the group stay after Charyn Canyon?

At a local guesthouse at the Kolsai Lakes, for two nights. Our itinerary names Seisek’s Guesthouse or similar, with dinner served there. Day 26 includes a half-day walk along part of the lake system, described in our article on the Kolsai Lakes of the northern Tien Shan, and on Day 27 the group returns to Almaty.

Charyn Canyon on the Stans route

Charyn sits between two very different landscapes. The day before, the group explores Altyn-Emel, with its Bronze Age petroglyphs and the singing dunes our article on the singing dunes of the Ili valley explains. The day after, the route climbs into mountain forest and lake country. The canyon is the hinge between them: desert and steppe above, and in its walls the record of how that dry country came to be. Our overview of the four-country journey through the Stans sets this final week in Kazakhstan within the whole route, from the oasis cities of Uzbekistan to Almaty.

Reading the walls

Charyn Canyon rewards the traveller who looks at it slowly. The dark basement rock speaks of volcanoes some 330 million years ago; the banded fill above it records five million years of a continent drying out; the towers of the Valley of Castles show how rare rain and soft sediment shape stone; the ash trees on the floodplain survive from a wetter world. Over all of it runs the Charyn, still cutting, and above all of it lies the steppe, apparently empty and full of history.

If you would like to read a landscape this way, with an Odyssey Program Leader and a small group, our 28-day Stans tour brings you to Charyn Canyon near the end of a long journey across four countries, between the deserts of Altyn-Emel and the lakes of the Tien Shan.