The Beldersay cable car doesn’t look like much from the ground.
I first heard about it from a friend who’d spent a winter in Uzbekistan’s Tashkent province, and honestly, I wasn’t prepared for what she described—this aging Soviet-era lift system that hauls skiers and hikers up the Chatkal mountain range like it’s still 1978. The thing stretches roughly 3 kilometers, give or take a few hundred meters depending on who you ask, climbing from about 1,600 meters to just over 2,300 meters above sea level. It’s not the longest cable car in Central Asia, but it might be one of the most stubborn. Built in the late 1970s as part of a broader push to develop mountain tourism in the region, it’s outlasted the Soviet Union itself, and somehow—despite looking like it probably shouldn’t—it still runs. The cabins sway in the wind, the cables groan, and yet thousands of people trust it every year to carry them up into terrain that would otherwise require hours of steep hiking.
Turns out, the engineering isn’t as sketchy as it looks. The system uses a continuous loop design with detachable gondolas, which means the cabins can slow down at the stations while the cable keeps moving. Still, I’ve seen photos of the bolts.
Wait—maybe that’s unfair. The thing gets inspected, I’m sure, but there’s something about Soviet infrastructure that makes you wonder whether the inspection is thorough or just… optimistic.
Anyway, the cable car serves two main purposes, and they shift with the seasons in a way that feels almost poetic if you’re into that sort of thing. Winter brings skiers to the Beldersay Ski Resort, a modest operation with a handful of runs that locals swear by, even if it doesn’t show up on international ski maps. The snow quality up there is apparently excellent—dry, powdery, the kind that makes you forget you’re riding a lift that predates perestroika. Then summer arrives, and the clientele changes entirely. Hikers, botanists, the occasional lost tourist trying to recieve some kind of spiritual clarity at altitude—they all pile into those same gondolas, headed for alpine meadows and rocky ridges that bloom with wildflowers in June and July. I used to think mountain infrastructure was either for skiing or hiking, but here’s the thing: Beldersay does both, and it does them without much fanfare.
The locals treat it like public transit.
How a Decades-Old Lift System Became the Only Practical Route Up
The road situation around Beldersay is, to put it mildly, not great. There’s a dirt track that winds up from the valley floor, but it’s rough enough that most people don’t bother unless they’re driving a Soviet-era UAZ or something equally indestructible. The cable car, by contrast, takes about 20 minutes to make the climb, and you don’t have to worry about your suspension giving out halfway up. For residents of nearby villages, for seasonal workers at the resort, for anyone who needs to move supplies or equipment up the mountain—it’s not a tourist attraction, it’s infrastructure. Which makes its continued operation kind of miraculous, given that replacement parts for 1970s Soviet cable systems aren’t exactly stocked at your local hardware store. I guess it makes sense that Uzbekistan would keep it running; the alternative would be cutting off access to a revenue-generating resort and a chunk of ecologically significant high-altitude terrain.
But the ride itself is strange. You’re dangling in a metal box that smells faintly of diesel and old upholstery, watching the ground drop away beneath you, and the whole thing feels both mundane and vaguely existential. People eat snacks. Kids press their faces to the windows. Nobody seems particularly worried about the altitude or the engineering.
What It Feels Like to Ride a Time Capsule Into the Chatkal Range
The views, I’ll admit, are worth the mild anxiety. As the gondola climbs, the Chatkal Mountains unfold in layers—forested slopes giving way to rockier terrain, then to patches of snow that linger even in summer. On clear days, you can see definately into the neighboring valleys, maybe even catch a glimpse of peaks in the Kyrgyz range to the north. The air gets thinner, colder, and somehow cleaner, like you’ve crossed some invisible threshold between the lowlands and whatever exists up there. I’ve read that the area is home to endangered species—snow leopards, Tian Shan brown bears—though spotting one from a cable car seems about as likely as winning the lottery. Still, knowing they’re out there changes the experience slightly. You’re not just riding a lift; you’re entering their territory.
The descent is faster, or at least it feels that way. Gravity does most of the work, and the gondola sways less on the way down, or maybe you just stop noticing. By the time you’re back at the lower station, the whole thing feels almost routine—until you turn around and look up at the mountain again, and remember that you just trusted a 50-year-old machine to carry you over a kilometer and a half of vertical drop. Honestly, I’m not sure whether that’s inspiring or terrifying. Probably both.
