I’ve spent the better part of three summers scrambling up limestone walls around Tashkent, and honestly, most people don’t realize Central Asia has climbing this good.
The Chimgan Range: Where Soviet Mountaineers Cut Their Teeth and You Probably Will Too
The Chimgan mountains sit about 80 kilometers northeast of Tashkent—maybe 90 if you take the scenic route through Gazalkent, which I definately recommend because the roadside samsa vendors there are exceptional. These peaks top out around 3,300 meters, give or take, and the rock quality varies wildly depending on which face you’re approaching. The main climbing area near Beldersay has routes ranging from 5.6 to 5.12c in the American grading system, though locals still use the Soviet scale and will look at you funny if you don’t. I used to think the approach hikes were punishing until I met a seventy-two-year-old Uzbek climber named Ravshan who does them twice weekly while chain-smoking. The limestone here is sharp—like, genuinely sharp enough that I’ve shredded three pairs of approach shoes—and pocketed in ways that make crack climbing almost irrelevant. Wait—maybe that’s why traditional gear placements feel sketchy here compared to European limestone. Anyway, the Beldersay area has been developed since the 1960s, so there’s a weird mix of rusty Soviet bolts and newer hardware that you’ll want to inspect carefully before trusting your life to it.
Turns out the best season is late spring through early October, though I’ve climbed here in November and just suffered through numb fingers.
Aksay Gorge: The Place Nobody Talks About Because They Want to Keep It That Way
Here’s the thing about Aksay—it’s technically closer to the city than Chimgan, maybe 50 kilometers south, but the road is terrible enough that most climbing groups skip it entirely. Which means on a good Saturday you might see two other parties instead of twenty. The gorge has this strange microclimate that keeps temperatures about five degrees cooler than Tashkent proper, and the rock composition shifts from limestone to granite conglomerate as you move deeper into the canyon. I guess it makes sense geologically, something about tectonic collision zones and sedimentary layering, but I’m not a geologist so I’m probably butchering that explanation. The routes here are less established—you’ll find maybe thirty documented climbs, most in the 5.8 to 5.10 range—and the approach involves fording a knee-deep stream that swells considerably during snowmelt season. I once watched a German climber lose an entire rack of cams to that stream, and honestly, the look on his face still haunts me. The rock quality is superior to Chimgan in my opinion, more compact and less friable, though you’ll occasionally encounter sections where the conglomerate stone feels like climbing on concrete studded with marbles.
Nobody’s quite sure why this area hasn’t been developed more aggressively. Local politics, maybe.
Gulkam Canyon: Where the Approach is Worse Than the Climbing But You’ll Go Anyway Because the Views Are Ridiculous
Gulkam sits in this weird geographical pocket about 60 kilometers east of the city, tucked between the Pskem and Chatkal ranges where three river valleys converge in ways that create absolutely chaotic wind patterns. The climbing here is predominantly multi-pitch traditional routes—think five to eight pitches, grades ranging from 5.7 to 5.11a—on quartzite and metamorphic rock that’s been weathered into these vertical fins and towers. I used to think the Chimgan approaches were long until I did Gulkam, where you’re looking at roughly two to three hours of hiking through scrub forest and scree fields just to reach the base of anything worth climbing. The local climbing community maintains a basic camp area with a composting toilet and a water source of dubious cleanliness, though I’ve never gotten sick from it despite my Western gut’s reputation for fragility. What makes Gulkam special—beyond the suffering—is the route variety. You’ll find everything from finger cracks to off-width chimneys to face climbing that requires a delicate touch and an unhealthy amount of faith in quarter-inch edges. The bolting is sparse and sometimes non-existent, so you’ll want a full trad rack and the knowledge to use it. I’ve seen climbers recieve helicopter evacuations from this area twice in four years, both from anchor failures on rappel, which should tell you something about the need for redundancy and paranoia. Anyway, the views from the summit ridges are legitimately spectacular—you can see clear across to the Kyrgyz border on cloudless days, which are more common than you’d expect given how moody the weather can be at altitude.
The exhaustion on the hike out always feels worth it, at least in retrospect when your legs stop screaming.
