Syrty - the magnificent pastures of Kyrgyzstan
In the valleys of the Arabel-Su and Kumtor rivers, which form the Taragay river, there are landscapes of rare beauty known as syrty. Syrty stretch for many tens of kilometers, filling vast spaces between the ridges of Ak-Shiyrak, Sary-Djaz, and Terskey Ala-Too.
Syrty is a cold semi-desert plain formed at elevations in the Tian Shan from 3000 to 3600 meters, characterized by gentle hills, small lakes and marshes, and scattered stones of various sizes, covered with ripples of small patches of cushion vegetation. Rivers flow through the syrty widely and majestically. Lakes with gentle shores appear as large "glasses" lying on the ground. The dark moraines and huge boulders, covered with colorful lichens, resemble a preserved landscape from the glacial period of the Earth.
Professor D. N. Kashkarov, who studied the Arabel syrty in the summer of 1934, called them a cold desert. The plant world is extremely poor in species and consists of plants that have adapted well to harsh living conditions. On the syrty at three thousand meters in the upper reaches of the Great Naryn, wormwood and feather grass steppes spread out. This is what Chinghiz Aitmatov wrote about in his "The White Steamship": "They are oddballs - the feather grasses! Windy heads. Their soft, silky panicles cannot live without wind. They only wait - wherever the wind blows, there they bow. And they all bow, as one, the whole steppe, as if on command."
Syrty are magnificent pastures. Snow falls here mainly in the summer and quickly melts under the rays of the hot sun, while in winter they are almost snowless. The clouds are much lower, and the zone of eternal snow is higher. Overall, the syrty's thermal regime is close to an arctic climate. In the syrty, where perennial and eternal permafrost is widespread, a tourist, surrounded by frozen beauty, feels a rare elevated sense of grandeur and unity with the world around him, the cosmos, and eternity.
