Pamir National Park

Pamir National Park tickets and tours: which one to book

The Pamir National Park, officially the Tajik National Park, takes in the empty centre of the Pamir mountains in eastern Tajikistan, and it is one of the largest and least visited protected areas in Asia: there are no gates, no visitor centres, no marked trails and no roads into its core, and a journey there is an expedition, arranged through one of the small agencies or community tourism associations in Khorog, Murghab, Dushanbe or Osh. Foreigners need, in addition to the Tajik visa or e-visa, the permit for the Gorno-Badakhshan autonomous region, which is requested with it, and the region has been closed to visitors altogether for periods in recent years, so that the situation must be checked before planning. The approach is by the Pamir Highway, the M41, one of the great road journeys of the world, which runs from Osh in Kyrgyzstan over passes of more than 4,600 metres to Murghab and Khorog and on to Dushanbe, skirting the park on its eastern and southern sides;

most visitors travel it in a hired four-wheel drive with a driver over a week to ten days, and see the park's edges from it, above all at Karakul, a vast, salty, cobalt lake at 3,900 metres lying in a meteorite crater. To go inside means trekking. The classic routes start in the Bartang valley, a deep, wild gorge reached by a rough track from Rushan: from the last villages one walks in two to three days to the natural dam and the lake of Sarez, for which a separate permit from the emergencies ministry, obtained well in advance through an agency, is required; or crosses by the lakes of Grum Grzhimailo and the Tanymas valley to the snout of the Fedchenko glacier. Other treks cross from the Gunt valley to Yashilkul and Bulunkul. The trekking tours that start in Osh stay largely in the Alay, north of the park. Homestays in the villages provide beds and meals.

Visiting Pamir National Park: what you will see

The park was created in 1992 and greatly extended in 2001, to about 26,000 square kilometres, nearly a fifth of the whole territory of Tajikistan, and was inscribed as a World Heritage Site, the country's first natural one, in 2013. The Pamirs, the roof of the world, are the knot from which the highest ranges of Asia radiate, the Tien Shan, the Kunlun, the Karakoram and the Hindu Kush, and the park embraces two contrasting landscapes. The western part is a maze of jagged, heavily glaciated ranges and narrow gorges, with the highest mountains of the former Soviet Union: Ismoil Somoni peak, 7,495 metres, which was called Stalin peak and then Communism peak, Korzhenevskaya peak and, on the park's edge, Independence peak, three of the five summits that Soviet climbers had to ascend to earn the title of snow leopard. Here lie more than a thousand glaciers, among them the Fedchenko, discovered in 1878 and named after a Russian naturalist who never saw it, which at seventy-seven kilometres is the longest valley glacier on earth outside the polar regions. The eastern part is a high, cold desert plateau, at 3,500 to 4,500 metres, of broad valleys and rounded ranges, with almost no rain, fierce winds and winter temperatures of minus fifty, where Kyrgyz herders keep yaks.

In February 1911 an earthquake brought down a whole mountainside into the Murghab river, burying the village of Usoi with its people; the landslide, more than two cubic kilometres of rock, formed a dam 567 metres high, the tallest dam of any kind, natural or artificial, in the world, and behind it the river rose, drowning the village of Sarez, to make a lake of astonishing blue, fifty-six kilometres long and five hundred metres deep. Whether the dam is stable has worried engineers ever since, because its failure would send a flood down the Bartang, the Panj and the Amu Darya through four countries, and it is monitored constantly. The wildlife is that of the high heart of Asia: the Marco Polo sheep, a race of argali whose rams carry the longest horns of any sheep, spiralling to nearly two metres, described by the Venetian on his passage in the 1270s, the Siberian ibex, the snow leopard, of which the Pamirs hold one of the healthiest populations, the brown bear, the wolf, the long-tailed marmot, the lammergeier, the Himalayan griffon, the Tibetan snowcock and the bar-headed goose, which nests on the lakes.

Pamir National Park: best time to go, seasons and hours

The season is short. The high passes of the Pamir Highway are generally open from late May or June to October, and July, August and the first half of September are the months for trekking, with warm, dry, brilliantly clear days, cold nights, rivers swollen with meltwater in the afternoons, which must be forded early in the day, and tracks in the Bartang sometimes cut by mudflows. Winter is extreme, and the plateau is then visited only by hunters and a few photographers.

The altitude is the chief hazard: the road itself climbs above 4,000 metres for days on end, so gain height gradually, by way of Khorog or the Wakhan, and carry medication. Bring a warm sleeping bag, a water filter, cash in somoni and dollars, since there are no banks, and all the food needed beyond the villages. Allow ten days to two weeks. Khorog, with its botanical garden, Murghab, the Wakhan valley and its hot springs and forts, and Osh are the staging points.