Mount Ararat is a volcano, and the last time it erupted it killed thousands. On 2 July 1840 a steam blast tore open its northern flank, melted part of the summit ice and sent rock and meltwater roaring down the Ahora Gorge; the debris buried the village of Akhuri and the monastery of St. Jacob, and the magnitude 7.4 earthquake that came with it left up to 10,000 people dead across the region. Nothing about the mountain looks violent today. A broad white dome rises 5,137 metres above eastern Turkey, with the sharp cone of Little Ararat, 3,896 metres, standing beside it, and together they make the double-humped outline visible from every road on the plain. It looks impossibly large because it is genuinely alone: no higher summit stands within 379 kilometres, and the mountain climbs roughly three vertical kilometres straight out of flat farmland. Genesis says Noah's ark came to rest on "the mountains of Ararat" — a region, not a peak — but the name settled here anyway.
You cannot simply turn up and walk. The mountain sits in a border zone within sight of Iran and Armenia, so every climber needs a government permit and a licensed guide, and only the southern route is issued. The path leaves Doğubayazıt and climbs past the summer camps of Kurdish herding families, pitched near running water wherever the sheep can graze; you sleep at Green Camp near 3,200 metres, then again at 4,200. The summit push starts around midnight, crampons on ice in the dark, and at first light the mountain lays its own long shadow far across the plain below. That ice is going. The cap measured 8 square kilometres in 1976 and 5.7 by 2011, and glaciologists expect the permanent ice to turn seasonal within a few decades.