Skazka Canyon, the Fairy Tale canyon, is a maze of red clay spires hidden off the road along the south shore of Lake Issyk-Kul, in Kyrgyzstan, two kilometres across, with no marked path through it and no one to say where to walk, and it is wandered at will between towers and turrets of eroded clay to a ridge where the red rock lines up against the blue of the lake and the snow peaks beyond. The red beds are only the top of an enormous pile, since the Issyk-Kul basin is filled with up to four kilometres of sediment stripped off the mountains around it, and the rare downpours have carved this corner of it into fluted slopes and clusters of spires, with the fan-shaped grooves running down every slope the tracks of the rain; the tallest cluster is the one the canyon is named for, a rank of towers and turrets that can be walked right up to, and the rest is a landscape of small canyons, ridges and walls in red, orange and cream that change with every turn, an hour or two of scrambling on clay that is firm when dry. From the highest crest the badlands drop away and the lake fills the north, a sea at 1,607 metres ringed by snow peaks.
Issyk-Kul means warm lake, and it earns the name, since its surface stays open through the whole winter while the mountains around it freeze. The canyon sits between the villages of the south shore, an hour from Karakol, where the yurts and guesthouses of the shore take walkers, and nothing here blooms or migrates, the show being red clay and low sun in every month; late spring and early autumn bring the mildest air and the best light, autumn the driest ground, while midsummer bakes the clay and midwinter freezes the walking. The wall of the Terskey Ala-Too stands across the lake to the south. Skazka is a canyon with no path, and the shapes in its clay are the fairy tale.