Song-Köl means "the last lake" in Kyrgyz, and for half the year it lives up to the name — the water freezes more than a metre thick, temperatures fall toward minus 40 degrees, and not a single person stays on its shores. It sits at 3,016 metres on a treeless plateau in the Tian Shan, the largest freshwater lake in Kyrgyzstan: about 270 square kilometres of water that is nowhere more than 13 metres deep, a shallow sheet spread across the high steppe. There are no road signs, no buildings, no permanent village — the only structures are the felt tents that appear and vanish with the seasons. The lake is a protected Ramsar wetland and an Important Bird Area, and demoiselle cranes, black-headed gulls, and bar-headed geese — the same geese that fly over the Himalaya — nest along its marshy edges.
Each year from late May, once the ice has thawed, Kyrgyz herding families climb to these jailoo — high summer pastures — with their horses, sheep, and cattle, raising white boz-üy yurts along the water until they descend again in late September. Stay in one and the day runs on nomad time: kymyz, the fermented mare's milk, poured from a churn; mutton shared around a low table; riders heading out across the grass at first light. The plateau is so open and so quiet that the lake mirrors the sky almost whole, turning orange and violet at dawn and dusk, and at night the stars come out with no town for a hundred kilometres to dim them. By October the families are gone, the yurts loaded onto trucks, and the surface begins to freeze once more — a working pasture for four months of the year, and empty highland for the rest.