I Explored An Undiscovered Canyon In Kyrgyzstan, And Here Are 23 Pics Of It

The Endless Veins of the Canyon of Forgotten Rivers after sunset showing beautiful contrast with the red shapes and snowy mountains in the back.

Seeing the milky way rise in the Fairytale canyon at 4 AM was a magical experience.

We found this rock during a daytime scouting session in an area that we later called Mars Canyon. This canyon has a great variety of interestingly shaped rocks. This rock being one of them. We named it ‘The Iceberg.’ I discovered that the Milk Way would line up in this shot in the early morning so we later went back at around 4 AM to shoot it again.

Sunset at the shore of Issyk Kul lake with endless shapes and canyons reaching as far as the eye can see. It was a very clear that day. You can see the huge mountain backdrop in the distance. An impressive sight.

A canyon we explored near the end of our trip. It cannot be seen from any road and is located deep into some mountains on the northwest of Issyk Kul lake. It’s size is impressive. This is just a very small part of the canyon. Look on the bottom right where you can see our SUV parked, to have a bit of sense of scale. This canyon has a wide variety of colors. It looks amazing from the sky.

These canyons come to life during the night. By playing with light and shadows all these structures start to look like creatures.

A black and white abstract of the textures of the canyons.

We found a lot of interesting shapes and textures that looked particularly interesting from the sky. This one reminded me of a dragon.

This huge canyon reaches as far as the eye can see with an amazing backdrop of 5000+ meter peaks as a backdrop. It’s really impressive. Walking on ground level will easily get you lost. We named this canyon the Canyon of Forgotten Rivers because these canyons were probably shaped from all kinds of little streams that once came from the glaciers into Issyk Kul Lake which you can see on the top left.

This was again a rock we scouted during the day. The structure looks like fingers pointing up in the sky, so we named this rock ‘The Fingers’. This is a star trail image taken over a period of 30 minutes.

The same location as picture 'The Night Explorer', taken during a different time of the night. We went back here because I saw that the Milky Way lined up with this composition around 4 AM in the morning.

It was the end of winter during my visit and there was still snow in some areas. The melting of the snow in these areas takes long as it’s still around -10C degrees during the night, but above zero Celsius during the day. I saw this interesting snow pattern that mirrored the rock shape in front. Taken at 12mm and getting very close to the foreground I shot this mirrored composition with the sun just peaking through.

An aerial view of Mars Canyon that offers a wide variety of canyon scenery. In this part there was still quite some snow creating an interesting contrast between the red shapes.

The last light hitting the ridges of the endless canyons.

Details of the shapes of Mars Canyon.

Red and black canyons forming a nice contrast with a swirling river/road in the middle of nowhere. We used dried up rivers as roads to reach some of these canyons.

Top-down view of the Canyon of Forgotten Rivers.

Flying the drone in extreme conditions. It suddenly started to snow while we were exploring deep into a canyon. Flying the drone and shooting some photos and videos with these ‘unique’ conditions was great to see. Luckily the drone survived!

When I flew my drone over canyons, I found lots of interesting shapes (some of them I scouted via Google Earth). This one reminded me of a footstep.

A close-up shot of another canyon rich in details and colors.

A daytime aerial of (as we named it) Mars Canyon. This canyon has a bunch of epic shapes that we later also shot during the night time. We could access it via a ‘road’, that was actually not a road but a dried up river (see it on the right).

In Skazka aka Fairytale canyon there are lots of interesting shapes along with foreground to play around with.

Black and white abstract of an interesting shape seen from the sky.