The Kulikalon lakes lie in a basin at 2,800 metres in the Fann Mountains of Tajikistan, and granite goes straight up off the far shore. That wall is Mirali, 5,106 metres, with Maria beside it. Two glacier tongues built this basin: the moraines they left behind are the dams that hold the water, and what remains of the ice hangs in shaded niches on the wall above. Three or four hours of climbing from the alpine camp at Artuch, through juniper and old moraine, puts you on the lip of the basin with all of it open. Flat grassy patches beside the water give you the finest wild camping in the Fanns. In the evening the granite loses its colour long before the lake does, and the only sound left in the basin is the grazing herds.
Nobody has the place to themselves. Each summer the villages below drive goats, cattle and donkeys up to these pastures. Families camp along the far shore until the first snows push them down. Much of the milk becomes qurut: sour yoghurt, salted, rolled into hard white balls and dried in the sun, set out on cloth beside the tents through the middle of the day. Donkeys still carry the gear for trekking parties over the Alaudin pass, where the trail leaves for the next basin and lakes fed straight off the glaciers. A short spur climbs instead to Dushakha, two connected pools in a stonier, higher bowl that few walkers bother with. Almost none of the birds that matter here are waterbirds: Himalayan snowcock and Hume's lark work the scree, crimson-winged finch the boulder fields, and the white-winged grosbeak lives on juniper berries, which ties it to these woods. That juniper, the archa along the shore, is the scarcest thing in the basin. It grows so slowly that a trunk you could put your arms around may have been standing for centuries, and these are the largest stands left anywhere in the western Zeravshan, cut hard for firewood everywhere else.