From the lakeshore road along the south side of Issyk-Kul, in Kyrgyzstan, Skazka Canyon shows nothing at all: a dull clay bank. Once you are through the gap in it, the ground opens into two kilometres of red spires. The name is Russian for fairy tale, and the shapes have collected names to match. One serrated crest is the Chinese Wall, a long ridge a dragon's back, and the tallest group, which you can walk right up to, is the castle. Nothing is marked and nobody tells you where to go, which is the point. You pick a gully, follow it until it closes, climb out over a ridge and drop into the next one, and an hour of improvising leaves you with a route nobody else took that day.
The fan-shaped grooves running down every slope are the canyon coming apart. Reds and rusts eroded off the Tian Shan as it rose and filled this basin with up to four kilometres of sediment, and the same mountains shut the rain out of it. With nothing rooted in the slopes to hold the clay together, the rare violent downpours cut the gullies and leave those grooves. Following one from a ridge down to the wash takes you through the whole mechanism. Light decides how much of it registers. A high sun flattens the place into glare; when the sun is low it comes in across the flutes and every groove puts down its own shadow. The clay holds firm while it is dry and turns greasy after rain. The payoff is on the highest crest. The badlands drop away, red spires stand in the foreground, and behind them the deep blue of Issyk-Kul runs to the snow line on the far shore. None of it is permanent either. The rare downpours that cut these gullies are still cutting, so the route you improvised this morning is not the one the canyon will hand out next year.