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Occupying a swathe of desert that was an ancient ocean floor over 400 million years ago, the Aktau Mountains in Kazakhstan’s Altyn Emel National Park were ravaged by millennia of tectonic shifts and battering from the elements. What remains are silver flat-topped mountains shaded in gradations of white, their ashy crags dropping off vertically at the sides where bone-dust scree crumbles into the crevices below like snowdrifts. The Aktau, meaning “white mountains” in Kazakh, derive their name from the high concentration of white sediments in the terrain.
At the foothills of these ghostly mountains, colorful conical ridges reside in sharp contrast to the higher-altitude lunar panorama. Vibrant bands of brick red and vivid ochre are stacked atop veins of silver and streaks of sandy brown. The colors ripple down the mountainside, spreading out below the low-slung peaks and folding into the rocky fissures encircling the base. The horizontal stripes lie on an angle, skewing the mountains to create the illusion that they are tilting into the earth.
In the absence of rain and flash flooding, the hike to Aktau traverses the cracked red crust of water runoff, flanked occasionally by mustard yellow walls carved out by rushing water escaping from the mountains. Embedded into the hardened dusty soil are flaking cubes of gypsum, their milky white crystals flickering in the ephemeral sunlight.