Walks and hikes from the city

Start at Medeu and take the steps — the famous flight above the skating rink. At the top, keep walking to Gorelnik, which is not a summit or a viewpoint but a place with a cafe: Apa Katya. If you still have legs, carry on to Sarysai, the next one up.

Getting into Medeu itself costs nothing, so the only money this route asks for is the coffee at the end of it.

One thing to know before you set off: the rink is closed. Medeu shut for a full reconstruction in 2025 and the city gives the last quarter of 2027 for reopening, so nobody is skating up there for now. The walk is not affected. The staircase is open and getting around on foot is fine — it is the rink that is a building site, not the gorge. More about what that building was is on the architecture page.

Before you start up the steps, look at the seated bronze figure in front of the rink. That is Anatoli Boukreev, put there in 2023 — the climber who went back out into the storm on Everest in 1996 and brought people down alive, and who came out of these same mountains. Almost everybody photographs the rink and walks straight past him. Who he was, and the climbing school he came from.

The steps are the obvious way up and the one nearly everybody takes. There is also an earth path through the spruce, to the left of them — quieter, softer underfoot, and the same destination. Neither is a secret; the second one is simply less obvious when you are standing at the bottom looking at a staircase.

Apa Katya is open all year, which is what makes this route a winter one too: the walk up is the same, and the reward at the top is a sheepskin on a bench in the sun.

This one is a walk rather than a hike. The pleasure of it is the shape: you climb, you sit down with a coffee at altitude, and there is more coffee waiting when you come back down. Vanilla, Del Papa and Chef all have places at Medeu itself, so the walk begins and ends at a table. Vanilla is a local chain and the branch I have written up (Konaev, in the centre) is not this one — go for the breakfast rather than the espresso either way.

Ride the cable car up to Shymbulak and start walking from there towards Mynzhylky. This is proper hiking rather than a stroll with a coffee at the end — but the path runs straight, so it asks for legs and not for navigation.

The road above Medeu is being repaired, so the cable car is the only way on to Shymbulak right now: taxis and buses up that stretch are paused. Getting to Medeu itself is unaffected — a taxi still takes you there without trouble, so the walk up the steps is on as normal. It is the section above it that is closed.

Walking up and riding down, or the other way round, is one ticket at 7,000 ₸; both directions cost 12,000 ₸. Children between six and fourteen pay 2,000 ₸ and 4,000 ₸. If you drive as far as Medeu, open-air parking there is 500 ₸ an hour and the covered parking is 1,000 ₸. Those are the resort's own published prices for pedestrians rather than fares I have paid — read off their tariff page on 26 August 2026, and they do change.

One thing worth knowing about up here: Tenir, the hotel on the mountain. It costs what a mountain hotel costs, so it is a spend rather than a stop — but the views from it are the best in this city, and it is worth going up once even if you only ever do it once.

The other moderate one, and a different valley entirely. The trail starts a little above the Ayusai visitor centre, so the way in is a taxi rather than a cable car — order one out, order one back.

There is a charge to enter: the trail is inside the Ile-Alatau national park, and the eco-post on the way in takes it. Pedestrians pay 648.75 ₸ as of January 2026 — the tariff is pegged to the state's MRP index and goes up every January, and it is the same at all ten of the park's posts. A car is 1,297.5 ₸. Take cash. If you come by taxi, the driver settles it at the post and you square up with him.

Same ceiling as everything else here: an hour and a half in one direction at the outside. What you get for it is a path along the valley side with the range opening up in front of you, and, when I walked it, a whole flock of birds working the updraught below the ridge.

The plateau everyone in Almaty has an opinion about, reached from the same Medeu side. It is the most serious of the four and the one that most rewards an early start. It walks year-round — this is not a summer-only route.

Go while it looks like this. Construction for the Almaty Superski project is starting up there, and Kokzhailau is the walk this city loves most in the form it has now. That form has a shelf life.

Everything above is reachable on a Yandex Go, and so is a good deal more. The fishing ponds at Talgar are the furthest thing I would call a taxi to — order one out, order one back, and the day works.

The nearest destination that genuinely needs a rental car is the visitor centre at Charyn Canyon. Beyond that point, the question stops being how far you can walk and starts being what you are driving.

One taxi ride that buys a much bigger day is Big Almaty Lake. The drive up is the easy part; the walking starts above the lake, where the trail carries on towards the pass and the observatory and the crowds at the shore fall away within twenty minutes. It is a longer and higher day than the four routes above, and the road can be gated below the lake depending on the season — check before you set off. There is also a way up by bus and on foot, which the lake's own page walks through.

Four routes is what I can write about from my own boots. If you want the whole mountain range catalogued — hundreds of routes graded by difficulty and length, a mountain weather forecast, and group walks you can sign up to — the people to read are Zabugorshiki. Renat, Amina and Ruslan have built the route database this city needed and nobody else made, and they walk the routes they publish.

Two things to know before you click. It is entirely in Russian, so you will be leaning on your browser's translation — worth it for the route pages, which are mostly photographs, maps and numbers. And their YouTube channel of the same name is wider than hiking; it also covers their life abroad. The site is the part you want.

I am sending you there rather than copying them, and there is nothing in it for me either way. That is the whole arrangement on this site.