Ugam-Chatkal National Park: Beyond the Chimgan Edge

Almost everyone who says they've been to Ugam-Chatkal National Park has seen a thin slice of it. They've seen Charvak's blue water, a chairlift at Chimgan or Beldersay, maybe the Amirsoy gondola. That strip along the reservoir is the park's front porch, and it's genuinely lovely. The rest of the house, the Pskem valley, the upper Ugam, the Maydantal and Bashkyzylsay reserve cores, sits behind a border checkpoint, a gravel road and, in places, a flat ban on tourism.

That isn't a failure of marketing. It's how the protected area was designed, and once you know which layer you're standing in, you can see far more than the Tashkent weekend crowd without stepping somewhere you shouldn't.

How big is Ugam-Chatkal, really?

Big enough that nobody agrees on the number. The national tourism portal, uzbekistan.travel, gives 574,000 hectares and a founding year of 1990 (last checked: September 2026). Other references use 668,350 hectares; our overview of Uzbekistan's national parks now follows the portal and notes the higher figure. The gap is almost 95,000 hectares, and it most likely reflects boundary changes and how the enclosed reserves are counted rather than anyone being careless. Either way, it's the country's largest protected area by a wide margin.

It covers the Bostanliq, Parkent and Ohangaron districts of Tashkent region, the mountain wedge that points northeast from the capital towards Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan. Four rivers organise the terrain: the Pskem, the Chatkal, the Ugam and the Koksu. The highest ground is on the Pskem range, where Adelunga Toghi (officially renamed Piskom in January 2026) reaches 4,301 metres and Beshtor 4,299 metres, according to the same tourism portal.

Why does the area matter to a visitor? Because "Ugam-Chatkal" on a map is not one thing with one set of rules. It's three overlapping designations, and the one that applies to the valley in front of you decides if you can walk into it.

Park, biosphere reserve, World Heritage site: three labels, three rulebooks

The national park

This is the broad, inhabited, visitable layer. Villages, farms, holiday resorts, roads and ski lifts all sit inside it. You pay a small entry fee at a road checkpoint and carry on. The foothill zones around Chimgan, Beldersay, Khodjikent and Parkent need no special permit, as the tourism portal states plainly.

The Chatkal and Ugam-Chatkal biosphere reserves

Inside and beside the park sit the strictly protected cores. The Chatkal reserve began in 1947 as a mountain-forest reserve and took the Chatkal name in 1959. UNESCO's Man and the Biosphere programme lists Mount Chatkal as a biosphere reserve designated in 1978, covering 68,842 hectares between 1,110 and 4,000 metres (last checked: September 2026). One wrinkle: a 2022 botanical checklist of the reserve, published through Zenodo, gives 1986 for the UNESCO designation. We've gone with UNESCO's own page.

Then the map changed. Until 2018 Chatkal had two separate blocks: Bashkyzylsay (about 11,100 hectares) on the southwest slope of the Chatkal range and Maydantal (about 24,150 hectares) on the north side. A Cabinet of Ministers decree, No. 367 of 16 May 2018, created a new Ugam-Chatkal State Biosphere Reserve of 42,952.81 hectares and moved Bashkyzylsay into it, leaving Maydantal as the Chatkal reserve. Oddly, the newer reserve was placed under the national railway company, Uzbekistan Railways, which describes it on its own site as the country's only highland biosphere reserve. Its rule for the protected zone is short: tourism is prohibited, and so is the presence of unauthorised people.

The Western Tien-Shan World Heritage listing

On 17 July 2016, at the World Heritage Committee's 40th session in Istanbul, the Western Tien-Shan was inscribed as a transboundary natural site shared by Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Uzbekistan. It's a serial property of 13 components spread across seven reserves. Uzbekistan's share is Bashkyzylsay and Maydantal, the same two cores described above. So the UNESCO-listed parts of Ugam-Chatkal are precisely the parts you can't hike into. That catches people out every summer.

What lives here, and what you'll realistically see

The headline animals are the snow leopard, Menzbier's marmot and the Tien Shan brown bear, all named by the tourism portal, with the black stork on the bird list. UNESCO's Chatkal entry counts around 1,300 plant types, 176 bird species and 33 mammal species in the reserve, and flags the snow leopard and Menzbier's marmot among its IUCN Red List species alongside the black vulture and lesser kestrel. Zeravshan juniper covers about 24% of the reserve's area.

Menzbier's marmot is the one to understand. It lives only in the western Tien Shan, it's rated Vulnerable by the IUCN, and its range is split in two by the Pskem valley, so the populations north and south of the river are treated as separate subspecies. That makes the Pskem one of the more biologically interesting valleys in Central Asia and explains why the checkpoints there aren't only about the border.

Now the honest bit. A day visitor at Chimgan will see raptors, lizards, a lot of cattle and possibly a marmot at distance on a high meadow. Snow leopards keep to high, broken terrain, much of it inside zones you won't be allowed into. Bears keep away from roads. If birds are your reason for coming, our birdwatching notes for Uzbekistan are a better planning tool than hoping for a big mammal.

The valleys beyond the reservoir

Charvak reservoir sits where three rivers meet: the Chatkal from the east, the Pskem from the north and the smaller Koksu. The village of Brichmulla (also spelt Burchmulla) at the top of the reservoir is where the easy country ends. Chimgan, Beldersay and Amirsoy are covered in our Chimgan and Charvak day-trip planner and the Amirsoy winter guide, so we won't repeat them. Here's what lies past them.

The Pskem valley

The Pskem runs northeast between the Ugam and Pskem ranges towards the Kyrgyz frontier. It was only opened to foreign tourists in 2018, according to the Tashkent operator Eurasia Travel, because of its proximity to neighbouring borders. Villages strung along it include Nanay (sometimes Nanai), and further up, Ispay, a settlement of around forty houses roughly 127 km from Tashkent. At the Nanay fork a rough track leaves for the Urungach lakes; the Ikhnach lakes lie in the same border-zone country further north.

Permits are where it gets murky, and we'd rather say so than invent certainty. A Tashkent-based foreign resident who drove to Urungach in June 2020 reported that border guards at the checkpoint on the Pskem road checked passports and registration, and that the Ministry of Internal Affairs office in Gazalkent confirmed residents didn't need a separate permit. The same writer couldn't confirm whether short-stay tourists were treated the same way. We couldn't find an official 2026 statement either (last checked: September 2026).

Our practical reading: carry your passport and proof of tourist registration, go with a licensed Tashkent operator who arranges any paperwork in advance, and don't count on talking your way through a military post. If the operator says a permit is needed for your route, believe them; they're the ones who lose a day if you're turned back.

Sijjak and the Chatkal arm

On the reservoir's shore, Sijjak (Sidzhak on older maps) is an orchard village with a handful of guesthouses, a quieter base than the resort strip near the dam. Sleep, eat home cooking, walk a side valley.

The Ugam side

The Ugam river cuts its gorge past the village of Khumsan and joins the Chirchiq just below the Charvak dam. The high Ugam watershed is shared with Kazakhstan's Sairam-Ugam National Park, itself part of the same World Heritage listing, which is why the ridgeline country here is managed as a border area rather than a hiking playground.

Getting in: fees, checkpoints and roads

You'll meet a checkpoint on the main roads into the park. Reported entry fees vary a lot. Recent traveller reports range from about 10,000 to 60,000 som per person (very roughly $1 to $5), depending on the post and how you're arriving (last checked: September 2026). Carry small notes. Card terminals at mountain barriers are rare.

Distances and road quality matter more than the fee. Urungach was reported in 2020 as a 3 to 3.5-hour drive from Tashkent, with the last hour or so on a rocky track from the Nanay fork that really wants a 4x4 with low range. A standard Yandex Go car or a city taxi will stop well short.

Mobile signal fades once you're past the reservoir. Download offline maps before you leave Tashkent, and agree pickup times before the driver goes.

When the interior is open

The front porch works all year: skiing in winter, swimming in summer. The interior has a much shorter season. Snow lingers on the high Pskem and Chatkal ground into late spring, gravel tracks turn slippery after storms, and early summer snowmelt swells the rivers that the lake tracks have to cross.

For the lakes and high valleys, we'd aim for July to early October. July and August bring the most reliable roads and the most people at Urungach. September is quieter and cooler, and the walnut and apple orchards in the lower villages are being harvested. After mid-October, don't plan anything that depends on a high track staying open. Our broader guide to hiking in Uzbekistan sets these months against the rest of the country's walking regions.

Doing it responsibly

Ugam-Chatkal absorbs a lot of pressure. Tashkent is a city of around three million people less than two hours away, and on a July Saturday it feels as though a good share of them are at Charvak. The damage concentrates in the accessible edge: litter at picnic spots, cars driven onto meadows, grazing pushed higher every year.

• Spend money in the villages. A night in a Sijjak or Brichmulla guesthouse puts more into the valley than a day trip that only pays a chairlift and a car.
• Stay on existing tracks. Off-road driving on high meadows is exactly the habitat Menzbier's marmot depends on.
• Pack everything out. There's no collection service at Urungach or on the side valleys.
• Keep distance from wildlife and herders' dogs. A marmot colony that keeps diving into burrows is a colony you're too close to.
• Don't fly a drone near checkpoints or the frontier. Uzbekistan's rules are strict, and border areas are the worst place to test them.

One opinion some readers won't like: you don't need to reach the UNESCO cores to have a good trip here, and paying someone to "get you in" isn't a service worth buying. The reserves exist because they're closed. The Pskem road, a night in Nanay and a morning at Urungach will give you more mountain than most visitors to Uzbekistan ever see.

A realistic two-day plan beyond Chimgan

Day one: leave Tashkent early by hired car, stop at Charvak for an hour, then continue past Brichmulla into the Pskem valley, passports ready at the checkpoint. Overnight in a guesthouse around Nanay, arranged through your operator, because walk-in beds are unreliable.

Day two: drive the track to the Urungach lakes at first light, walk the shoreline and the slopes above for three or four hours, then return to Tashkent by evening. If the track's closed or the checkpoint says no, swap in Sijjak and a side-valley walk. You'll still be deeper into Ugam-Chatkal than the chairlift crowd.

The one thing to settle before any of this: ask your operator, in writing, if your exact route crosses into the border zone and what document the checkpoint will want. That single answer determines whether the plan works.