The terrain of Mount Ararat, side by side and zone by zone

The four sides

Bryce, who knew the mountain from several sides, described each face of Great Ararat:

• North-east. The mountain “descends very abruptly” towards the Aras plain. In places it forms ranges of black precipice capped with beds of ice “many hundreds of feet in thickness”, and it is pierced by a deep chasm (see features on a map).
• South-west. The fall is “somewhat less rapid”. A smaller chasm cuts into this side.
• South-east. Facing Little Ararat, the slope is “steep indeed, but in most parts not precipitous”. Bryce climbed this side. Snow lies here in long strips between rock ridges, and he found it involved very little snow work in autumn.
• North-west. The longest and gentlest side: a succession of terraces separated by moderately difficult slopes, running down into a broad fan-shaped base. It holds the only large fields of snow and névé. Parrot reached the summit this way in 1829.

Bryce put the average angle of the north-western declivity at about 17 degrees and of the south-eastern at 25 to 30 degrees.

Zone by zone, from the base up

The base. The lowest slopes, where the mountain merges into the plain, are “singularly smooth and uniform”, Bryce wrote. On the north-eastern side they consist of whitish clay or sand strewn with lumps of trachyte. Higher on the northern side, Parrot crossed a tract of volcanic sand and pumice-like shingle. The botanist Tournefort, who travelled at the beginning of the eighteenth century, had described that ground as sand in which one sinks “up to the ankle”; Parrot thought him “somewhat hyperbolical” and found the tract “not very difficult”.

The middle slopes. From about 5,000 feet up to 11,000 or 12,000 feet, according to Bryce, the ground is less rugged and grassy, used as summer pasture. Parrot found a nearly horizontal grassy plain on the north-west side that interrupts the stony ground “like a carpeted step”. On his second attempt he and his companions rode saddle horses up to the edge of the stony tract.

The stone zone. Parrot describes “the stony region, which forms a broad zone round the mountain immediately below the limits of the perpetual snow”. It “consists wholly of angular fragments of dark-coloured volcanic rock” in wild disorder: sometimes like a rough wall, sometimes a craggy ridge, sometimes heaped in a narrow gully. Here Parrot’s party sent back their horses. Bryce describes the same upper slopes, above 10,000 or 11,000 feet, as extremely rough and broken. They are seamed by gullies, some of them volcanic fissures and some probably cut by winter storms, and “strewn with prodigious masses of loose stone”. This part is almost entirely bare of plants.

Hidden ice. Not all ice on Ararat is visible. Near Kip Gholl, Parrot came upon a glacier “of considerable extent” so covered with lava, sand and rock fragments that the ice could be seen only in the deep cracks. Bryce similarly describes the glacier in the north-eastern chasm as “almost covered with blocks and stony rubbish”.

Snow and ice. Above the stone zone lies the permanent snow, which Bryce put at nearly 14,000 feet on average and lower on the north-west. On the steep upper slopes of the north-west side, Parrot’s party had to cut steps. He explained that what is called ice at that height is snow turned into glacier ice, which does not yield underfoot. Bryce adds that on the north-west ice slopes are “occasionally steep enough to require some step cutting” and that crevasses occur. One rock ridge on the south-east side stays clear of snow to within a hundred feet of the summit.

Little Ararat underfoot

The lower cone has a different surface. Climbing its north-western slope in 1829, Parrot found loose, sandy lava that gave no firm footing: “it was almost always necessary to make three steps in order to advance one”. Near the top, sand gave way to sharp rock, and a narrow ridge with precipitous sides led to the summit.

Water on the slopes

The terrain is dry. Bryce describes brooks from the melting snow at about 13,000 feet that disappear lower down into the loose stones. He adds that in autumn one can walk round the mountain “meeting scarcely a brook and rarely even a spring”. The Ağrı Governorship’s description of today’s southern approach reflects the same fact: water is taken on at Eli, before the seven- to eight-hour walk to the first camp.

Today’s southern approach as officially described

The Governorship page, dated 14.09.2020 and citing a book from 1995, outlines the approach from Eli:

• a walk of seven to eight hours to a first camp at 2,800 m;
• four to six hours of climbing to a second camp at about 4,200 m;
• a summit day of eight to ten hours, returning to the first camp.

It lists crampons, an ice axe and a rope as obligatory for the summit climb, which is consistent with the snow and ice described above. These figures are the page’s general description, not surveyed positions or a schedule. They say nothing about conditions on a given day. Snow cover and ice change from season to season (see snow and ice on Mount Ararat).

The terrain changes

Two things mean that these descriptions should be read as records, not as a map of today’s surface. The glacier ice has shrunk: the U.S. Geological Survey measured a loss of about 40 per cent of the glacier area between 1977 and 2013. And the mountain moves: the earthquake of 1840 brought down cliffs and ice in the north-eastern chasm, and Bryce saw the fresh fracture marks thirty-seven years later (see geology and nature).

Sources

1. James Bryce, Transcaucasia and Ararat, 3rd ed., London: Macmillan, 1878, ch. VI pp. 212–213, 222–227, 238–241. Internet Archive. Read 25 September 2026.
2. Friedrich Parrot, Journey to Ararat, translated by W. D. Cooley, New York: Harper and Bros., 1846, ch. VIII pp. 168–173, ch. XII pp. 255–257. Internet Archive. Read 25 September 2026.
3. Ağrı Valiliği, Ağrı Dağı (page dated 14.09.2020, citing İ. Alpaslan, Her Yönüyle Ağrı, 1995). Checked 14 September 2026.
4. USGS EROS Center, RBV Images Mount Ararat. Checked 14 September 2026.