Deeper Than You'd Guess

Look down. Under your feet, almost two kilometres of air — and at the bottom, way down there, a turquoise thread of river. Not blue, not green — turquoise, the kind of colour you'd expect on a postcard and not quite believe. Up here on the plateau near the village of Dubki, almost everyone has the same first reaction: surely that's been photoshopped?

It hasn't. The colour comes from limestone suspended in the water, combined with just how clear that water is, and it's sharpened by the sheer drop below — in places, the river under the tour boats runs a hundred metres deep. The Sulak carries plenty of force, but from up here it looks more like a mountain lake. Local guides have a line for it: "a glacier river playing dress-up."

The Sulak Canyon reaches a maximum depth of around one thousand nine hundred and twenty metres. The Grand Canyon in Arizona, for comparison, bottoms out at about one thousand eight hundred metres at its deepest point. So the Sulak is genuinely deeper — not a claim from a tourist brochure, just the numbers. What it doesn't have is a constant width: in places the canyon squeezes down to a few dozen metres, a narrow stone crack, and elsewhere it opens out to three kilometres, wide enough to feel like a whole valley. Same canyon — wildly different depending on where you're standing.

But before the tourists, there were engineers. The Chirkey hydroelectric station on the Sulak is the most powerful power plant in the North Caucasus and Russia's tallest arch dam. Its concrete wall rises more than two hundred metres. It was built in the nineteen-seventies, with the country's best concrete crews and blasting specialists brought in from across the Soviet Union. Back then, engineers posed for photos on the edge of freshly cut rock ledges, with no idea that half a century later, crowds with phones would be lining up at the exact same spots.

Building the reservoir gave the canyon a submerged history of its own. The old village of Chirkey — with its orchards, its cemetery, streets that stepped down in terraces toward the river — sat right in the flood zone and had to be fully relocated. In the final days before the water rose, the level climbed by almost a metre a day. Older residents still tell of boys competing to see who could hold out longest, swimming out to orchard trees already half swallowed by the rising water. Fishermen today say their sonar sometimes picks out straight lines on the bottom — the remains of walls, maybe, or maybe just a legend the guides are happy to dress up further.

The canyon even has an unexpected literary footnote. One of its viewpoints is named after Alexandre Dumas. The writer really did travel through the Caucasus in the nineteenth century and wrote about Dagestan's gorges in his travel notes. He never saw the dam or the reservoir, obviously — but he captured something exact about these Caucasus drops: standing at the edge, a person feels not just fear of the height, but a strange pull to step forward anyway. Guides here quote Dumas right before asking tourists not to lean over the edge for a selfie. A rare case of nineteenth-century European literature doubling as a safety briefing.

The real tourist boom took off around the mid-twenty-tens. Before that, this was mostly alpinists, fishermen, and people who simply knew the place. Then came the official websites, dozens of local tour operators, day trips out of Makhachkala combining jeep rides, canyon boat tours, and stops at the Sarykum sand dunes. Tour prices have climbed several times over in just a few years. For many people in Dubki and the surrounding villages, tourism has become a real alternative to seasonal construction work far from home.

And that's the sharpest question the canyon is asking right now. Thousands of visitors each season, boat engines on the water, cafés popping up unregulated at the cliff edge — pressing on the same fragile Caucasus landscape that draws people here in the first place. Local activists are pushing for limits on visitor numbers, there's ongoing debate over new construction on the slopes, and stricter protections are under discussion. The Sulak Canyon today isn't just a depth record and turquoise water. It's a live experiment in how much modern tourism a place can absorb and still remain the place people came to see.

Ask me sometime about Dagestan's ghost villages — I know why some of them emptied out in a single night, but that's a tour for another day.

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