Look, if you lived just out of sight of Ushba, you’d want to see him more often, too. Especially if you were a photographer.
We can glimpse only his shoulder from our house in Etseri, Svaneti. For the peak you have to walk 10 minutes or so away from the house in one of several directions.
I confess to having taken probably a thousand pictures of him over the last 27 years, from every vantage point I could. There is still a range of angles, though, which will put Ushba, Tetnuldi and the highest mountain in the Caucasus, Elbrus, in the same frame. That’s still on my list. It’s from somewhere above the village of Nakra, I think.
Tetnuldi is basically a pyramid; Elbrus is essentially two rounded bumps, scalable with no actual mountaineering gear or experience, just a guide and the willingness to trudge through deep snow.
Tetnuldi has killed people, yes. But Ushba, at about 4700m more beautiful than the other two by far, is also the hardest climb in the Caucasus, and holds the record here for deaths. Lovely but heartless. That’s how I write him in my short stories about Svaneti, based on both what I see and hear.
Sunrise shots are not the best for Ushba due to the light’s angle. Midday onwards, right through sunset, are the best times. Late sun will also bathe the mountain in gold.
I recently made a short drive to Becho, next village up from us, because it has Max Ushba along its more than 5 km of length. Indeed, there is only one short stretch along the main road from which a foreground hill blocks Ushba entirely from view. I would never choose to live there, knowing what I was missing.
So I parked at the top of Mazeri hamlet. Here, I set up my iPhone on a holder on the car’s hood, with a cabled battery supplying power, and ran a couple of timelapse videos. These take a shot every 6 seconds, and then compile them all into a video at normal frame rate, with clouds and shadows practically racing by. It’s magic. At the same time, I was shooting still photos on my big Canon digital camera, to get the best of everything.
The weather was kind, with Ushba’s peak remaining visible most of the time despite clouds drifting through the scene. Grandfather and Grandmother, the two legendary figures sticking up from the mountain’s shoulder, were also in nice relief, standing out well. Ushba turned them to stone untold centuries ago, and now they are glacially slowly teaching him about a new thing of which he used to know nothing: love.
I suppose I will continue shooting Ushba as long as I am here. From Latali you get a 3/4 view of the two peaks; from Mestia they are side by side, and the mountain looks completely different. Becho’s views are basically of the south peak blocking the north one, but this is no less dramatic, if not more so than the other angles. You really can’t count on visibility, though, so I always tell my trekking guests: If you see Ushba, get a shot straight away! My record shortest available time was 10 seconds, before clouds obscured the peak, but I got what I had come for. Beautiful, cruel, and also surprisingly shy. That’s our Ushba.
Blog by Tony Hanmer
Tony Hanmer has lived in Georgia since 1999, in Svaneti since 2007, and been a weekly writer and photographer for GT since early 2011. He runs the “Svaneti Renaissance” Facebook group, now with over 2000 members, at www.facebook.com/groups/SvanetiRenaissance/
He and his wife also run their own guest house in Etseri: www.facebook.com/hanmer.house.svaneti
