The dazzling summit of Mount Ararat, capped by a permanent layer of glisterning snow, soars towords the heavens like a magnificent silver-beaked bird. Mount Ararat's fame rests not on the natural beauty of its symmetrical, deceptively smooth flanks and brilliant white crest, however, but on its Biblical associations, for this mountain is held to be the first to have pierced the receding waters of the Great flood and offer a safe berth for Noah's Ark

The upper and lower slipes of Mount Ararat are largely barren. Sespite a permanent snowline at around 4420m, water is scarce on the mountain and a dew birch trees are the only vegetation that can survive. Around the middle slopes on the good pastureland. Few other animals make their home here, although there were certainly treater numbers in the early 19th century when the Britich deplomat James Morier, reported "beras, amall tygers, lynxes and lions". Wild cats and snakes may have inhabited the mountain in medieval times, giving rise to rumours of gragons, but colourful local tales of small snow worms so cold they could cool a large bowl of sherbert have never been substantiated.