The source of the Adyl-Su River is located on the Dzhankuat glacier. It lies between the Jantugan and Gumachi mountains, which are part of the Greater Caucasus Range. The length of the Adyl-Su River is 12 kilometers. It flows out into the Baksan Gorge and flows into the Baksan River. The picturesque gorge of the river is surrounded by high mountains, where there are several glaciers.
Adyl-Su means "Red water" in Turkic, as there are narzan springs here. Translated from Balkar, Adyl-Su means "beautiful water". Both names are suitable to describe this gorge. There are small sources of narzan in many places of the gorge, but their debit is small.
Two rivers flow in the upper reaches of the gorge. The Adyl-Su flows along the left side of the gorge, and its unnamed tributary flows from the Bashkara Glacier on the right side. On some maps, this tributary is named after the lake: Bashkara. In 2017, a powerful mudflow descended into the gorge along this tributary when the glacial moraine of Lake Bashkara broke due to rains. These two streams merge approximately in the middle of the gorge. The river Adyl-Su in this place flows down the beautiful cascading waterfall Lynx Spot.
Even lower, a very large tributary, the Shkhelda River, flows into the Adyl-Su River. These two rivers are almost identical in their abundance, as the Shkhelda River flows out of a large glacier on Shkhelda Mountain. After that, the Adyl-Su River flows for another 4 kilometers and then flows into the Baksan River. The height difference from the source of the Adyl-Su River in the Dzhankuat glacier to the confluence with the Baksan is 900 meters, from 2,700 meters to 1,790 meters above sea level.
