Millions of years ago, Salair was a real mountainous country with peaks rising to the sky. Gradually, under the influence of time, the ancient mountains turned into a chain of low hills, dissected by a network of beams and dens. Nevertheless, at present there are several hills in the relief of the Salair Ridge, the height of which exceeds 500 m: Kopna (509 m), Sinyukha (536 m), Barsuk (566 m), Pikhtovaya (585 m), Mokhnataya (555 m) , Gusyok (589 m), Tyagun (562 m), Kivda (618 m).

The length of the ridge is 300 km, it begins in the upper reaches of the Neni River, passes through the territory of the Altai Territory, Kemerovo and Novosibirsk regions and ends with the Bugotak hills. The main ridge of the Salair is almost parallel to the Kuznetsk Alatau.

The relief of the Salair Ridge is asymmetrical:

• its southern part is raised,
  
• in the north, the hilly upland is smoothed out, passing into the Kuznetsk depression,
• on the eastern side, the high ridge ends abruptly (a typical example is the Mount of Winds or Tyrgan),
  
• the western gentle slopes imperceptibly pass into the plains of the Altai Territory.

The Salair Ridge does not have mountain lakes and snowfields, but the rivers flowing into Chumysh, Berd and Inya originate here. The mountain system acts as a watershed between the basins of the Siberian rivers Tom and Chumysh.

The slopes of the Salair Ridge are covered with light coniferous forests with a predominance of pine and larch, on the eastern slopes are the famous pine forests. And in remote, inaccessible places, the impenetrable taiga of fir and aspen has been preserved. Such gloomy dark taiga is popularly known as "black" or "black taiga".

The Salair Ridge is rich in minerals: there are deposits of limestone, nickel, bauxite, quartzite, mercury and silver. The most valuable is the loose gold, which the local population has long been extracting from the gold-bearing rivers of Salair. The historical center of gold mining is located in the village of Yegoryevskoye.