I’ve been awake since the sky was full of stars; dogs near Ulangom in Western Mongolia barked all night (after sleeping all day). There’s a pink and orange sky to the Northeast over Uvs Nuur, Mongolia’s largest lake, by area. Venus and a half moon still shine brightly. The horses around me munch quietly on the overgrazed grasses. To the south are two jeeps with trailers, two four-wheel-drive Toyotas, a big truck and 28 others in sleeping bags. Only the stack of the coal-fired power plant rises prominently above the low skyline of Ulangom, the Aimag capitol, to the northwest. Low hills are silhouetted to the east; the snow-capped Turgen Range rises to almost 4000m on the western skyline. Our campsite is just below 1000m which is 200m above Uvs Nuur.

Dawn brings the sound of a crier in a minaret at a mosque in Ulangom. Perhaps it is a recording blasted over loudspeakers. The sound mixes with the canine barks and occasional vehicles of early morning. Kazakhstan is not far west; many Kazaks with their Islam religion inhabit far western Mongolia. The Russia-Mongolian border crosses the northeast corner of Uvs Nuur, but the lake is so big one cannot see across it. Nearby Tuva is close to the point on Earth farthest from any ocean, yet gulls and terns are among the great variety of birdlife along the shores of Uvs Nuur.

This day unfolds as many have this past month in wonderful western Mongolia. Our “base camp” lay at an elevation of 2225m on the east side of the Kharkhiraa Mountains in the northeastern Mongolian Altai. These foothills are cut by major north-south faults separating the Uvs Nuur (lake) basin to the east from the Turgen/Kharkhiraa Range to the west. Camp is almost on one of the two largest faults, which runs many kilometers north and south. Just to the east is a placer gold mine which operates 24 hours a day for the six months of “summer”. We got a tour by the (female) chief geologist and saw frozen ground (permafrost) in the mine floor. A few kilometers to the west is a coal mine. This mine operates during winter months, when Mongolians need coal for heat and electricity (there are few or not other sources of energy in Mongolia). We have not seen trees for weeks: everywhere is grass, except rock outcrops and where overgrazing has caused slope instability. Many slopes have terracettes, most apparently directly or indirectly caused by overgrazing.

We see cattle, yaks, horses, sheep and goats all over the place, with camel herds here and there. Regularly there are goats and sheep grazing by camp. One morning I woke Clare early because I thought she was grating her teeth; she thought it was someone walking by our tent, but it lasted too long. We opened the fly to see a grazing yak a few meters away.

Wildflowers accompany the grasses—fewer (like edelweiss) at this elevation and more in meadows 500m above us. Above this are some of the most beautiful mountains I’ve ever seen. Occasionally we drive (for research purposes) to the pass between the Turgen Mountains to the north and the Kharkhiraa Mountains to the south. Each massif has giant glacial troughs radiating in all directions. At the heads of these troughs are large glaciers, particularly on northern slopes. The snouts of the glaciers are buried in rock debris—down each valley goes a small river carrying outwash. Some glaciers are on the summits of flat-topped mountains; down the sides are ice fields and hanging glaciers.

Scattered throughout the countryside are white gers, one to a few per Mongolian family or extended family. Transportation is by horse, or motorcycle. There are a few big trucks to haul wool after shearing, or move the family (and its ger) to lower elevations for winter. The people are very friendly, inviting us in to their gers for yak cheese, airag (fermented mare’s milk), salty tea or whatever. We often have something to give: a pen, a balloon, chewing gum or candy. They are curious as to what we are doing, and to the nature of our instruments.

Our party includes nine Americans, one Swiss, and nine Mongolian students; two Mongolian drivers with Russian jeeps; two Mongolian cooks; two US Geology professors (Rick and me), Clare, one US doctor and his wife, one assistant from California, plus one Mongolian and one British professors. There are two Toyota “land-cruisers"; Bayasaa told another driver not to come with his Russian four-wheel-drive van until it was fixed.

We are working on the following American research projects: three along the fault (when was the last earthquake?), two on local rocks, one on nearby landslides (which are varied and spectacular) and three at high elevation (one on patterned ground, another on aufeis, and a third on moraines). Mongolian students are assisting with most of these research projects.

The weather is tough; we’ve only had one or two days without rain. We've experienced lots of rain with occasional hail, high winds, thunder and lightning. One day it hailed so much that there was the appearance of snow on the ground. The lightning is likely dangerous only when we’re on ridges; once Clare and I had less than one second between the flash and the bang. Temperatures have been as low as 40° F, which yields freezing considering wind chill. A 60°F temperature feels great when the sun is out. Field work is hard in low temperatures and/or rain. Especially if one is not moving much. During rare cloudless hours, the icy mountains are spectacular.

Two research projects are a little risky because the field areas are over a ridge and down in a deep valley from as close as vehicles can get. We always have at least two people in each research site; those in the high valley have CB radios to maintain contact. Each day groups walk to nearby projects or go by vehicle to remote sites, as far as an hour away. The only real road leads east to the Uvs Nuur basin and west to a village and the coal mine. There are “tracks” all over the place; vehicles follow the tracks or just go “cross-country”. There are no bridges, even on the road. The van had lots of traction problems; a Toyota got really stuck once, but digging, putting rocks in the ruts, pulling with the other Toyota, and pushing with people got it out of the muck. The jeeps are best, especially because of their high clearance.

Three types of patterned ground are common. The mounds of soil, vegetation and rocks merely yield a bumpy ride. The vegetated frost mounds (“hippie heads”) result in a very bumpy ride, or if soft, a stuck vehicle. The stone-ringed mounds with boulder edges are about impossible to cross.

Around the camp are steep grassy slopes, including Sacred Mountain north across the valley. Many of us climbed this mountain, which rises about 500 m above the river where we get our water. The river flows past the town upstream of us, plus there are livestock everywhere, so we have to purify our water. Sacred Mountain's top is often in the clouds; there is an ovoo and a stone alter on the summit.

Meals are good, but similar, every day. Breakfast is tea (and instant coffee); juice every other day, cream of wheat, cornflakes, granola, bread and spreads. Lunch (in the field) is tea, bread, sardines, cheese and perhaps meat and/or an apple. Dinner is tea, meat and vegetable soup, pasta with meat and vegetables (or sometimes meat with rice or potatoes) and canned fruit every other evening.

We have two gers: one is in the kitchen, the other is for everything else, dining, research, talking, games, reading, etc. The “other” ger leaks like a sieve during rainstorms, but beats being pelted by raindrops and hailstones. The storms come from the west; afterwards there are spectacular lightning displays to the east.
My favorite place is the high valley where the glacial and aufeis projects are located. I was fortunate to be able to visit this most beautiful site half a dozen times, with bad weather only the day Clare joined me. The students have named it “No Goat Valley” because no sheep or goats go there, so there is no overgrazing. The valley floor is lush with grasses and wildflowers, plus a tiny bush with green leaves and red flowers. Dozens of tiny streams and a big spring feed the braided river that has carved two canyons through phyllite. Some of the lichen-covered granite boulders are striated. At the head of the valley is a compound cirque with many glaciers descending from snowy rocky peaks. Light and dark clouds dance across the bright blue sky. The only sounds are the wind, the river crashing over rocks, and occasionally, an icefall from a hanging glacier. The only evidence of visitors is a little horse and yak dung and scattered cairns. Moraines wind across the valley floor and sides, and a large patch of aufeis lies above the upper canyon. I have never been anywhere more beautiful or remote.

John W. had climbed a nearby peak a few days ago. We somewhat hurriedly left base camp at 2225 m at 9 a.m., six of us crammed into a Russian jeep, enduring an hour of rocks and ruts, hill and stream crossings. The jeep was “parked” on the northeast side of a valley with a small stream and lots of patterned ground, with gers, Mongolians, sheep, goats and camels down valley above a canyon. We walked southwest across the broad valley, hopping on rocks, walking on grass and wild flowers, jumping over tiny weeks and beginning the ascent at about 2850m.

The northeast side of Cirque Mountain (as Clare names this peak), is a huge pile of bedrock and frost-shattered boulders undergoing landslides and solifluction. Patches of grass near the base become few and far between—there are stable stepping places. They are replaced by smaller patches of moss on thin soil as one ascends; but the upper 500 m of these mountains in the Kharkhiraa Range has only lichens for plants. The only animals we saw were occasional spiders and raven-like birds.

I ascended the way Clare did a few days ago when she reached perhaps 3200 m. It surprised me that I could more or less keep pace with Nick from Carleton College, Martin from Whitman College, Laura from Princeton University and Moyo from Mongolian University of Science and Technology. Franco from Switzerland was way ahead of us much of the day even though he made side trips for photography. The ascent involves finding rocks that won’t move on a giant unconsolidated staircase; small rocks that slip down under a boot cost energy that shouldn’t be wasted.

To the southeast is a large cirque with a shrinking beheaded glacier that is the main source of the stream in the valley below. Most of last winter’s snow is gone, the surface replaced with dust from spring storms. Higher up the ridge we go, eventually seeing the huge glacial trough to our northwest. The head of this deep valley is full of glaciers and moraines: hanging glaciers, cirque glaciers, valley glaciers with lateral and medial moraines. Just down valley from this beautiful ice is a gigantic ice-cored terminal moraine that behaves like a rock glacier. The melt water from the glacier complex disappears under the “rock glacier” and reappears near its snout, flowing down valley under aufeis, between many lateral moraines, and through two canyons before reaching the Kharkhiraa River to our north.

The summit of Cirque Mountain is a nearly flat block field about the size of Whitman’s Ankeny Field. To the south is a giant glacier wasting away, but still feeding ice to the southeast glacier in the valley where Nick and Martin are doing their research. We gawked at and photographed the glacier-mountain complex in and above the valley almost a kilometer below us, then decided about where the high point of our small rocky plateau lay. There we built a cairn or ovoo of granitic boulders and at our lunch of mostly bread.

It was warm and almost windless; dark clouds were in all directions, but lightning never came. Mostly the sun shone on the rocks and glaciers. After an hour on the summit, we spent over five hours descending, by a different route. First we went south to the huge snow filed-glacier, and walked southeast near its margin, looking at the meltwater on and at the edge of the ice. Next we crossed the rock and snow between this glacier and the beheaded glacier in the cirque we planned to circumnavigate. Bayasaa and five other Mongolians had driven up to the high valley shortly after us; they had climbed to the snout of the beheaded glacier for lunch.

Our next stop was the top of a huge northeast-facing empty cirque. By empty I mean no more glacier, only small moraines from the Little Ice Age. Then we slowly descended the ridge between the two cirques—slowly because of the very long slope of unstable rocks. Such descents are very tough on knees—particularly old knees. We crossed mafic dikes cutting the pink “granite”, and many mass-wasting features. It was quite a relief to get off this steep loose rock.

The stream issuing from the beheaded glacier cascades over boulder hundreds of meters down from the ice to the valley floor where we started. On either side of this torrent are grass patches and lines of frost moved stones. We took off our boots, washed our feet in the near-freezing water, and lay in the grass, waiting for Bayasaa and company to return from the cirque with the beheaded glacier. Then we all crossed the valley floor to the four-wheel-drive vehicles. Many nomadic Mongolians left the high valley that day, with gers and other belongings on a truck and a camel caravan. They drove their sheep and goats to lower pastures; winter comes early in Mongolia. The only traces of their summer home were two skulls— one camel and one human.

The program's Web site is:
http://keck.carleton.edu/program/mongolia.html

You can find out more about the Keck Consortium by visiting:
http://keck.carleton.edu