Not surprisingly, I love maps. The ones for Mongolia are old Soviet ones and I wasn’t supposed to have them. I can’t remember why. We were studying them in a traditional ger tent at the road head to the Tavan Bogd, Mongolia’s highest mountains. Bad weather had delayed our departure from Ulan Bataar, forced us to make a stop on our second attempt and now put down too much snow for the camels.
I have used many forms of transport on adventure ski trips but never camels and certainly never camels in the snow. They turned out to be extremely impressive beasts of burden able to carry a quarter of a ton of kit which they dropped by the lateral moraine of the Potanin Glacier at 2900m. Our home for the next 10 days.
Mongolia is not an obvious place to ski. Lots of planning, organising and complex logistics are required. Summer mountaineers to the Tavan Bogd set up advanced base camp high on the ice to climb Nairamdal 4104m and Khuiten 4374m, the highest summit in Mongolia. However, the delight of skis with their speed and ease of travel on smooth, well-filled glaciers means we avoided this effort and discomfort, travelling daily from our base camp to summit and back.
The weather did not let up and neither did the winds. We got hammered, particularly poor Lucy in the ‘festival tent’. The highlight of the trip was Nairamdal, a special point on the surface of the globe, marking as it does the border of China, Mongolia and Russia. Kazakhstan was but a short distance away.
This was the first time I used a pocket digital camera rather than the Nikon FM2 that had accompanied me on my travels for years. May 2007. I’ve never been one for new kit or new technology – I like the boring old, tried and tested stuff. However of course I now have to admit that I was a bit slow on the uptake with digital photography!!