Altai Team Rod Mercer/Tina Nef

Ed Nef, Tina’s father, has an office in Ulaan Baatar (UB), the capital city, and travels to the area regularly. When he encountered the president of the Mongolian Alpine Association, he suggested putting him in touch with us for a possible visit to the area. So it was that a half dozen Seattle Mountaineers, mostly intermediate students and a few non-Mountaineers climbers, set off to the other side of the world.

Mongolia has been politically independent of Russia since 1990, after being under Soviet domination since 1921. With independence, travel to the country has become less restrictive, but the heavily subsidized economy and infrastructure has deteriorated, leaving the country more isolated, but still accessible by aircraft and railway from Moscow and Beijing.

The majority of the climbing in Mongolia is centered in the Altai region which spans western Mongolia and parts of Russia, China and Kazahkstan and contains many 4,000+ meter glaciated peaks, but access to most of them is difficult.

	Altai Mtns Rod Mercer/Tina Nef

We planned to visit a subset of the Altai, the Taban Bogdo Range (the “Mountains of the Five Gods”) on the Mongolian-Russian-Chinese border. The majority of the peaks in this range were climbed by joint Mongo-Eastern bloc countries in the 60s and 70s; however unclimbed routes, primarily ice climbs, still exist on many of them. Finding trip reports proved problematic as none of us speak Polish or Russian. We researched as much material as was available for such a remote area and found a couple of trip reports by previous expeditions in the American Alpine Journal in addition to the unreadable Polish summaries. The UW cartography library provided us with Russian topographic maps of the area.

Arranging a trip of this kind is difficult without the help of people who live there. The Mongolian Alpine Association turned out to be no help. Midway through our planning, they doubled the price for providing hired services. Friends in the Peace Corps came to our rescue by connecting us with a group of enterprising Mongolians who were in the business of providing herders, translators, cooks and guides for groups like ours. In retrospect, we might have made minor changes, but for the most part, it worked out well.

	Mongolian Locals Rod Mercer/Tina Nef

So. in June of last year we all trickled into the country for our 3 week adventure in ones and twos by a variety of different routes: via Moscow on the Trans-Siberian Railway; via Tokyo and a night in Beijing; and via Seoul. We planned our trip for June and July, two months of the warmest, most pleasant part of the year. With continental weather patterns, mornings were always sunny and early evenings were always cloudy with frequent thunderstorms. Temperatures were comfortable even at the high altitudes. Happily, we didn’t have to experience the harsh Mongolian winter.

Getting from UB to our climbing base camp involved flying in a prop-driven Russian Andropov 25 which needed to make fuel stops along the way, bouncing around in Russian 4WD vans, riding Mongolian horses and hiking. We finally arrived in base camp 2 days later in a brief snowstorm.

The intent for the duration of our trip was to climb the highest and third highest peaks (Mt. Huiten and Tsengle Khairhaan respectively), and trek for 10 days across the Altai mountain range to a place where the vans would meet us, experiencing Mongolian culture along the way.

	Altai Mountains Rod Mercer/Tina Nef

Since most of the climbing that had been done by the previous parties involved alpine ice climbing over the course of several weeks, we debated what to bring. We had less than a week to do our climbing and had a party of varying degrees of confidence to negotiate steep ice. In the end we decided to leave ice tools and all but a couple of ice screws at home. We took gear for a basic glacier climb and a small rack of rock pro. As it turned out, rock pro wasn’t necessary as almost all non-glaciated Mongolian mountains are large piles of choss (which is why we could only find ice climbing beta).

Base camp for Mt. Huiten was comfortably located in alpine meadows beside a large moraine. The first part of the climb, from base camp to high camp, meandered up a huge ice flow peppered with hidden crevasses. Several of us disappeared up to our armpits more than once. A large pile of broken rocks in the middle of the glacier served as high camp for the night at 12,000 ft. The following morning, following a 3:30 am alpine start, we began our push to the summit, navigating as best we could through an unknown glacier, with marginal topo maps to assist us. Around sunrise we finished with most of the crevasse-filled glacier and began a steeper ascent up the north flank (40 degrees of unexposed steep snow with a few icier spots). We topped out on the NE shoulder and headed southwest to get to the summit located on the Mongolian/Chinese border (4374 m).

The weather was superb and summit views spectacular. Looking out towards completely uninhabited mountainous terrain, we enjoyed views of the very remote peaks in Russia, China, Kazahkstan as well as the green plains of Siberia.

The plan was to return to high camp and on the following day attempt Friendship Peak (Taban Bogdo Ola, 4104 m) which marks where the borders of Mongolia, Russia and China converge. Rain, snow, and accompanying limited visibility moved in, however, so we found it challenging enough just to negotiate our way back down the glacier to base camp. The glacier climbing we did was excellent though. The approach was such that there was ample time to acclimate to the altitude. While Huiten has an elevation close to Rainier, the climb felt more like an ascent of Mt. Baker.

Subsequent days of trekking through the Altai range were similarly gorgeous as we settled into a relaxed pattern of putting the miles behind us while the Mongolians followed along on horses and camels. The meals produced more variety than the Mongolians are probably used to, but certainly less than is the norm for us. Meals were served in a variety of ways with one of several side dishes, but always included mutton.

At the end of the trek, we encountered the third highest peak, Tsengle Khairhaan, (4193 m) advertised to be “generally considered the most technical” in the Mongol Altai range. It turned out to be an arduous scramble up a broken pile of rocks to a peak with a small glacier on top; hardly technical and certainly not worth going out of one’s way for. In fact, several of our party turned around preferring to explore other features in the area.

We can highly recommend Mongolia for anyone looking to get off the beaten path. There is very little in the way of commercial services but the people were always friendly and constantly invited us into their gers (yurts) for tea or snacks. Small gifts for the family were good to have. Arranging support can be challenging and you can easily pay too much to foreign companies for their services. At the suggestion of our friends in the Peace Corps, we were able to use a local company directly: Blue Wolf Expeditions (www.mongoliaaltaiexpeditions.com). Their prices were reasonable and they hire locals for support.
The best we can say about Mongolia is that the land is without tourists!

A free slideshow of the trip will be presented at the Mountaineers clubhouse on March 10th at 7 pm.