The horse had no name, or rather it had a name I could not pronounce. My guide Darkhan said it twice, slowly, and I repeated it back to him both times in a way that made him look at the ground. After that we called the horse Khar — black, in Mongolian — which was at least accurate. He was a compact, barrel-chested animal with a neck like a tree stump and an opinion about everything. We did not always agree. Over forty days we reached an understanding.
Mongolia is the most sparsely populated country on earth: 3.3 million people spread across 1.5 million square kilometres, roughly the size of Western Europe. Outside Ulaanbaatar, the infrastructure thins rapidly. Roads become tracks. Tracks become suggestions. In the far west, in the Bayan-Olgii province where the Mongolian Altai meets the borders of Russia and China, you can ride for three days without seeing a paved surface or a building taller than a ger. This is where I went, and this is what I found.
I had arranged the trip through a Kazakh outfitter in Olgii, the provincial capital — a small, wind-scoured city of 30,000 people that functions as the gateway to the western steppe. Darkhan was twenty-six, spoke serviceable English acquired from a single year at a university in Ulaanbaatar, and had been riding horses since he was three. He regarded my riding ability — which I had described as intermediate, generously — with the patient scepticism of a man who has seen many tourists overestimate themselves. He was right to be sceptical.
The first week was about learning to sit. Not to ride — riding implies control, a negotiation between horse and rider in which the rider has meaningful input. What I was doing in the first days was sitting on a moving animal and trying not to fall off. The Mongolian steppe is not flat. It rolls and folds in long, slow waves, the grass short and tough, the ground underneath harder than it looks. I fell off twice in the first three days. Darkhan helped me up both times without comment.
We were heading for Tavan Bogd — the Five Saints — a massif of five peaks on the border with Russia and China, the highest point in Mongolia at 4,374 metres. The approach takes four days on horseback from Olgii, crossing two river fords and a high pass at 3,200 metres. The landscape changes as you climb: the steppe gives way to alpine meadow, the meadow to scree and snow, the sky getting bigger and bluer with every hour of altitude gained.
We slept in Darkhan's family ger on the first night — a circular felt tent pitched in a hollow out of the wind, the interior warm from a small iron stove burning dried dung. His mother fed us suutei tsai, the salty milk tea that is the staple drink of the Mongolian steppe, and a bowl of tsuivan — hand-pulled noodles with mutton — that was the best thing I had eaten in months. I slept on a narrow bed along the ger wall and woke to the sound of horses outside and a sky full of stars through the smoke hole above the stove.
Cultural Note
Entering a ger: always step over the threshold with your right foot, never stand on it. Move clockwise around the interior. Accept any food or drink offered with both hands or with your right hand supported at the elbow. Refusing hospitality is considered rude; accepting it, even symbolically, is a mark of respect. If you are given airag — fermented mare's milk — take a sip even if you do not enjoy it.
The Tavan Bogd massif is where the glaciers are. Three of them descend from the main peaks — the Potanin, the Alexander, and the Grane — and from the high camp at 3,600 metres you can see all three at once, a panorama of ice and rock that extends for thirty kilometres. The border with Russia runs along the main ridge. On clear days you can see into Siberia.
We left the horses at the lower camp and walked to the glacier snout on foot. The Potanin Glacier is retreating — visibly, measurably, the moraines it has left behind marking its former extent like a tide line. Darkhan told me his grandfather had described the glacier reaching a point a kilometre further down the valley. That was sixty years ago. The ice has pulled back significantly since then, and the rate of retreat has accelerated in the last decade.
We spent two nights at the high camp. The temperature dropped to -8 °C both nights. I had a four-season sleeping bag and was still cold. Darkhan slept in what appeared to be a medium-weight fleece and seemed comfortable. I asked him about this. He said Mongolians do not feel the cold the same way. I am not sure this is physiologically accurate but I lacked the energy to argue.
You can ride for three days without seeing a paved surface or a building taller than a ger. This is where I went, and this is what I found.
The Kazakh eagle hunters of Bayan-Olgii are among the last practitioners of berkutchi — the ancient art of hunting with golden eagles. There are perhaps 250 active hunters remaining, almost all of them in this corner of western Mongolia, and the tradition is under pressure: the young men are moving to Olgii and Ulaanbaatar, the eagles are expensive to keep, and the fox and rabbit populations that the birds hunt have declined. What remains is extraordinary.
Darkhan had arranged for us to spend five days with a hunter named Bakhytzhan, a man of about sixty with a face like weathered leather and hands that could have been carved from the same rock as the mountains behind his ger. His eagle was a female — females are preferred, being larger and more powerful — seven years old, with a wingspan of just over two metres. She sat on a wooden perch outside the ger and regarded everything with the focused, unblinking attention of an animal that has been the apex predator in its environment for thirty million years.
The hunt begins before dawn. Bakhytzhan rose at 4am, fed the eagle a small piece of raw meat, and fitted her hood — a leather cap that covers her eyes and keeps her calm. We rode out in darkness, the horses picking their way up the mountain slope by instinct, the cold absolute and still. At the summit ridge, Bakhytzhan removed the hood. The eagle turned her head once, slowly, scanning the valley below. Then she was gone — a brown streak dropping at 150 kilometres an hour toward something I could not see.
She caught a fox. The whole sequence — from release to strike — took perhaps eight seconds. Bakhytzhan rode down the slope at a canter, whistling, and the eagle waited on her kill until he arrived. He rewarded her with meat from a pouch at his belt, stroked her chest feathers with one finger, and said something in Kazakh that Darkhan translated as: "Good girl. That is enough for today."
She was gone — a brown streak dropping at 150 kilometres an hour toward something I could not see. The whole sequence took perhaps eight seconds.
The return journey took three weeks. We rode south and east, away from the mountains and back into the open steppe, the landscape flattening and widening until the horizon was a perfect circle around us and the sky was everything. I had been on horseback for long enough that my body had adapted — the saddle soreness of the first week was gone, replaced by a kind of muscular ease, a sense of the horse's movement as continuous with my own. Khar and I had reached our understanding.
We stopped at three more family camps along the way. At each one the hospitality was the same: tea, food, a bed, conversation conducted through Darkhan's translation and a great deal of gesture. I learned a handful of Kazakh words — enough to greet people, to thank them, to say that the food was good. These words opened more doors than any amount of English.
On the thirty-eighth day we crossed a low ridge and Olgii appeared below us — the water tower, the mosque, the grid of Soviet-era apartment blocks that look incongruous against the steppe. I had been away long enough that the sight of a town felt strange, the density of buildings and people and noise a kind of assault after weeks of space and silence. Darkhan noticed my expression. He said: "You will miss it." He was right. I already did.
On the last morning I went to say goodbye to Khar. He was in a paddock behind Darkhan's family compound, eating hay with the focused indifference of a horse that has already moved on. I put my hand on his neck. He did not look up. This seemed right. We had never been sentimental with each other. I respected that about him.
Cultural Note
The Kazakh eagle hunting tradition — berkutchi — is recognised by UNESCO as an Intangible Cultural Heritage. If you visit eagle hunters, go through a reputable local outfitter who has established relationships with hunting families. Pay fairly, photograph respectfully (always ask first), and understand that you are a guest in a working household, not a tourist attraction. The Golden Eagle Festival in Olgii, held each October, is the most accessible way to see the tradition if a multi-week horseback journey is not feasible.
What the Steppe Teaches
There is a quality of attention that the steppe demands. In a landscape with no landmarks, no signposts, no features that distinguish one valley from the next, you learn to read the land differently — the angle of the light, the direction of the wind, the behaviour of the horses, the way the grass bends. Darkhan navigated by all of these things simultaneously, without apparent effort, the way a city person navigates by street signs. It is a form of intelligence that has no name in English but that you recognise immediately when you see it.
The nomadic life is not romantic in the way that outsiders imagine it. It is hard work: the gers must be dismantled and moved three or four times a year as the herds follow the grass. The animals must be tended in weather that ranges from -40 °C in winter to +35 °C in summer. The distances to schools, hospitals, and markets are enormous. The families I stayed with were not living this life because it was picturesque. They were living it because it was theirs, because their grandparents had lived it and their grandparents before them, and because the steppe is not a backdrop for their lives but the substance of it.
I think about Bakhytzhan's eagle often. The way she sat on the perch outside the ger, absolutely still, watching everything. The way she dropped from the ridge. The eight seconds. There are things in the world that are so precisely themselves — so completely what they are, without apology or performance — that being near them changes the scale of your own concerns. The eagle was one of those things. The steppe was another.
I have been back in London for four months. I still think in the rhythms of a horse's walk.
Tom Ashford
Contributing Writer
Tom Ashford is a writer and long-distance traveller based in London. He has travelled overland through Central Asia, the Caucasus, and sub-Saharan Africa, and writes about nomadic cultures, wilderness travel, and the experience of being genuinely lost. The Mongolia trip was his longest continuous journey on horseback. He is already planning the next one.
