Volume 5: Through the Eyes of the Snow Leopard
After years of careful planning and preparation, the first in a long list of eager travelers embarked on a private version of Quest for the Snow Leopard, an exciting Mongolia tour set in the most remote section of the Altai Mountains.
We asked Joseph Rohde, plein air painter and executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, to share some of his personal journal entries on his exclusive Mongolia tour to paint the rarely-seen ‘ghost cat.’ In a bid to conserve the habitat and the species, Rohde has sold the paintings entirely for fundraising, and exhibited the remaining paintings for sale in Ojai, California on May 17th.
Joseph Rohde shares personal journal excerpts of his Mongolia tour to paint the snow leopard for the conservation of the species.
We had to strap the wet paintings over the backs of our camels so that they would dry as we marched through the day. We have three camels now, having picked another one up at the last Kazakh gers. As we headed out after our lovely stay with our Kazakh hosts, Jim pointed down towards the next valley and said, “Well, at least we’ll have WiFi.”
Nothing would surprise me, so I thought nothing of it as we rode along until I looked up and realized what he was referring to. The larch forest on the slope of the mountain in front of us was eroded into a gigantic shape that said WIFI.
Well, there was no WiFi, but it is a lovely valley with a couple friendly families just getting ready to head out towards their winter pastures. Our path took us past old Kazakh cemeteries and many, many older tombs and standing stones, balbal, khirigsuur, and deer stones.
One area was defined by a very long double row of stones laid out to form an avenue that led up to a grave with a big carved warrior. Some of these stones are really tall, twelve feet or so, but most are not waist high. Beyond this area we found our campsite. Very rocky up above, and it looks like snow leopard habitat.
Today as we left camp we found snow leopard prints. Followed the prints up to the lair. As we left for the long ride to Lake Khoton, we rose out of the WiFi valley towards the pass, snow all around. To our right we suddenly came upon snow leopard prints in the snow, leading upwards into a craggy outcropping to our right.
Where the Wild Things Were: Ojai Quarterly expedition feature [read]
Since there is no record of snow leopards ever killing anyone, we decided to just dismount and follow the prints, which were pretty fresh, clearly laid down that morning. We hiked up in knee-high snow trying to parallel the path of the leopard as we went, until we started coming upon these areas that were more or less “roosts” where the leopard or leopards had rested or sat.
I sat in one roost, right next to where the leopard had sat and sketched the view that the leopard must have seen. It’s very clear how these spots are chosen because they seem to always have two views. This whole outcropping of rocks was clearly used to survey the valley below us, the pass itself and the valley beyond the pass.
After that, we remounted to cross the pass and head towards Khoton, passing one more set of tracks that led off to the east. Then, what a slog!! As we crossed the pass, before us was a huge seemingly endless plain of ice and snow bordered on east and west by snow-covered hills and mountains.
Far in front of us were the mountains on the far side of Lake Khoton. What we could not see from there was that the first huge plain, dropped off about in a steep glacial moraine and was hiding a second plain just as big, which hid a third long rocky slope. Camels and horses traveled together through most of this. It really looked like Antarctica or Greenland.
Now we’re encamped along the edge of Lake Khoton, which looks like Lake Tahoe in about 1840. Lost our camels for a while, which was nerve wracking, but Dalaikhan rode off and found them. Planning a couple paintings for tomorrow.
Lake Khoton is quite beautiful. Sort of surreal, seeing camels juxtaposed against a huge pristine body of water. We are camped under a huge craggy larch tree that I am painting. I’m also doing a painting of the snow leopard view from the sketch I made. Weather is suddenly very nice; shirtsleeve weather. Sunny, warm and comfortable.
We are taking showers in our shower tent, which is also very nice; water’s in a reutilized fire extinguisher, so actually good pressure. Dalaikhan is dismissing the third camel now, since from here on out there are no high passes to make them freak out and quit.
Our two camels should be able to do it.
The Mongolia Tour: More Information
This concludes Joe Rohde’s Mongolian tour series. For more information on Rohde’s incredible travels and his quest for the snow leopard, tune in to his personal blog or his Facebook page.
Volume 4: Nomadic Hospitality
After years of careful planning and preparation, the first in a long list of eager travelers embarked on a private version of Quest for the Snow Leopard, an exciting Mongolia tour set in the most remote section of the Altai Mountains.
We asked Joseph Rohde, plein air painter and executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, to share some of his personal journal entries on his exclusive Mongolia tour to paint the rarely-seen ‘ghost cat.’ In a bid to conserve the habitat and the species, Rohde has sold the paintings entirely for fundraising, exhibiting the remaining paintings for sale in Ojai, California on May 17th.
Joseph Rohde shares personal journal excerpts of his Mongolia tour to paint the snow leopard for the conservation of the species.
Hospitality: Mongolia is mostly empty. We are traveling through mountains and valleys that are miles long, across thousands and thousands of acres of space. Every so often we will come across a few gers (yurts), or one of the very southwestern-looking flat-roofed Kazakh ranch buildings. Like…maybe five to ten in a twenty-mile day.
That’s a very small number of people in a very large area. You would think this might lead to a culture of isolation and extreme individualism, but actually it all seems very communal. You basically don’t need an invitation to just walk into somebody’s yurt. You have to be polite, say hello, sain bainuu and all that, but it is a bit as if the first quadrant of the ger is public space.
We were traveling over a high pass when a very very cold system began to blow in from the further western mountains along the Chinese and Russian borders. Camels quit. Horses ran off. We really needed to hunker down somewhere…so Baagi points down the valley to these three little Tic-tacs, which turn out to be gers in a meadow, and says, “We’ll go there.”
Down we ride and pretty much barge into this nice Kazakh lady’s yurt. She is sewing on a hand-cranked sewing machine by the light of the smoke hole above and the fire in her stove. She looks up as we enter: me, a white guy in a Mongolian robe with huge ethnic earrings dangling from my left ear; Jim, another white guy with a huge video camera; and Baagi, who is a big guy, Mongolian, whom she has never seen before in her life.
You can bet she’s never seen a crew like the three of us together. She is completely unfazed, more or less automatically reaching over to put some tea out, some biscuits and some cheese, and goes back to sewing, having the most perfunctory of conversations with Baagi now and then.
Where the Wild Things Were: Ojai Quarterly expedition feature [read]
We sip her yak butter tea and eat her shortbread-ish biscuits and fry-bread doughnut thingies and gnaw on her cheese like we are old buddies. Then the dad comes in and gives us one of the other gers to be our private headquarters until the cold spell passes. “You cannot travel! You must not travel! My ger is yours!” (Actually his daughter-in-laws ger, and she didn’t get a vote.)
Imagine three total strangers walking into your kitchen, popping open the fridge and sitting down to a nice PB and J. Then imagine turning over a third of your house to them for some indeterminate period of time. That is hospitality.
It’s as if, despite the huge distances that divide each family, they are all part of one big family, and we are like friends of the family. I suppose without this practice nobody would survive out here. It’s one thing to be welcomed in as the temperature drops into the teens. What about when the temperature is forty below? That’s gotta feel real good.
In the end, we turned over some foodstuffs and some other collateral for the hospitality and I did a nice portrait sketch of the patriarch and his family in their ger, in return for a wonderful stay and the completely unforgettable experience of being welcomed, fed, and hosted in grand nomad fashion.
The Mongolia Tour: More Information
Stay tuned for the final follow up journal entry (tonight!) to Joe’s Mongolian tour! For more information on Rohde’s incredible travels and his quest for the snow leopard, tune in to his personal blog or his Facebook page.
Volume 3: Land of Blue Sky
After years of careful planning and preparation, the first in a long list of eager travelers embarked on a private version of Quest for the Snow Leopard, an exciting Mongolia tour set in the most remote section of the Altai Mountains.
We asked Joseph Rohde, plein air painter and executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, to share some of his personal journal entries on his exclusive Mongolia tour to paint the rarely-seen ‘ghost cat.’ In a bid to conserve the habitat and the species, Rohde has sold the paintings entirely for fundraising, exhibiting the remaining paintings for sale in Ojai, California on May 17th.
Joseph Rohde shares personal journal excerpts of his Mongolia tour to paint the snow leopard for the conservation of the species.
Rolled up the finished painting and hit the road. The horses and camels don’t necessarily walk along the same paths, so we sort of split up and travel in tandem a lot of the time. We, on horseback, are able to ride off into the hills looking for ancient mounds and deer stones, which we find everywhere.
The camels, loaded up with hundreds of pounds of supplies apiece, plod along paths that are more level and rise slowly. Even so, they can keep up with us in speed because they are so much bigger than the horses. Sometimes we see them a mile off, slogging along while we cowboy it up on the high slopes.
Great horses, too! Very compliant, very lively when needed, very easy to control. Love the Australian trail saddles which we, the foreigners, are on, but the local Kazakh and Mongolian saddles also look pretty comfortable, as they have these thick cushions on them. Baagi, our guide, is fantastic, very smart, very scholarly, but lots of fun – totally into our constant hunt for yet another ancient tomb or petroglyph.
One thing I really notice about Mongolia that is different from the Himalaya, where I have traveled a lot, is the scale. The Himalaya are tall and rugged, but the footprint of the space is small. Here, we travel in one day across an area that I would spend two weeks in if it were Nepal. Everything is huuuuuge! The landscape is really beautiful in a very stark and somber kind of way.
Where the Wild Things Were: Ojai Quarterly expedition feature [read]
It’s fall, of course, so there isn’t a lot of green except here and there around the streams and ponds. Mostly the grass and heather run from silver-golden to a series of reddish tones, sometimes very rust-red. Here and there are a few yellow flowers and bright red tundra-like tiny plants. The rocks of the surrounding mountains are sometimes almost purple. Skies, when clear, are brilliant blue.
Lots of birds of prey, eagles, buzzards, hawks, falcons, lammergiers. Ducks, geese, swans in the water. Getting used to seeing yaks and camels again, which I can’t get enough of because I just love the way they look. The camels make a very funky sound that is quite unexpected, sort of a puppy-kitten yelping sound. This is all the more weird because the camels are like the size of dinosaurs. Our horses saddles barely come up past the bellies of these giant hairy creatures, made doubly tall by all the stuff piled up on them.
Another thing about Mongolia: the land seems very stable, unchanging. I am told that many of the glacial moraines we see are not from the “recent” Ice Age that ended 10,000 years ago, but from some other much more ancient Ice Age before that.
The graves and stone monuments that were raised up as much a five thousand years ago are just sitting there as if they were put up, maybe in your grandpa’s time. If some ancient nomad picked up a stone the size of a cantaloupe and moved it to help form a circle in the grass, and did that when Homer was writing the Illiad, or when the Egyptians were raising up the pyramids, that stone is sitting right there where he put it.
The Mongolia Tour: More Information
Stay tuned for the 2 follow up journal entries to Joe’s Mongolia tour! For more information on Rohde’s incredible travels and his quest for the snow leopard, tune in to his personal blog or his Facebook page.
Volume 2: The Mongolian Altai
After years of careful planning and preparation, the first in a long list of eager travelers embarked on a private version of Quest for the Snow Leopard, an exciting Mongolia tour set in the most remote section of the Altai Mountains.
We asked Joseph Rohde, plein air painter, and executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, to share some of his personal journal entries on his exclusive Mongolia tour to paint the rarely-seen ‘ghost cat.’ In a bid to conserve the habitat and the species, Rohde has sold the paintings entirely for fundraising, exhibiting the remaining paintings for sale in Ojai, California on May 17th.
Joseph Rohde shares personal journal excerpts of his Mongolia tour to paint the snow leopard for the conservation of the species.
Big snow.
Woke up this morning and thought it was fog, it was so thick. Painting anyway though. We set up the easels in the snowstorm and I had to change my plans from painting Shiveet Khairkhan, which was great looking yesterday and is now covered in snow clouds. Painted instead this other mountain, which our Tuvan friend had discussed last night in his legends.
The morning was pretty snowy and windy, so painting was difficult, to say the least, but as the afternoon came on the snowstorm broke up and it was really very nice. We kept up the rhythm of painting by pulling the canvas in and out of the tent to dry, using the heat from the traditional metal stove, which is stoked with yak dung.
Of course, snow melts and becomes water, so the canvas would become too wet to continue, but by moving in and out of the very warm and comfy dining tent, we were able to get a rhythm going and complete the work.
In the late afternoon, after working, we all rode up to the higher slopes of Shiveet Khairkan, where there are just hundreds and hundreds of ancient petroglyphs carved into the rock on the smooth faces that were long ago polished by ancient glaciers. Interesting and beautiful, some of the petroglyphs represent animals that are extinct – like aurochs. It’s a bit like walking past the Lascaux cave paintings, only outdoors.
Where the Wild Things Were: Ojai Quarterly expedition feature [read]
The Altai Mountains are pregnant with history. The Scythians were not the first to leave evidence of their tenure in the icy valleys. Throughout the area, we are traveling through lie vast petroglyph monuments with engravings that include mammoths and aurochs, creatures of the Ice Age.
Other petroglyphs depict the arrival of the mounted Scythians. Carved stone warriors stand-alone, guarding the empty steppe, memorials to Turkic chieftains of the era of the Huns. Above the plains rise tall, flat megaliths called deer stones inscribed with the elegant silhouettes of flying deer and griffons in a style reminiscent of the tattoos on the frozen nomads below.
Geometric Kazakh cemeteries, less ancient, but no less imposing, continue the ancient patterns of commemoration in stone. Witness to all their comings and goings were the snow leopards, one common color with the rocky hills and cliffs, who, more than the stones and the carvings on the stones, are part of the land, something fluid moving in the rocky stillness.
The Mongolia Tour: More Information
Stay tuned for the 3 follow up journal entries to Joe’s Mongolia tour! For more information on Rohde’s incredible travels and his quest for the snow leopard, tune in to his personal blog or his Facebook page.
Volume 1: The Sacred Mountain
After years of careful planning and preparation, the first in a long list of eager travelers embarked on a private version of Quest for the Snow Leopard, an exciting Mongolia tour set in the most remote section of the Altai Mountains.
We asked Joseph Rohde, plein air painter and executive at Walt Disney Imagineering, to share some of his personal journal entries on his exclusive Mongolia tour to paint the rarely-seen ‘ghost cat.’ In a bid to conserve the habitat and the species, Rohde has sold the paintings entirely for fundraising, exhibiting the remaining paintings for sale in Ojai, California on May 17th.
Joseph Rohde shares personal journal excerpts of his Mongolia tour to paint the snow leopard for the conservation of the species.
We landed in Olgii, a dusty border town whose suburbs are a mixture of flat-roofed adobe-style buildings and yurts, or gers, (the Mongolian word). After a brief lunch and visit with a local Kazakh family who happen to be teachers, as I once was, we caravanned off across the landscape towards Tsengel.
The land is very reminiscent of the wide-open semi-deserts that separate Los Angeles from Las Vegas, but there is clearly way more water here than our southern deserts ever see, presumably from the melted snows of winter. Still, it all seems familiar until one comes across a Bactrian camel, an ancient khirigsuur burial monument, or a white ger…and then, all of a sudden, it’s clearly Mongolia.
First night camp is just across a slow river from Tsengel. Something like poplar trees grow in the wet meadow between the town and us. Yaks and camels grazing. Hundreds of birds, swallows maybe, circling in the air above as sun sets.
Where the Wild Things Were: Ojai Quarterly expedition feature [read]
We gathered in our dining tent, which is quite warm, for a nice hearty meal and off to sleep. Baatar (Baagi), our guide, handed out Mongolian robes, deels, to Jim and I, saving one for Lane. They’re very warm, like wearing a packing blanket. Love sleeping in the cold, so I’m in heaven.
Our camp below Shiveet Khairkhan, the local sacred mountain, is backed up against this big glacial till. Cars are gone. Camels arrived along with Dalaikhan the camel guy and his nephew. Long shadows cast by the big mountain and other peaks as the sun sets…beautiful light.
The moon is full and huge as it rises above the valley below us. It looks a bit like the weather may change. Snow falling high above us, tiny crystals all around us, but it is still clear and nice here. Long conversations in the dining tent with a local Tuvan guy who talks about snow leopards in local legends.
The Mongolia Tour: More Information
Stay tuned for the 4 follow up journal entries to Joe’s Mongolia tour! For more information on Rohde’s incredible travels and his quest for the snow leopard, tune in to his personal blog or his Facebook page.