This month's national park pick...

The Gobi Desert’s Gurvansaikhan is twice the size of Yellowstone

By Patrick Totty

In the old days of the Soviet Empire, Mongolia was a vassal state that served as a buffer between Siberia’s barely peopled expanses and the teeming millions of China. Both China and the former USSR were happy with that state of affairs, since the illusion of Mongolian independence served to defuse the tensions between the two giant states.

Now, in the post-Soviet era, Russia and China are happy to continue the charade, since the costs of a war over Asia’s vast interior spaces is something neither country wants to face right now. In the meantime, the Mongolians, despite knowing their country exists at the sufferance of two far more powerful nations, are busily enjoying the expanses of their semi-desert, high steppe landscape. Thanks to its small population – 2.7 million primarily nomadic people who live very light on a land that covers almost 600,000 square miles – Mongolia is one of the least disturbed ecologies in the world. Think of Wyoming, with its mountains and high desert plateau, blown up to six times bigger and you have Mongolia.

A significant part of Mongolia lies in the Gobi Desert, perhaps Asia’s most famous dry spot. The desert is the eastern terminus of the world’s greatest steppes, vast flatlands that begin at the Volga River in Russia and run 3,000 miles east into the heart of Asia. It is most famous for its dinosaur bones, a reputation that began in the 1920s when  the American Museum of Natural History mounted searches for fossils that are still the stuff of paleontological legend. Like Wyoming, and its neighbors, Utah and Montana, Mongolia is one of the great repositories – perhaps the greatest – of dinosaur bones on earth.

Under communist rule the Mongolians had set aside a small area of the Gobi, which lies near their southeastern border with China, as a natural preserve. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Mongolia shrugged off its stultified political and economic leadership and began looking for ways to interact with the global economy. 

One of its first moves was the vast expansion of the Gobi preserve in 1994 with the creation of Gurvansaikhan National Park. At 7,700 square miles (2 million hectares), the new park, more than twice the size of Yellowstone, covered an enormous expanse of mountains, steppes and desert. Gurvansaikhan, which means “Three Beauties of the Gobi,” takes it name from a trio of mountains that rise between 7,200 and 8,500 feet (2,000 to 2,600 meters) in the eastern Altai Mountains. 

The enormous scope of the park, which extends east to west more than 230 miles, protects 620 species of flowering plants, 240 species of birds, wild herds of gazelles, asses and bactrian camels, and such endangered species as the snow leopard and Siberian ibex. Precipitation ranges from two to eight inches (50 mm to 200 mm) annually. 

As with most dry landscapes, rain has produced dramatic erosional effects, such as the Yol Valley, a deep gorge that harbors a small glacier, and the Singing Sands, an area of dunes surrounded by colorful sandstone formations. The same rain began a paleontological gold rush that has never ended when it melted away overlying sediments to reveal huge beds of dinosaur fossils.

Gurvansaikhan is a very isolated place. The nearest town, Dalanzagad, is a settlement of 13,000 souls that lies more than 300 air miles south of the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator. Surrounded by emptiness, Dalanzagad and its nearby park are among the most distant places on earth. But as Mongolia grows its tourist services in earnest, travelers report that Dalanzagad offers reasonably comfortable accommodations, and a number of experienced tour operators have emerged to accommodate the growing number of travelers to the country.

Some useful URLs:

http://www.un-mongolia.mn/wildher/gobigrv.htm
http://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/expeditions/gobi/

– Patrick Totty