How to get rid of tiredness and never ever trust that spring is coming

Two days ago Bo and I went with Miji to visit a family whose livestock had been raided by a snow leopard female with two cubs. The leopards had killed goats for three nights in a row in late February. All the tiredness that I wrote about last time disappeared when I heard this, the first sign of a female with cubs!!

Yesterday we checked our trap cameras, I got a little tired again when we discovered that we had three visits by Aztai but nothing else. We have decided to pull the traps from the current trap area to avoid catching Tsagaan again in the near future. This means that it will take a while before I can report on any new capture. I would like to get more collars out fast but it has to be done in an ethically correct way that we can defend for ourselves and others. In the end of the day it is better to have two collared cats and be proud of the captures than four collared cats and ashamed of what we did to collar them. 

Bo left with Miji to Dalandzadgad this morning. I wasn’t sure of what to do today but after a while I got too eager to check the area where the female with cubs are so I packed my bag and took off. We have had ten warm days with lots of sightings of migrating birds and insects. This morning was sunny and warm and I behaved like an amateur and drove on dirt tracks to a place 30 km away (as the bird flies) without proper equipment. When I was about two km from the mountain range I noticed that I couldn’t see them anymore. Couple of minutes later I was in the middle of a snow storm and couldn’t see much at all anymore. I always carry tools to repair the bike, water, some food, matches (don’t know what to build a fire of in the desert but still), a headlamp, and a thin down jacket in the backpack. What I didn’t bring was my gauntlets (big mittens with a windproof layer on the outside). My hands are my weak point when it’s cold. It didn’t take long for my gloves to get wet or for my hands to go numb. I turned towards base camp, there is a “road” going there and it is closer than our trap camp. 

Now, to make matters worse, the only maps we have are A4 printouts with contours of the topography. Each line represents a 10 meters difference in altitude so they are not very accurate. The mountains contain a lot of iron ore why our compasses don’t work too good. I usually navigate with the sun and my watch (which is fine, when you see the sun…) I do have a GPS but since our maps don’t have gridlines, I can only use it to find stored positions. 

I checked the GPS every time I stopped to get some blood back into my hands to be sure I was going in the right direction and eventually I got to Base Camp. To my disappointment, no one was there and I didn’t carry the keys to our ger. Well, nothing to do but drive to the trap camp, in the end I just hung on to the bike without shifting or changing the throttle much. My neighbor was herding livestock just by our camp when I got there and I invited him in to thaw out over a cup of tea. 

Tomorrow, I will pack more clothes and find that female…