Alone in the Gobi

We were all very happy that we had caught a female. Too bad this joy turned into misery after just two days when we didn’t get any fixes from her collar. Meg and I went back to Trap Area 3 and tried to pick the collar’s VHF signal. After a couple of hours we found the collar in a cave. It looked as if Suhder had wedged it between two rocks and pulled it over her head. There are so many items on the collars that they lose their round shape when tightened to fit a female, instead some “corners’ appear. I also gave her just a little room to grow in, in case she wasn’t fully grown yet. Apparently the collar wasn’t tight enough… Seems as if this female capturing business will be my nemesis.

I have been alone in camp for 17 days now, and it is another week until the summer crew arrives. I do not have too much to do until they come here. I still have Suhder’s collar but need a new piece of belt for it that I am expecting any day now. The summer crew is also bringing new collars. With little to do here, a total fiasco with the female and no one to talk to I resorted to the only solution – I spent two days in the ger watching sad movies and indulging in chocolate while talking to Friday.

Indulging might be saying too much, I ate the two bars that I had. That felt like indulging. And the movies weren’t really sad. To top it off, Miji slaughtered a goat and the damn cat abandoned me in hope to get some fresh goat meat. So much for comforting me…

For a long time I had no motivation, felt like I had to wait for the summer crew to do something. And I got tired once I sat down and relaxed. Well, a couple of days ago I decided to start building traps. I managed to build two the first day. Takes a long time to carry everything myself and do all the work alone. I also pitched my tent up at the top of Signal Mountain. It takes 45 minutes- an hour to walk up and down and I figured that it’s better to sleep there than to hike up every third hour during night. Believe it or not but I got hit by a storm the first night. It broke the poles to the tent, I tried to repair it but lost my balance in the wind several times and almost got blown over. In the end I had to tie down the tent and leave it to climb down to Base Camp.

The day after I got a mail saying that maybe just one collar will be finished before the summer crew leaves. No tent and maybe just two collars made me lose my motivation again. So I have closed the traps, I will be a wreck if I am to climb up and down that mountain all trough the nights for 10 days. And I don’t feel like it at the moment.

The good news is that I have started scouting next trap area (unless we move back to trap Suhder again, when we have new collars, don’t know yet). I am aiming for Superman, I think that I know where he/she is based on the three cameras that has taken pictures of him/her. And the fact that it seems as if Tsagaan is avoiding a part of the mountain range north of his home range (which would point towards Superman being a male). I have found quite a lot of scrapes and scent marks (urine on rock walls) and a few decent trap sites. Five-ten more days of work and I hope that I will have a plan for how to catch Superman.