The Mobicom Uul: The Real Story of Orjan’s “holy” Mountain

This post starts on a spring day last year, as I was out on one of my many reconnaissance tours with the motorbike. I was following a bike trail towards the “badlands” as it turned up on a mountainside. It did look rather steep, but our Yamaha off-road bikes are a lot more powerful than the bikes that the herders use and so I thought that I would be fine. The trail got steeper and steeper and I came to realize that if I would stop, the bike and me would start going downhill, one way or the other. So I drove as fast as I could until I got to a small flatter area where I jammed the brakes, got off the bike and looked around. Quite far below me I could see what appeared to be the place where people got off their bikes and started walking.

This made me curious; it was a very well used trail – why did all these folks drive the bikes to that point and then climb this mountain? I followed the trail up to the top of the mountain where I found some piles of rocks.

At first I didn’t understand but then I realized that I must be on a religious spot. I know that Mongolians worshipped the Sky Father in the early days and 2009 was a very dry year – perhaps they came up here to perform some religious ceremony to make it rain.

Darn – I had just parked my motorbike on a holy mountain… I hurried down, lifted the bike around, got it down safely and hoped that no one had seen me.

I have never received an explanation of what that mountain is until a few weeks ago when Miji and I needed to talk to Bayara in Ulan Bator. We hopped in the car and Miji drove to the Mobicom Uul – which turned out to be my holy mountain. Mobicom is the largest cell phone operator in Mongolia and Uul means mountain in Mongolian.

So what I thought was a sacred mountain where the locals performed religious rites turned out to be something a lot less spectacular – the spot where you have a signal for your cell phone.

Welcome to 2010…

Orjan Recounts Putting Collar on Fluffy Female Snow Leopard

Finally, in a double sense, the last collar has been deployed. And the cat is a female.

It took 90 consecutive days to place GPS radio collars on five snow leopards and get all our collars out, and it wasn’t until the last one that the long-longed-for female appeared.

She weighed little less than 25 kg. I think that she is two years old and I’m guessing that she has had problems to find food after she left her mother. It had rained, and when I came up to her she looked like a fluffy fur-ball, all hairs standing up. Not even when they are wet do snow leopards smell like anything. But their coat gets even fluffier than normal when they have dried.

The cat doesn’t have a name yet, for now she is known as F2.

The temperature has changed a lot during the last days and spring has finally arrived (I’m hoping, maybe it is just fooling me and it will get cold again). Three days ago I took off my thermal underwear. I have worn them constantly since the 8th of February. Well, except for the brief moments that I’ve rinsed my body. Feels strange not to wear them, but very good. Hasn’t been any point in taking them off in night either before since I have to get up every third hour and it is still cold in the nights.

I finished investigating snow leopard hunting sites yesterday so for the next week I will try to classify ibex to get a better idea of the population structure. In a week Koustubh and Bayara will arrive in camp, and soon after that the camera trapping and occupancy surveys will start. In two weeks my brother and his wife will also come here. My brother has built a neat little system that we are going to test. I will describe it separately, provided that it works; otherwise, he can describe what it’s like to walk from camp to Ulan Bator…