First part of the last field session

The roadtrip to camp was rather eventful as we ended up in both thick fog and snowfall at the same time. We passed a severe traffic accident outside of UB, don’t think many passengers had survived it. The roads here are dangerous to travel. As we left the roads and started following the roadtracks south the fog got thicker, for a while everything was white – couldn’t tell where the sky ended and the ground began. With no visible tracks I have no idea how Miji found his way, had I been driving we would have ended up in Russia. Still, somehow we reached camp. We spent the first days getting the ger in order and sorting all trapping and capture gear. Once that was done we started hking around in the canyons looking for fresh snow leopard signs. We found hour old tracks from a leopard in a canyon nearby and a reasonable amount of scrapes and scent marks in the area. The trap area does not look super exciting but we should get a couple of cats at least. We finished building snares six days ago and now we have thirteen of them waiting for a cat. Since then not much has happened, we picked up Lasya’s collar day before yesterday. It had dropped on the exact date it was scheduled to, 18 moths after I deployed it. That is German precision for you.

 

The last days we have tried to get the vehicles in working condition. By changing parts between the two ATVs and the two bikes we now have one ATV and one motorbike that works. Miji and I was working on the motorbike for several hours. At a point we had most of the bike in pieces, including the fuel line and carburator. This is a big thing for me, I didn’t even know what a carburator was when I got here four years ago. Miji is good with engines and I have learned quite a bit about the bikes so together we managed to get the carburator to work again. I explained in my Mongolian “this-say-gas-now- (to)this” and so on.

 

Byron, my team mate, had a fever today so I set out for the first kill site searches on my own. The weather is pretty cold, Miji has piled up with a gigantic amount of different kind of fuel for his stove. He says that it will be the coldest winter in a long time. Not sure how he knows but so far he is correct. Anyways, after the first kill site, which was a rather big Argali male that Ariun had killed d killed it started snowing. I got to the second and third but on the way back from that the snow picked up rather dramatically. In the end I coulnd’t see more than 2-300 meters. Navigating your way out of the mountains is sort of dependent upon seeing the mountains, otherwise there is no way of telling where the valleys and passes are. It didn’t worry me too much, until I got back to the bike and it refused to start. I hadn’t fine-tuned the carburator and now it didn’t want to work in the cold. It was about 30 km to camp so no way that I would make it back on foot before it got dark. I was preparing mentally to spend the night in the mountains, wouldn’t be fun but couldn’t get worse than a few frostbites at the most. Though, at last the engine started. I guess Yamaha doesn’t joke when they write that only authorized dealers should work on the carburators… 

 

It’s difficult to ride in snow cause you don’t see the holes and rocks but a couple of hours later, after navigating a dirtbike through snow and snowdrifts I reached camp. Now even my hands have thawed out.

 

Tomorrow we will see if we have to dig the snares out and hopefully soon catch a cat. So far the score is -1 collar (Lasya’s dropped so we have one more in camp now then when we started) so we need to catch one to get back on zero.