Reserve eleven nights in Altai Tavan Bogd, Mongolia

To reserve eleven nights in Altai Tavan Bogd, Mongolia, three things have to be settled months ahead, and not one of them can be settled from a laptop in LA. A frontier permit is issued in a single town by a single authority. A vehicle has to survive about 190 kilometers of river gravel in each direction. The horses exist as a telephone number belonging to a man who spends his summer at 8,000 feet with no signal. Those three are what this office holds for you. The food, the tent, the pace and the decision to sit out a day because the river came up all stay in your hands.

The corner the trip works in is the one where Mongolia, Russia and China meet at one point. Five summits stand along that line, the highest of them at 14,350 feet, which is the top of the country. North of the ridge the Potanin glacier runs about fourteen kilometers down its own valley, and the water leaving the snout is the color of weak milk from the rock it has ground to powder. Everything you actually live on, the moraine, the pasture, the felt tents, the eagles on their blocks, sits between 8,000 and 10,000 feet.

The eleven nights come in three parts. Two long road days at each end. Four days with horses out of the roadhead where the track quits at the Tsagaan Gol. In the middle, however many days you choose to spend on the moraine watching the ice.

This is the far end of the ladder and it is not a thinner version of the other rungs. It buys different things. On the first rung somebody is beside the traveler every day, carries the language, cooks at seven and puts the tent up, and the figure reflects all of that. Here you are buying a piece of paper, a driver and six animals, and the days in the middle are unstaffed on purpose.

What no booking can do is make the province easier than it is. Olgii has two cash machines and both are in town. There is no shop after Tsagaannuur. The horseman's Kazakh and Mongolian will not meet your English halfway. That is the exchange you are making, and it is the reason the figure sits where it sits.

The road west of Olgii

Olgii stands at about 5,800 feet on the Khovd river. Most of the province is Kazakh, the market opens at eight and sells rope, felt, batteries and dried curd, and the pavement ends about forty minutes past the last houses. From there it is washboard and gravel bar for eight to eleven hours, depending entirely on the fords. The driver stops where the channel braids and walks into the water to read the depth before he takes the van through. In a dry week the crossings come up to the wheel hubs. After two days of rain they reach the door sills and he waits.

At Tsagaannuur a soldier at the frontier post copies the permit and the names into a book by hand, and that is the minute the paperwork either works or does not. It is also why your details are wanted early and why the dates will not move afterward. The permit names specific days, and a fresh one goes through the same office in Olgii from the beginning.

Beyond the post the road climbs onto open ground with no fence, no tree and no roof for sixty kilometers, then drops to the roadhead by the Tsagaan Gol at about 8,000 feet. The van goes no further. Whatever comes with you from that spot goes on a horse or on your back.

The permit, the driver and the horses

The frontier permit is filed weeks in advance by the Mongolian company that runs the valley, not by you and not at the boundary. Park entry is charged for each person for each day inside, and the ranger station by the confluence writes your name into its book as you pass. Those two pieces of paper are the whole reason a reservation exists on this rung. You could hire a van in the Olgii market in an afternoon. You cannot hire the permit.

The vehicle is a Russian built four wheel drive van, and the driver has been running that track from the age he could reach the pedals. His name and the plate go on the written itinerary you get before you leave home. Fuel is in the figure. So are his own meals and his own bed on the road, which is the line people forget and then argue about at the roadhead.

The horses are three to ride, one of those the horseman's own, and two to carry. They are small, thirteen hands or thereabouts, and they walk. Five to six hours out of the roadhead puts you on the moraine at roughly 9,600 feet. The horseman stays with the animals for the four days he is booked, then turns them around and goes home, and after that you are on foot with whatever you carried in.

Base camp, the glacier and Malchin

The camp is gravel, not grass, and nothing is built on it. A rise of six hundred feet behind it opens the full length of the glacier, and it repays the forty minutes at first light, when the ice is still gray blue and the floor of the valley is dark for another hour after the summits have gone gold. Western Mongolia runs an hour behind the capital, so around the middle of July you get roughly sixteen hours of light and you eat supper in it.

Malchin, at 13,290 feet, is walked rather than climbed, up scree from a col, and its summit ridge is the boundary itself, so you stand on the one side of it and look across. Above the icefall the glacier is crevassed and that is roped work with equipment and with somebody who reads ice. None of it is held here. If you want it, it is hired in Olgii before you drive out, and it sits in the excluded list with a daily range so the number does not arrive as a surprise.

The herder camps are the other half of the eleven nights. Families are up the valley from June to the first week of September. Milk tea comes with salt in it, dried curd comes with everything, and the correct answer to both is yes.

The season in the upper Tsagaan Gol

The valley is workable for about four months and the edges of that window move a fortnight either way from one year to the next. The month you pick decides the ford, the grass, and whether the horseman is even in the valley to be booked.

Pricing the exact days you name runs two to four working days from here, because the permit lead time and the horseman's own calendar come back separately and one of them comes back by telephone. Ask for that before you hold anything else in your month.

The Pine Gazette owns no aircraft, no rooms, no vessel, no vehicle and no animal. What it holds is a reservation with the Mongolian company that runs the valley, and that company invoices you itself, on its own paperwork and in its own currency. Nothing is paid to this office at any stage, and this office takes no money of any kind. Getting yourself to the country is your own arrangement, and no flight of any kind is booked here; the itinerary starts when the van pulls out of Olgii and ends when it pulls back in.

Pine Gazette Bookings LLC works out of 2450 Severn Avenue, Suite 312, Metairie, LA 70001, and books for people in New Orleans, across Louisiana and a long way past it. Reach a person on +1 (504) 832-6194, or send your dates and the number of people to bookings@thepinegazette.com. If a distance, a height or a number here has aged out of date, send it to corrections@thepinegazette.com and it will be corrected.