| Ride Mongolia's Steppe |
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Page 1 of 4 One of the world’s last great grasslands is at the heart of Genghis Khan’s former empire—and his Mongolian descendants dream of keeping it that way  THE RUSSIAN HELICOPTER, a huge Mi-8 with a bee’s eye for a cockpit, climbs through the crisp Mongolian air, and Steve McCormick gazes out a porthole. Far below, the slabby buildings of Ulan Bator nestle beneath the 10,000-foot Khan Khentii mountains, a sacred range that cradles the city in a verdant palm. The concrete apartments and crumbling roads eventually bleed into pastures. In between, there’s a sprawling suburb of traditional felt tents (called gers), where nomads cling to a specious modernity.The grass is precisely the reason McCormick is here. As the president of the Nature Conservancy, McCormick, 56, has spent the past seven years pushing the nonprofit onto a global stage with an ambitious project to conserve 10 percent of the world’s major habitat types by 2015. Grasslands—unlike rainforests—are sorely lacking attention, and McCormick, who has since left the Nature Conservancy, maintains that Mongolia holds “the last of the least and the best of the rest” of the world’s temperate prairies. “They’re absolutely pristine,” he says, “so the opportunities are enormous.” The helicopter climbs over green, hummocky ridges, and in the distance a razor-thin horizon wheezes under an enormous sky. This is the start of the eastern Steppe, a downy carpet of crested wheat and rustling sage that sprouts from rootstock 15,000 years old. A vast medieval empire grew from these plains, which stretch east for more than 1,000 miles. Today, the steppe is the world’s largest intact grassland; virtually none of it has ever been tilled or fenced. For years Mongolia was an undeveloped Soviet satellite, but with the collapse of Communism, it is now open for business. The result isn’t pretty, with overgrazing, desertification, and mining and oil exploration all threatening the steppe. Centuries ago, swaths of grasslands as large as 575,000 square miles were unbroken by farms or fences; today it’s hard to find pristine patches bigger than 100,000 contiguous square miles. Nomads are caught in the middle, abandoning their herds for the city. “Mongolians are deeply proud of their heritage,” says Chris Pague, a Nature Conservancy senior conservation ecologist on the trip. “They want to keep nomads doing what nomads do.”  ACCESS Most flights from the U.S. to Mongolia (which start around $1,500) pass through Beijing or Seoul. If you’re transferring through Beijing, you’ll need a double-entry Chinese visa—even if you never leave the airport. Companies like Travel Document Systems (Read more... “Mongolia has the type of untouched nature that we yearn for in the West,” McCormick says. “The question now is, Will they learn from our mistakes?” The Mi-8 descends over a grassy knoll studded with granite crags. Through my porthole, I see the faint white dots of a ger camp among the willows. Beyond that, I see the most beautiful kind of nothing. ISOLATION IS A BIG PART OF MONGOLIA’S APPEAL, and the country’s popularity is exploding among adventure travelers, who are virtually the only travelers here. Only 137,000 visitors came to the country in 2000; by 2006 that figure had nearly tripled. “On a world scale, that’s not very big,” says Badral Yondon, of Nomadic Expeditions, the country’s premier outfitter. Indeed, Mongolia sees about as many visitors in a year as Disney World’s Magic Kingdom does in a week. |
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