20250903 Wednesday, September 3, 2025 Gobi Petroglyphs and Fossils

20250903 Wednesday, September 3, 2025 Gobi Petroglyphs and Fossils

Breakfast was a slight modification from yesterday’s full American Breakfast fare with a Mongolian variant of eggs Benedict American style: fried egg, smoked salmon lox, and avocado on toast.  

About half of our group headed out in the trusty Lexus SUVs to a petroglyphs site about an hour’s drive from the Gobi Nomad Lodge.  We drove past a few gers with nearby herds of horses and goats, and as we got further from the lodge, the roads went from gravel to two-track, and then from two-track to no-track driving across the prairie by apparent dead reckoning for some time before crossing back into barely recognizable 2 tracks and into and across a few dry washes.  

These drivers are able to do all this navigating without the benefit of maps or satellite navigation.

The parking lot for the Khavtsgait Mountain Petroglyph site is a bit of a climb out of the valley and onto the mountain slope.  This is within the Gobi Gurvansaikhan National Park.

Most of the petroglyphs are scattered across the top of a ridge about 500’ elevation above the parking lot.  The climb up to the ridge was steep and the trail was irregular, rocky, and with some loose surfaces, requiring mindful foot placement and a walking stick to help stabilize you and compensate for any minor foot slips.  

The climb was strenuous, but Alma and her drivers made sure the pace was not too much for any of us, stopping about every 20’ of elevation for a short break and gathering up the group.

There were beautiful blue skies as far as the eye could see, and a light breeze was occasionally punctuated by gusts that could catch your hat as you rounded a corner.  There were small shrubs, grasses, and wildflowers clinging to the slopes.  The underlying geology was mostly fractured basalt and a black-surfaced hard sandstone with many larger chunks showing a characteristic dark and shiny rind, like what we had seen in the valley yesterday.  

As we approached the top of the ridge, we encountered the first petroglyphs, which were easily recognized as various animals.  As we climbed up onto the top of the ridge, which was marked by a stone cairn, there were petroglyphs all over the place. 

 

Many depicted not only animals but also human activity.  Alma said these vary in age, but most date back to 3000-2000 BC, during the Bronze Age.

It was a spectacular and breathtaking setting for the petroglyphs.  While it was a bit of a stairmaster workout to get up to the top, it was an entirely worthwhile adventure.

While the hike back down the steep slope was much easier on the cardio, it was harder on the knees, and potentially more hazardous because of the loose substrate underfoot conspiring with gravity.  Nobody actually fell, but there were a couple of close calls.  Alma and the drivers were very good about making sure nobody fell during the steep descent.

The drive back to the Gobi Nomad Lodge seemed to take less time than the trip out, but maybe it was because most of us probably napped a bit as the drivers did all the hard work.  The Lexus SUVs really soften what could have been a very harsh trip in a Jeep.

Lunch was a fixed menu starting with a creamed broccoli soup followed by Mongolian dumplings.  Two were filled with ground meat and two were filled with vegetables including some pickled vegetables.  These were served with a Cole slaw and edamame.  

We had a bit of nap time after lunch and then had a lecture by local Mongolian paleontologist who had a basic grasp of English, but Alma was able to elaborate on his explanations with great detail.  She has either seen this presentation many times, or may be a closet amateur paleontologist.  

The most famous fossil from the Flaming Cliffs site was remarkably a pair of dinosaurs locked in a life or death struggle.  It was an upright protoceratops pinning down a velociraptor on its side.  It’s hard to imagine the circumstances under which both creatures would be instaneously buried alive by sand, but then again, it is hard to imagine what really happened during the extinction level cataclysmic meteor impact.  Perhaps a shock wave instantly killed anything in its path, or a tsunami of sand driven by the shock wave did the job.  

We watched a black and white news reel describing the expedition into Mongolia that discovered the dinosaur fossil bed and the first intact dinosaur egg fossils containing fossilized embryonic dinosaurs. The expedition was inspired by the discovery of Peking Man, and they were hoping to find evidence of the origins of the human species somewhere in Central Asia.  The expedition initially looked like it was going to be a failure because they did not find any early human remains, but when an assistant stumbled on a dinosaur nest with fossilized eggs in it, the expedition’s fate turned for the better.  It made Roy Chapman Andrews a very famous American paleontologist.  

Our Lexus steads whisked us across the Mongolian plains again.  It seems like everything is and hour’s driving time from the Gobi Nomad Lodge.  We drove past a couple other apparent tourist lodges of very similar construct, as well as other working gers with herds of horses, goats and even a few cows along the way.  It is quite apparent that in the plains of Mongolia, roads are a general suggestion and not something you find on a map.  In some places, there are as many as 5 or six parallel two tracks going in the same direction.  We have only rarely encountered other traffic, but when oncoming vehicles meet, a game of chicken ensues and one vehicle or the other has to switch to an alternate track, or go cross country.  

We did end up going cross country in a few places, including some where the plain had been replaced by rock gardens with fist to grapefruit sized sharp rocks everywhere.  It was a wonder none of our vehicles ended up with a flat tire.  These vehicles must have 12 ply tires.  

When we arrived at the Flaming Cliffs park, there was an entrance gate that we had to pass through.  There is a very hard to miss sculpture of a Camel Caravan stretching across the horizon, commemorating the importance of these Camel Caravans in the establishment of trade between China and the West.  Most of the tea from China was transported via Camels, along with silk and other goods for trade.

It was a very short drive to a promontory overlooking the Flaming Cliffs.  These are bright orange in color due to the iron content in the soils.  They are very much like the Badlands of South Dakota, or Bryce Canyon, but a very different color.  Erosion has caused all of these geological sites to take on the similar gross morphologies.  But what makes the Flaming Cliffs unique are the dinosaur fossils that lay on the plain below the cliff faces.  These have eroded or tumbled out of these cliffs over the millennia.  

Our drivers took us down to the plain below the cliffs where our local paleontologist met us.  He had gone down yesterday to poke around and remarkably, had discovered a new protoceratops fossil in a huge boulder of sandstone which lay in the middle of the plain like a glacial erratic.  It had probably started off as a huge chunk of the cliff which had broken off, and became isolated as everything around it eroded away.  

He also took us to a nearby hill where there were dinosaur bones all over the place.  Most were fragments too small to positively identify as being part of any specific bone like a femur or pelvis, but there were also sandstone chunks with fragments of an identifiable pelvis or part of a shoulder and ribs visible.  It was pretty amazing and also humbling to find evidence of so much instantaneous destruction and death in one spot.  

We wrapped up the day at a small tent set up where we had a beautiful view of the Flaming Cliffs for sunset.  They served us complimentary cocktails and the brought in a troupe of performers who had driven all the way from Ulaanbaatar.  There was a band with traditional Mongolian instruments including a violin-like instrument with two strings which was played in an upright fashion like a Chinese violin, but with a much larger sound box.  There was an instrument fashioned out of a ram’s horn with a woodwind mouthpiece and keys, which sounded remarkably like a clarinet.  There was an upright bass version of the Mongolian violin, and a large Dulcimer like instrument.  Two of the men in the band specialized in throat singing, which originated with Tibetan and Mongolian Buddhist monks.   They played several pieces and they were surprisingly melodic and pleasantly rhythmic.  

They brought in a female guest singer who showed that Mongolian women can also master some of the overtones in her singing.  

And the finale featured a young contortionist who not only did amazing feats of balance and contortion, but could also hit the bullseye with her bow and arrow upside down and using her feet to hold the bow, draw and release the arrow.  That was nothing short of amazing.  

Our drivers proved their ultimate prowess navigating back to the Gobi Nomad Lodge in the dark.  It is much harder to judge distances and extent of irregularity of the road surfaces in the light of head lights let alone figure out which direction to drive in the absence of street signs or even GPS.  Miraculously, we all arrived back to the lodge in the dark.

Late dinner was a spinach salad, shrimp pasta, and cake with ice cream.  The shrimp were pretty dried out, so they must have been holding our dinners for quite some time waiting for us to return from the Flaming Cliffs.  

Many travelers received great news from Viking Air.  While most of us were booked on a Mongolia Air direct flight from Ulaanbaatar to Hong Kong, there were 3 couples whose flights were supposed to fly them to Seoul, and them from Seoul to Hong Kong.  That itinerary would have taken hours longer and gotten them in to Hong Kong late at night.  Viking Air was apparently able to find enough seats on the direct flight at the last minute to get everyone on the same flight.  

Tomorrow we have to put out all our suitcases to be transported by truck back to Ulaanbaatar because we will be taking the Cessna Caravan back to Ulaanbaatar in the afternoon.  We will have some activities around the lodge tomorrow.