From that first stinging cannonball off a riverside bluff to the last day at the beach, our idea of a sweet summer is one by, on, and in the drink. To get things flowing, we’ve charted the waters for you.

Blissful Indolence Made Simple

A Florida Stream, an inner tube, and no ambition in sight.



There are two ways to tube down north-central Florida’s Ichetucknee River: the easy way and the easier. Let’s examine the easier first, assuming it’s a radiant midsummer day, air temperature about 95, humid enough to confuse a frog.
Lie on your back, hindquarters submerged in the 72-degree water, gazing drowsily up through the overarching canopy of Spanish moss. Recall the First Law of tubing physics: The chill of the booty is directly proportional to the circumference of the vulcanized vessel. Fail to think of a Second Law. As the black rubber heats up, regulate body temperature by idly flicking water onto your belly and sighing.


Among Florida’s many artesian springs, famous for their mermaids and manatees, none is more beloved by inner tubers than this perfect conduit for the indolent. Though parts of the Ichetucknee are narrow and serpentine, its banks are buffered by a luxuriance of eelgrass that will gently catch and release your tube with a soft, whispering sound. Do not attempt to steer the tube, except in slow circles to rotate the sky and invite musings on the immensity of the ether, which is frankly miraculous and ultimately exhausting. It’s possible at any moment to be struck by a falling stinkpot, a turtle known to climb high into the canopy and leap into the water when startled. Possible, but unlikely. Disregard the threat, or think to yourself, If the blow must come, let it be fatal. Drifting, drifting, you’ve made your peace.


With the easier path, it’s more likely you’ll fall asleep, only to be wakened by the laughter of other tubers. You’ve gone aground in a shaded eddy, your mouth comically gaping. Sit up, blinking and grinning sheepishly. Now is a good time to tackle the easy way.


This way is more gear-oriented (a mask and snorkel). Flop onto your belly and, chin resting on rubber or head slightly elevated, survey the banks for stalking egrets, sunning Suwanee cooters, or periscope-nosed softshell turtles. You might see otters and beavers, but by and large this is wilderness writ small, though with startling clarity. Because many springs feed the Ichetucknee as it winds through pines, hardwood hammocks, and swampland, visibility is forever. It opens wee mysteries like a microscope slide.


Plunge your mask into the stream. Now you see the spring’s power, pumping an average of 233 million gallons a day. The fish, you see, the bream and bass and little sailfin mollies, are working hard not to drift. The eelgrass is waving as if in a gale. You see breaks in the streambed, phosphate pits and sudden overhanging caverns. Unable to resist, you slither from the tube like a gator and dive deep, and are rewarded by a chance meeting with a siren, a three-foot-long legless salamander. Which is thrilling and, ultimately, quite chilling.


You’ll need to get warm again. Clamber back aboard the tube like a cooter (from kuta, an African word for “turtle”), and take it easier.

Wild, Wild Midwest

This just in: You can say Wisconsin and wilderness in the same breath.

The kayak is often associated with rugged terrain, where rivers rise and fall with the melting of mountain snows. Wisconsin, on the other hand, is canoe country, which is to say it’s mostly flat, pressed smooth by the weight of long winters and the Ice Age, the longest winter of all. Topographic relief appears not on land but in the bouldery staircases and slick-water chutes of the rivers that drain it. Midwesterners feeling hard-put to explain why they even own a kayak need only run the Flambeau, a splash-and-dazzle river that barrels out of the North Woods as if from a glacier.
The Flambeau cuts across north-central Wisconsin in two branches. The North Fork has more quiet water, the South Fork more rapids. Between the forks lies some of the wildest country anywhere: pine forests banded in autumn with sugar maple, yellow birch, and hemlocks; trackless alder marshes like the Million Acre Swamp; and black bears, otters, eagles, ospreys, and at least two packs of timber wolves. Not to mention the isolated tavern, all knotty pine and smoke, with more antlers than bottles above the bar.


“It’s a gem of a river,” David Kelly says of the South Fork. “No dams. No towns to speak of. And it doesn’t get the traffic of better-known rivers like the Brule or Wolf. Already today I’ve seen a bald eagle and a coyote just out my front window.”


Kelly owns the general store in Lugarville—in fact, the only store in Lugarville ten miles northwest of Phillips and overlooking the South Fork. He also runs a shuttle service and canoe rental. Put in at Lugarville and you can cover the 20 miles to Little Falls in a day of hard paddling or two days at a leisurely pace, allowing time to play in the rapids.


The first half of the trip is easy, Class I rock gardens and a couple of Class II rapids. (Water levels fluctuate according to weather; September usually beats out the dog days.) On the second stretch, the rapids are more concentrated and evocatively named: Cornsheller, Big Bull, Prison Camp Rapids. The last is just upriver from the State Prison Forestry Camp, where trustees in green dungarees and white T-shirts, many of them former urbanites, stand around and perfect the long stare.


The best whitewater comes at the finale at Slough Gundy, where the river accelerates as it enters a narrow cleft between a cedar island and a high granite ledge, dropping in three separate pitches over a half-mile. The first pitch is a straight shot down a center chute; the second is complicated by a crosscurrent that sweeps you toward the rock ledge.


On my initial trip, this current caught my paddle and neatly rolled me, so I rode the third set of rapids hanging upside-down, submerged rocks whizzing past my head. I managed to tow the kayak to shore before it went over Little Falls and, after sun-drying on the rocks, lugged it up the footpath to run Slough Gundy again.

A Piece of the Shore

Skinny-dipping under the stars, and other reasons to go cottaging in Ontario

In Ontario, “cottage country” is a precise geographical term, “to cottage” a common verb. The province has a pleasing ratio of 220,000 lakes to 200,000 or so private cottages beside them; about one of every 20 families owns one. And most of the other 19 families manage to cadge an invite or two.


Muskoka, Georgian Bay, the Kawarthas: The topography of the cottage regions changes from one to the next, and the cottages range from million-dollar showplaces to rustic one-rooms (like mine, where running water means hustling from the dock with a bucket). The uninitiated can’t see the appeal of suffering through Friday gridlock out of Toronto, of returning to the same place time after time. “You have to do it to understand it,” says a friend.


For me, the reasons come clear each time I arrive and slide my kayak into Mississagua Lake. I make a circuit to see what’s new, knowing almost nothing is. But always discoveries await: the loon’s nest on the edge of an islet; the heron stalking its supper; evening light striking the long fingers of granite that reach into the water.


Perched on Precambrian rock, our tiny, green-stained cottage is barely visible from the water, hidden among pines. The land around us belongs to the Crown and can’t be built on, so the bay is almost ours alone. When the urge for greater exploration strikes, we pack dry bags into the kayaks and go, because Mississagua Lake spills into the Mississagua River, which alternately meanders and rushes into a lake a dozen or so portages downstream. At its other end, Mississagua connects to a chain of other lakes via a wetland where snakes slither in the shallows, frogs bask on logs, dragonflies mate, and platter-size snapping turtles paddle in deeper stretches.


Any cottager will tell you a cottage is a place stacked with memories of what you can’t wait to do again. Skinny-dipping on a starry night. Devouring the season’s first ear of fresh-picked peaches-and-cream corn slathered in butter. Screaming along on the Laser, hiked out, head almost touching the water, laughing out loud. Sometimes when I’m back home, caught in the city’s hustle and hassle, the clatter seems to retreat and I hear instead the slap of the waves against the dock. I’m up north again, and all’s right with the world.

To the Inland Sea

The best swimming in Mexico: Ocean?

Somebody asked Subcomandante Marcos, the figurehead of Mexico’s Zapatista movement, how he first came to Chiapas. Half-jokingly, he answered that he got drunk and wound up in Ocosingo instead of Acapulco. “There is a lake near there called Miramar,” he said. “I asked which way the sea was, and they told me, ‘That way,’ so I started walking. Pretty soon I realized I was in the mountains, and I never left.” It’s not a bad story, and it’s even plausible once you’ve seen Miramar for yourself.
I’m a lake lover of four decades, and I have never seen anything like it. Laguna Miramar (“sea view”), as it is called in Spanish, lies in a ring of mountains 47 miles southeast of Ocosingo, in the southern state of Chiapas, the heart of the Lacandòn rainforest and the Montes Azules Biosphere Reserve. It is also the Zapatista heartland, one reason Miramar may not be for everybody. Access is through the Maya community of Emiliano Zapata, where you are already “back there,” so to speak. Then it’s a four-and-a-half-mile hike to the lake.


The trail ends at a long, narrow beach. There, beneath chicozapote trees bristling with orchids, bromeliads, and epiphytic cacti, the community has erected two thatched, open-sided palapas, one for tents or hammocks and one with a traditional raised hearth for cooking. Zapata and the other lake communities bar hunting and logging near Miramar, so the only sounds are “lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore,” in Yeats’s words, and the unceasing drone of howler monkeys.


I visited Laguna Miramar with Fernando Ochoa, a bilingual outfitter from San Cristóbal who helped Zapata develop its tourism plan. We paddled the lake’s more than seven square miles for three long days and didn’t see it all, though we did visit pictographs, rock carvings, and a full-scale island ruin left behind by Miramar’s ancient inhabitants, ancestors of the Maya who live there now. A thousand feet deep, Miramar sustains enough aquatic life to entertain a Cousteau, including turtles, crocs, and a cryptozoological creature the Indians say resembles a manatee. In our canoe cruising, however, all we saw were several dozen species of tropical and migratory birds, a bewildering array of plant life, and fish. Mostly we swam.


And the swimming was the best I’ve ever had, anywhere. The few divers who have sampled Miramar’s depths can get downright poetic about it. We paddled from one travertine shoal to the next, diving into water the color and clarity of Aqua Velva and basking in shallow depressions eroded along the shore. Once in a while we saw a single dugout in the distance. The rest was silence.

The Hillbilly Autobahn

West Virginia’s most wicked whitewater, speed limits be damned.

I’m supposed to be listening to my guide, Sib, who barks directions at us in fluent Appalachian. But I can barely hear him over the roar of the water, so I stare at the snarling froth thundering out of Summersville Dam and feel my leg stubble prickle against my rented wetsuit. The first raft to launch is a rowdy all-male squad from Buffalo. They grunt like apes as they try to muscle downriver, but their raft gets swirled around and sucked sideways while the guides on the shoreline whoop with uncivil glee. Our group pushes off next, thwacking paddles and stroking furiously, only to have the Gauley’s unforgiving current push us back to shore. We finally make it through the spin cycle, and Sib yeehaws while grabbing a smoke from his waterproof pack. Fortunately, I’m upwind.


It could drive anyone to tobacco, or worse, taking boatfuls of tourons into world-class West Virginia whitewater. The Gauley has more than a hundred Class IV and V rapids in a 28-mile stretch; even in late summer and beyond, when western rivers whimper down to a trickle, the Gauley rages. Back in 1988, Congress mandated that on 22 days between Labor Day and late October, Summersville Dam must release 2,800 cubic feet of water per second—2,800 basketballs with each tick of the clock—just for rafters and kayakers. Not surprisingly, guides from around the world migrate here before they follow the sun to the Southern Hemisphere.


We approach Insignificant, the first Class V. Sib keeps his instructions light and funny, but since he’s puffing like a furnace while trying to position the raft, I’m not sure I shouldn’t be terrified. The white foaming jaws come into view just before they swallow us. Sib’s yelling, “Paddle, paddle!” but all five of us have been thrown to one side, and we paddle only air. When I dig in for a real stroke the raft suddenly buckles, and I’m waterborne, sucked under like driftwood.


Before I can panic, though, the river’s spit me out and I’m swimming jerkily toward the rocky shoreline, instead of toward the boat as instructed. But, serendipity: The boys from Buffalo are waiting in the eddy, and they yank me up by my life jacket. I lie sputtering in their boat until my own raft comes, then I grin a goofy thanks-for-saving-my-sorry-butt smile and hop back in. Cold, beat-up, and sure I’ve broken my foot, I couldn’t be happier. I’ve been baptized by the mighty Gauley. Just 99 more rapids to go.

God’s Own Plunge Pool

A grotto behind the waterfall, a bracing New Hampshire river, and thou.

During a desert-dry lull in an otherwise water-obsessed lifetime—in west Texas—I used to drift off to sleep imagining perfect swimming holes. They always had a waterfall, for aesthetics and to keep the air moist, and cliffs for diving, à la Acapulco. The diving had to be into a deep pool of exceptionally clear water, with underwater formations to explore. The outlet was usually a tumbling riffle over smooth granite. Maybe fruit trees lined the banks, dropping, oh, ripe plums in my lap while I sunbathed.
Years later I discovered just such a place, although the fruit is blueberries and their season ends just before the swimming gets really enjoyable. My nomination for the world’s best swimming hole is the Upper Falls of the Lower Ammonoosuc, near Fabyan, New Hampshire. Pure snowmelt flows from Mount Washington, plunges 12 feet into a succession of three glacial potholes, and exits gracefully over the required smooth rock, spilling into a trout pool to break Izaak Walton’s heart.


The slick granite chute above the waterfall is sized for human buttocks, a natural slide. A small cave behind the waterfall can hide a couple of swimmers at a time. But it’s the potholes themselves that cause swimmers’ hearts to flutter. The first, probably 20 feet around and nearly as deep, is ringed by 20-foot cliffs. The second, connected to the first by an underwater passageway, is larger, and its cliffs offer launch points from perhaps 10 to 40 feet, choose your height. The third pothole is larger yet, with even more diving heights, and sunnier, thus attracting more leisurely attention.


Pardon my obsession with structure: The sheer geology of the place offers all a swimmer could devise for fun in water, except a rope swing. Its only problem: See “snowmelt,” above. The water temperature is bearable for about three weeks in August, past the blueberries’ prime. So bring your own.

Flipper . . . Is That You?

North mixes with tropics in the Channel Islands’ underwater bizarro world.



Suspended 40 feet beneath the surface. Visibility, maybe five body-lengths. Kicking in slow motion through a forest of kelp. Enormous, sinuous stalks, some nearly 200 feet long, rise from the sea floor and grope for light.


To the right, a large, dark shape lingers, barely discernible in the green murk. Consider the possibilities. It’s not a curious sea lion, or it would’ve already stormed your face mask. A great white shark would make great bar-stool fodder, but those are thin odds; people dive southern California for decades without even glimpsing one. Charlie the Tuna? Easy, man; don’t lose your grip here.


Whatever it is, it’s approaching. The other divers seem to have vanished. But then, adrenaline surges and otherworldly ambience are the draw in the Channel Islands, less a Disneyesque reef dive than a bushwhack through the jungle. Warm and cold currents collide here, attracting a through-the-looking-glass collection of species that rarely lurk in the same circles. Other kelp forests grow up north, and some of the same fish, invertebrates, and mammals swim farther south, but only here do they mingle.


At last, the behemoth emerges from the soup: a giant sea bass longer than you, bulkier than you (maybe two or three hundred pounds), and probably tastier, too. Gargantuan up close but a runt among its peers. Its world-record forebear, weighing in at almost 600, succumbed to a hook near Anacapa Island in the sixties. Mouth gaping and eyes bulging, this one circles around and then back for a second pass unusual for a fish—before it slips away into the gloom. The pulse gradually slows.


Nights later come the surreal dreams, of hulking, amorphous creatures seen only out of the corner of the eye. And in the morning, musings about the ones that choose not to be seen at all.

Time Off the Grid

In blissful isolation along the Rogue River, where it’s easier to find a fly rod than a phone.

From its headwaters near Crater Lake, the Rogue River twists and veers for several hundred miles through the lower left-hand corner of Oregon before arriving at its broad estuary on the Pacific at the town of Gold Beach. But the part of the Rogue I love is its 40-mile run through a corridor of Klamath Mountains wilderness—one of those faraway worlds you can still find in pockets all over the Northwest, where the nineteenth century lasted at least halfway through the twentieth. Even today, it’s a long way to a phone.
The surrounding landscape is an absurdly crenellated empire of sharp ridges, steep fir-covered slopes, and deeply notched ravines; a perfect refuge for coots, renegades, and survivalists; and a terrible place for cars. (A wag in Yreka once put up signs that read, “Our roads are not passable, hardly jackassable.”) The sheer cussedness of this terrain has been the Rogue’s best defense against civilization’s embrace.


The Rogue played a supporting role in the Meryl Streep vehicle The River Wild, and it’s a popular summer run for rafters and kayakers. Dams upstream have partly tamed it, but once it enters this coast range the river reverts to a primordial rush of swift and sometimes ferocious Cascadian snowmelt. Still, the pleasures I’ve found along the Rogue have mostly been slow ones. They began with a six-month caretaking job I had at a remote ranch homestead near Horseshoe Bend, a blissful interlude that offered a pretty good argument for the Unabomber lifestyle. I hiked through gorgeous swaths of old growth, saw a pair of cougars lope side by side up a hillside, heard the kind of lore that seems to thrive in the absence of electricity, and had my first taste of fly-fishing for the late-summer run of Rogue steelhead, the signature species of the place.


Steelhead embody the secretive, once-upon-a-time glamour of the Rogue. Like their cousins the salmon, steelhead spawn in rivers and migrate to the sea. But these Homeric fish sojourn in the ocean and return to the river twice before they attain the four- to eight-pound size and quick-strike savagery of the classic Rogue steelhead. Alas, like the Rogue itself, they are threatened, but like the wild Rogue, they triumphantly persist.

The post The Wetter You Get, the Summer You’ll Feel appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

ONE WARM MORNING EARLY LAST JUNE, we carried our canoes at the shore of Brighton Pond, deep in Vermont’s boreal Northeast Kingdom, and carried them over the narrow divide separating the Nulhegan and Clyde River watersheds. It was a fairly short portage, a nearly level stroll on a well-beaten path under tall white pines. Not five minutes later, we came upon the tracks of the St. Lawrence and Atlantic Railroad and followed them 200 yards to a tea-colored tamarack bog—perhaps the shortcut we were seeking to the Nulhegan. We put in and drifted toward a narrow blue horizon throughaisles of balsam and spruce.

It was National Trails Day, and my wife and I had joined six members of Native Trails Inc., a nonprofit outfit dedicated to identifying and preserving precolonial and preindustrial travel routes, on a scouting detail. With us was one of its founders, Ron Canter, a cartographer at the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration, as well as Maryland-based computer expert and waterman Randy Mardres, and Mike Krepner, a Maine guide.
Our goal that day was to check out the portage route and then run the Nulhegan 15 miles to the Connecticut River. It was the latest in a decade of outings Native Trails has led as the group has pieced together the 700-plus-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail. The NFCT, a (mostly) fluvial Appalachian Trail, includesthe storied and popular canoe waters of the Adirondacks and Maine at either end, but its interior connections, such as the Nulhegan, have attracted little use since the days of log drives in the late 1800s. We wanted to make sure nothing besides a few short portages and beaver dams blocked the way.

As you might expect, creating the NFCT has been a long haul, but the vision Native Trails outlined ten years ago, based on colonial records and maps, is nearing reality. To promote and maintain the trail, a separate nonprofit named the North Forest Canoe Trail was formed in 1999. The organization is run by Kay Henry and Rob Center, former executives of Waitsfield, Vermont-based Mad River Canoe who view the trail as an opportunity for increased economic vitality and historical awareness. The seasoned managers have already won corporate and foundation grants, and have organized a network of volunteers to maintain waterways, campsites, and information centers.

While every mile of the NFCT follows colonial routes, its final shape has been updated to accommodate changes in the watercourses. The trail begins at Old Forge, in New York’s Adirondack Park, and roars down the Saranac, with its sections of Class II and III whitewater, to Lake Champlain. From there, it enters the Mississquoi River and, after a good deal of upstream paddling and poling, lets you out at the Clyde-Nulhegan watershed, where we started out that morning. Reaching the Connecticut River, the NFCT next hooks up with the Ammonoosuc River, cuts across New Hampshire’s northern neck, and wends up the steep, spectacular Rapid River to Maine’s Rangeley Lakes at Fort Kent. It ends at the Canadian border.

There are still some kinks to sort out. Snags and downed trees from spring runoffs have yet to be cleared. Short sections of portage trail, like the one connecting the Clyde to the Nulhegan, need brushing out and marking, and information isn’t complete for every segment of the route. Leaving Brighton Pond that day, we had little idea what to expect.
We paddled the Nulhegan’s twisty headwaters, cutting away blowdown, and on through the middle reaches of deep current to the swift lower miles. Toward day’s end we came to the head of a lovely Class II rapid with a narrow line of waves cushioning the rocks. We ran it, Ron Canter poling his canoe from a standing position. Eventually we rounded a bend and confronted a maze of boulders blocking the widening stream. While the rest of us watched, one of the men soloed his boat down the rock garden, only to run aground.

A party of long-haulers might have chosen to camp there and reach the Connecticut in the morning. But we called it a day and hiked back to the highway. On a low rise above the railroad bridge, we looked back up the valley, a scene on par with anything depicted by 19th-century painters. The view reminded me of what I love most about the NFCT: its natural beauty and timelessness.

Like a golf course that requires every club in the bag, the northern Forest Canoe Trail demands a full range of skills, including experience negotiating short stretches of Class III whitewater. Through-paddlers should know how to pole and should allot at least eight weeks to complete the trail, something that hasn’t been done yet.

When To Go: May/June or September/October are the best months, as campsites are more readily available and the water is higher.
Getting Primed: Build up to the long haul by paddling short sections first. For information on trail conditions, call the NFCT at 802-496-2285, or check out: . Also, I highly recommend Adirondack Canoe Waters: The North Flow, by Paul Jamieson (available through the Adirondack Mountain Club, 800-395-8080; ).

Staying There: The NFCT passes directly through several towns, so there’s easy access to inexpensive motels and cozy B&Bs. For base camps, however, try The Wawbeek, on Upper Saranac Lake, New York (518-359-2656), Northbrook Lodge, in Paul Smiths, New York (518-327-3379), and The Birches, in Rockwood, Maine (207-534-7305).

Outfitters: You’ll find a dozen or more supply-rental outfits and other services along the way, among them Mac’s Canoe Livery, Route 30, Lake Clear, NY (518-891-1176) and Nulhegan Guiding, 1506 Route 114, Island Pond, VT (802-895-4328). Mac’s Canoe Livery’s rates are typical: $25 a day for Royal X canoes, $40 a day for Kevlar, and $50 a day for graphite.

The post Exploring – or Through-Paddling – the Riverine AT appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.

OUR CAMELBAKS BULGING, WE PEDALED OUT ONTO the Mongolian steppe, each of us choosing one of a dozen dirt tracks threading through the long, waving grass. Five hundred and sixty miles northwest of the markets of Ulan Bator, Mongolia’s capital, we had entered the Asian outback from the town of Mörön, the nine of us feeling like the luckiest mountain bikers alive. The steppe extends from central Mongolia all the way west to the borders of Kazakhstan and China, and while it’s interrupted in places by drier terrain, boreal forest, and mountains, from here it seemed an infinite plain.

For centuries the steppe has been crisscrossed by Mongols, descendants of the wandering tribes who were first united under Genghis Khan in the 13th century. Of the country’s two and a half million people, nearly half remain nomadic livestock herders. Cycling their ancient paths, we were continuing a tradition even as we set a precedent: This was the first day of the first-ever organized biking trip up the northern finger of Mongolia, and we were the first party of helmeted travelers to shift gears up its passes and seek singletrack kicks on its goat paths. Riding this wild expanse was like exploring the American West 300 years ago, albeit on wheels.

On our topo maps we had etched an ambitious, 225-mile loop that took us far north of the ongoing drought in central and southern Mongolia. (Officials are calling it the nation’s worst natural disaster in 30 years; travelers heading there should check with the Mongolian embassy.) First we planned to pedal out from Mörön toward mythic, glimmering Lake Khovsgal, some 90 miles away.This would take us almost due north through the relatively flat valley of the Egiyn River. Once at Lake Khovsgal, we would ride along a portion of its western shore and then climb west up a rugged frontier road and over the snow-tipped Saridag Mountains via 10,000-foot Jigleg Pass. Out the other side of Jigleg, we’d drop into the Darhat Valley, turn south, and head back to Mörön. It was a journey that outfitters call an “exploratory”: a test run of a new itinerary with guides and, in this case, paying customers. As scouts for Boojum Expeditions, a Bozeman, Montana–based outfitter, we were to plan a route for future biking trips (one of which will be offered in August), and to report on a variety of terrain.

IF WE HAD ONE PERSON TO THANK FOR GETTING US here—and to blame when the weather turned—it was Montana road-bike racer M.C. Jenni, Boojum’s office manager. She had fantasized about mountain-biking across a Montana without roads, and encouraged her boss to try out such a trip in Mongolia. No one doubted her abilities. After all, she’d completed the Hewlett-Packard LaserJet Women’s Challenge—a 12-day, 750-mile stage race in southern Idaho. But she’d never guided before, so Boojum paired her up with the ever-ready Peter Weinig.

Four years ago, Weinig, a native of Germany, had ventured solo out of Ulan Bator on a horse loaned to him by the Mongolian Boy Scouts; except for winter getaways, he hasn’t shaken Mongolia yet. He’s been leading Boojum’s equestrian trips in Mongolia for three years, but bike saddles suit him just as well. “I’ve got a bike in Delhi, a bike in Berlin, one in Singapore, and one here in Mongolia,” he boasted as we unloaded our gear from the plane in Mörön. But, he added, “This is the place with the real choice riding.”

Rounding out the expedition were six American clients and six Mongolians, the latter of whom we addressed by their first names. (Mongolian surnames tend to be too difficult to pronounce.) Among them were Bold, a young translator who’d learned English from a drifting Oregonian Rasta; Maagi, the patient and quiet cook; and Mishig, Boojum’s Mongolian business partner. Mishig holds a 20 percent stake in the Boojum-owned Khovsgal Lodge Company; he also serves as in-country ambassador and auto mechanic. On this trip, he drove an army surplus Russian GAZ 31 truck, a four-wheel-drive support vehicle. When Mishig wasn’t driving, he fished from the riverbanks without a rod, spinning the line overhead like a lasso before sending the glittering lure out across the current.

We strung out in Technicolor shapes on the gray and brown hills and spent the first four days in sunny, clear weather. Then, on the afternoon of our fifth day, we left the rolling grasslands and felt the chill of the Saridag Mountains ahead. Melted snow and frost turned our ascent into a slushy mess, and snowflakes soon blanketed our helmets. Passing one of our riders toppled in a puddle, Jenni shouted, “Spring skiing!”

And yet our arrival at Lake Khovsgal that evening was so dramatic it overshadowed the storm. The 600-foot-deep lake was stunningly clear. Its water is rumored to be so clean that—all my outdoor training notwithstanding—I drank straight from a water bottle filled at its edge.

WE STAYED AT THE LAKE FOR TWO DAYS, waiting out the weather, but eventually abandoned our plan to bike over Jigleg Pass—it was sure to be snowbound—and headed for a more remote drainage, the Harhuth Valley, due southeast of the lake. (To avoid such icy surprises, this year’s trip will depart a month earlier than ours did.)

On the morning we broke camp, the weather also broke, and a warm, summery breeze blew. Our caravan trailed across lush meadows and along pebble-strewn beaches, through larch stands where brown snowshoe hares leapt away in the spattered light, and then out along packed, unobstructed lakeshore tracks that stretched out of sight. That afternoon we detoured along a little-used horse-and-goat trail. Peter called it a “shortcut” to the town of Hatgal—with 300 residents, the biggest village on the lake.

Some shortcut. The trail cut across soggy wetlands and then rose sharply to a dramatic ledge, with singletrack lacing sheer 100-yard drops to shallow, rocky, windswept lagoons. At one turn I snagged my pedal on a stump and flew forward, far out over my handlebars, catching air—big air. My bike and I plunged through tangled brush and down a slope that led to a cliff. Fortunately, I came to a stop well before the edge, and suffering nothing worse than a chainring track snaking down the back of my thigh.

A few miles later, we crossed the Egiyn River on a weathered bridge. On the other side, smoke rose through a tattered tepee where a woman was brewing “brick” tea, which is dried in the shape of a brick and then broken off and ground before it’s steeped and diluted with reindeer milk. She served it with a plate of hard biscuits and even harder cubes of reindeer cheese. She was a Tsaatan, one of the “reindeer people,” the most restless of the nomadic herders (they move at least ten times per year), whose dwindling 17 families live mainly in the border area between Siberia and Mongolia, west of Lake Khovsgal. This ruddy-faced, expressive woman, her watchful, silent husband, and their children have learned to track the tourists who visit the region. They’d gotten word of our trek and had traveled southeast to intercept us by camping on our probable route. Courtesy dictates that you stop and pay a visit.

We were happy to. They presented a perfected routine—a visiting session in the tent, rides on a few listless reindeer, and as many photographs as we could want, all for about 4,000 tugrog, or $4, for our whole group. As we departed, the family’s teenage son rode up on a reindeer, its fuzzy rack of antlers almost bigger than he. Spying our bikes, he jumped off his mount and enthusiastically accepted Bold’s offer of a teetering spin on a bike.

We spent four more days roaming the Harhuth Valley, looking for golden eagles and listening to wolves that howled in the night. But that perfect day—when we visited the Tsaatan, then took off through mud to Hatgal, and arrived exhausted to find the ever-reliable Maagi whipping up plates of mutton and fried rice—must’ve been the clincher in convincing Boojum to do it all again next month.

Ìý

Khan Air
The 411 on the Far-Flung

Credit the ratio of livestock to humans—more than ten to one—for the creation of thousands of miles of singletrack trails across the Mongolian steppe. The Mongols on our trip rode their bicycles with the vigor of horsemen: They stormed up steep passes on one-speeds—no dismounts. Westerners, however, are advised to use bikes with suspension up front, and should have plenty of intermediate riding experience.

When To Go: To avoid the harsh winter, go from June to September, when temperatures run in the seventies by day and forties at night. Ìý

Getting Primed: You will need a Mongolian visa ($50), available at the airport in Ulan Bator or from the Mongolian embassy in Washington, D.C. (202-333-7117). For planning information, visit and . If you don’t bring your own bike, the only place to rent one is in U.B. from Karakorum Expeditions ($25 per day for an eighties-era bike; 212-658-9938; ).

Getting There: Getting to Mongolia is no small feat. The best route is Los Angeles to Seoul via Korean Air, Northwest, or United. (You can go through Beijing or Osaka, but in Seoul you won’t have to obtain a Chinese visa, stay overnight, or recheck your bike.) From Seoul, continue to Ulan Bator on MIAT, the Mongolian international airline. The total round-trip costs about $1,700.

Outfitters: Boojum Expeditions (800-287-0125; ) and Karakorum Expeditions both lead backcountry treks in Mongolia. Boojum’s August Lake Khovsgal trip costs $2,200; the outfitter also leads custom expeditions for $200 per day. U.B.-based Karakorum leads a variety of trips, including a 14-day organized bike tour of Arhangay, a region southwest of U.B., for $1,820.

Exploring—or Through-Paddling—the Riverine AT

Canoeing pioneers unveil the new 700-plus-mile Northern Forest Canoe Trail

Red, Hot, and Blue

The buzz on the adventure circuit

The post Mongolian Heights appeared first on ºÚÁϳԹÏÍø Online.