Patience makes perfect: How (and where) to track a snow leopard

For the past 17 years, Munkhtogtokh has worked for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), specialising in snow leopard research. His office in Khovd, a city of roughly 30,000 people in Western Mongolia, was chosen partly for its infrastructure, but mostly because of its proximity to snow leopard populations that had been documented in the mountains close to the city.

I traveled to Mongolia before the COVID-19 pandemic, and COVID restrictions have made it difficult to travel to Mongolia lately, particularly with daily case numbers spiking savagely in recent months. When I meet Munkhtogtokh, it’s inside a rudimentary roadhouse that looks like it has been dumped in the middle of nowhere, way beyond the city boundaries. It’s the sort of location where a quarantine station might have been deemed suitable.

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The building’s gaudy interior resembles the set in a Wes Anderson film. Outside, it’s surrounded by an expansive bitumen car park. Unless the roadhouse’s Friday night karaoke sessions draw crowds bigger than I imagine, it appears to be overly ambitious.

As we chat, seated inside a booth that you’d expect to find in an American roadside diner, framed through our windows across a flat, desolate expanse of cold climate desert is a snow-capped mountain range. It’s in these mountains, Munkhtogtokh says, where most of his field research is conducted.

“Three days ago, we saw a female snow leopard with four cubs. The only other time I’ve seen that many was in 2015, when we managed to film them using remote cameras,” he says. “This time, we saw them live.”

Mongolian snow leopards are believed to number anywhere from 900 to 1,200 individuals—second behind China in numbers, but higher in density. For that reason, Mongolia has become the global epicentre for snow leopard research.

It’s this same young snow leopard family that our small Intrepid Travel tour group had attempted to track the previous day, when we drove high up into the mountains into the snow leopard’s habitat on Jargalant Khairkhan. The 3800-meter mountain is revered by Mongolians for the rain it produces and the livestock feed that precipitation harvests.

The mountain is inside the boundaries of Black Water Lake National Park and is one of three similarly sized peaks within sight of each other. All contain known populations of snow leopards.

Munkhtogtokh and his team believe as many as 90 snow leopards prowl these slopes, hunting mountain-dwelling ibex and marmots, and big-horned argali—the largest sheep on earth. To access the mountain’s higher reaches, we’ve swapped the Russian-built Furgon vans that have ferried us around for the past week in favor of Toyota Land Cruisers with added grunt and grip. We drive up the bald mountainside on a morning where storm clouds threaten to spill their load, stopping partway up to look at ancient petroglyph galleries with their illustrations deer and wolves.

Higher up, plump marmots scurry towards their burrows, spooked by lammergeyers (bearded vultures) with wingspans three meters across circling above them. Inside our vehicle, we’re all strangely silent, mesmerized by the striking landscapes beneath brooding skies. It’s vast and open, and unexpectedly treeless. There isn’t so much as a bush in sight.

“Have you ever seen countryside like this before?” asks one of my travel companions.

We’re 3,000 meters above sea level by this stage. Mists swirl around us and spots of rain appear on the windscreen. In the distance, across a valley divide, woolly yaks and stout horses graze on summit pastures. As a nation of ancestral nomads, it’s estimated that livestock animals across the country number a whopping 66 million.

“Scientists are now telling us that it’s more than we can sustain,” says Bata Erdene Khuu, one half of the husband-and-wife team guiding our tour group around Mongolia’s western provinces. “It’s also why the wildlife is becoming scarcer.”

In 2017, an IUCN Red List of Threatened Species report classified the plight of the snow leopard as ‘vulnerable’. It estimated a population of just 2700-3400 wild adults, in a geographic range extending across 12 countries—from Siberian Russia in the north to Uzbekistan out west, and from the Indian and Nepali Himalaya down south to Mongolia in the east.

Of the 27 leopards Munkhtogtokh has counted on this mountain, seven were sighted in this valley, so it’s perhaps inevitable that we’ll see one if we’re prepared to wait.

Mongolian snow leopards are believed to number anywhere from 900 to 1,200 individuals—second behind China in numbers, but higher in density. For that reason, Mongolia has become the global epicentre for snow leopard research.

Eventually, the track we’re following leads to a point overlooking a steep, barren canyon that’s layered with multicolored rock striations. Our itinerary originally had us hiking the last four kilometers to this point.

“I’ve seen thousands of ibex here, and it’s better to see argali big-horned sheep when you are on foot,” Bata’s husband, Timur Yadamsuren, explains.

Earlier though, as we were climbing up the mountain, spotters had radioed in to tell us they had seen ibex and urged us to hurry up. Thoughts of walking there were quickly discarded.

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The two spotters are both wrapped in warm deels, or robes, that stretch down past their knees. They sit side-by-side, mere meters above the point where the ridgeline plunges into the canyon. One has a set of binoculars raised to his eyes. The other points.

“The ibex are down there,” says Timur. “Can you see them?”

Even with the help of my camera’s telephoto lens, they are mere specks—a family of eight dusky-coated individuals, camouflaged against the craggy slopes. Ibex are the main prey of snow leopards, and it’s here that these spotters had seen the mother and its four cubs two days earlier.

Snow leopards typically breed around February or March, giving birth three months later. Since it’s now September, the cubs would be four months old, at best. It may even have been the first time they had ventured outside their nursery den.

Of the 27 leopards Munkhtogtokh has counted on this mountain, seven were sighted in this valley, so it’s perhaps inevitable that we’ll see one if we’re prepared to wait. But therein lies our problem. The amount of time we’ve allocated for trying to spot one of the world’s most elusive creatures here is finite, and there are other sights and activities to see and do before our trip is over.

One by one, the biting winds drive us back into our vehicles. Certainly, we lack the fortitude required to track snow leopards. Perhaps we’d be better off visiting them in zoos. Or maybe we should just meet up with a snow leopard expert in a lonely roadhouse and listen while he tells us tales of his encounters with one of the world’s most elusive animals. Yeah, maybe that will do.

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Mark Daffey visited Mongolia courtesy of Intrepid Travel.