Tracking Gobi Grizzlies: Surviving Beyond the Back of Beyond

Preface

Two Quick Bear Stories

For more than a decade, my home was a log cabin in the Montana Rockies, off the grid and way off the clock. My to-do list on many days looked like this:

Chop firewood,

Pump water,

Go watch wildlife next door in Glacier National Park,

Especially bears.

Late one August, I camped for a while along the ridgeline of a mountain range overlooking a series of shallow subalpine lakes. It was huckleberry time, and the crop up there was beyond good that year. You could have told as much from the purple stains that tattooed my fingers and encircled my mouth. Or from the big clods of what looked like compressed pie filling all over the slopes. They were the dung left by tons—literally—of grizzlies drawn to huck heaven from home ranges near and far.

Before long, I had an adult bear in view at a lake. I dropped from the ridge to a lower band of ledges and set up a telescope. The animal was wading out from shore with only portions of its back and snout showing, furry alligator–style. This grizzly wasn’t in the water to hunt for fish or for anything else, though. It wasn’t there to drink its fill or to interact with another bear. It was just doing what any of us might while free-roaming the slopes on a hot afternoon—getting wet and keeping cool. Feeling fine. Every so often, the bear would stand to swipe at the surface or pound it with its paws to create a splash. At other times, Aqua-Grizz would submerge completely and then rise on its hind legs again to shake itself, whipping rings of water from its head and upper torso.

Returning to shore, the bear came upon a washed-up tree trunk. After rolling this around for a few moments, the grizzly lay on its back among the green sedges, wrestled the heavy length of wood atop its body, lifted it, and began to juggle the thing with all four feet. Why? Well, why will a grown-up grizzly repeatedly slide down a tilted patch of snow? Why does one foraging in a meadow sometimes break into a wriggly, loose-limbed frolic, swinging its head and zigzagging this way and that? I think the better question—and also the answer—is: Why not? Imagine you own hundreds of pounds of muscle packed atop muscle, claws that measure three to four inches along the outside curve, and the ability to accelerate from zero to thirty-five miles per hour in seconds. What you want to do, you can do, no worries. You’re a heavy-duty organic power generator with a fresh tank of fruit sugar fuel, and this log is just lying there waiting to be tossed around.

While science can’t quite bring itself to say that grizzlies like to goof, the experts acknowledge that, young or old, these bears do devote an intriguing amount of time to play behavior. Exuberance is part of what defines them. So is a strongly developed sense of curiosity. Grizzlies are given to thoroughly investigating objects of interest, manipulating them with their mouth as well as with those broad, flexible paws, trying in their own way to learn more about how the world works. It’s one of the main reasons I’ve always found it natural to relate to grizz—to imagine myself in their place as they move through a landscape, poking around. I also try never to forget that the same animals can instantly turn volcanic when upset.

The grizzly eventually lost interest in the log and waded back into the lake. There, the bear resumed whapping the water with its paws, alternately dunking and rising to do the subalpine swimming hole shimmy-shake. For a few minutes, it spent more time than usual with its head underwater. I thought the bear might be investigating something below. That was before a closer look through the telescope revealed that it was blowing bubbles with its nose. The water’s surface tension, layered with a fine summer film of pollen and dust, kept many of the bubbles bulging in place after they rose, glistening atop the lake like a flotilla of small jellyfish. The grizzly bit at some. It stood upright once more, chest-deep now, and appeared to look the bubbles over carefully. Then it started popping the largest by pricking them one by one with the tip of a claw.

MY WIFE, KAREN REEVES, SPENT SEVERAL SUMMERS MANAGING A HIKE-IN chalet high in the Glacier Park backcountry. One year, a spell of rain wrapped the heights in heavy clouds, hiding the spectacular topography from sight for days. One of the guests, a woman with an infant child, grew more and more restless as the storm kept its shroud over the land. At last, she decided that, rain or no rain, view or no view, she and her husband were going to get out on the trail to a pass south of the chalet. The high point was barely a mile distant, but the route was steep. By the time the couple negotiated the pass and started through the alpine meadows beyond, their baby had grown hungry. Picking out a level spot, the woman sat, opened her jacket, and began to suckle the child amid veils of mist.

As the baby nursed, the parents took more notice of their surroundings. They became aware of an occasional break in the fog. Then out of the swirls stepped a grizzly. Coming from the opposite side of the pass, the bear was no more than forty or fifty yards away, well inside the zone where a startled bear may reflexively attack. Not only was this a grizz, it was the kind said to be the one you least want to meet at close quarters: a mother with young. She had two little cubs at her heels.

The bear noticed the people at almost the same time. She stopped walking, swiveled to check on her offspring, and turned back to stare directly at the parents and child again. After what must have felt like an awfully long pause, this grizzly made its move. She plonked down on her hindquarters, gathered the cubs up onto her lap, and began nursing them. Maybe it was the smell of the other mammal’s milk that inspired her; maybe something else. I don’t remember Karen relating how long the mothers sat there on the pass, not far from one another, nursing their babies. I only remember hearing that after the young were fed and content, the two females rose and went their separate ways.

ONE WAY TO DEFINE GRIZZLIES WOULD BE AS BIG, HAIRY, EYE-POPPING opportunities to get your heart rate up and start thinking fast. But what are the animals truly like? All kinds of people seem to believe that they know. In reality, nobody does. And nobody will until we gain more insight into the species’ complex suite of behaviors and learning abilities. That’s not a criticism of our efforts. It’s a tribute to a potent mammal that, like us, is able to operate on many different levels and in many different environments. It’s also an open-ended invitation to discovery.

In a remote and pitiless desert on the other side of the world from North America lives a bear that science understands only poorly so far and the general public isn’t aware of at all. One of the scarcest creatures on the planet, it is a type of grizzly so extraordinary that its existence is hard to imagine even after you get to its homeland; in fact, especially after you get to its homeland. Traders, bandits, holy men, and warriors have passed through over the centuries, adding legends and layers of history. But they didn’t stay, and this setting was never tamed. It still isn’t. Not yet, although….

A wolf pack waits its turn at an elk carcass monopolized by grizzlies in Yellowstone National Park, United States of America. Photo: Dan Stahler

Oh, hell. Let’s just go so I can show you.

01

Lost Amid the Dust and Gold

Numbering around 800, wild Bactrian—double-humped—camels are critically endangered. The largest remaining population lives in the GGSPA. Photo: Doug Chadwick

Pre-dawn. The trap door at Shar Khuls was up, as usual. I left my vantage point on the high spine of a ridge and climbed back down to my tent. It was pitched near several others in a draw where the mountains give out onto an immense gravel plain. On one edge of the encampment was a ger, the Mongolian name for a yurt. Built of wood and concrete instead of fabric, this round hut stood buried in the side of a hill for extra shelter from the elements. There were ten of us living here, the only humans for thousands of square miles. The ger was the communal burrow where we gathered to dine.

Breakfast the day before had been noodle soup with dried camel meat that our cook pre-softened with a beating from a tire iron. This morning we were looking at a two-course affair: tinned sardines on fry bread, followed by a rice soup with chunks from the dwindling supply of overripe sheep parts that hung from the ger’s walls. It was April 29, 2014. The dust in the air outside had grown thicker overnight, and a cold wind was blowing gale force. Nevertheless, the crew—a group of wildlife scientists and protected area rangers—was determined to explore a water source far to the north that had been discovered only three weeks earlier. The plan was to head across the plain to a distant mountain range we failed to get over the day before. Since the southern slopes had proved too steep and unstable for our Russian-made, four-wheel-drive van, we were going to try circling the base of that range today to find a route up the north side.

First, one of the patrol rangers needed to inspect the Shar Khuls trap more closely and check three more traps we had set in the terrain farther east, each roughly fifteen to twenty-five miles from the next. Shar Khuls (Yellow Reed) was named for its beds of tall Phragmites grass growing beside copses of poplar trees and tamarisk bushes where an underground spring flows to the surface. The other three traps were also set near live springs. All four oases lay amid a maze of parched mountains and canyons deep in the Great Gobi Desert, beyond the back of beyond.

Gobi, in Mongolian, means waterless place. Half a million square miles in size, the Great Gobi is one of the Earth’s five largest deserts (outside the frozen polar expanses receiving so little fresh precipitation that they, too, technically qualify as deserts). The drylands stretch for a thousand miles east to west and as many as six hundred miles north to south, taking in the southern third of Mongolia and much of northern China. This is right at the center of the Asian land mass, so far from any ocean that clouds bearing moisture drop nearly all of it over other landscapes before they ever get here. Rainfall in the Gobi averages just four to six inches annually. Some years, parts of the countryside never see a drop. Temperatures can reach 122 degrees Fahrenheit in summer and sink to minus 40 in winter. If you imagine the result to be a vast realm of shifting sands, well, you shouldn’t. The Gobi Desert is mostly stone.

Each of the traps was a sheet metal box about three feet wide, four feet high, and eight feet long. The one at Shar Khuls stood with a heavy door raised above an open end. Inside were grain pellets, raisins, dabs of jam and honey, and a raw egg: bait. A wire ran from the door’s release mechanism to a hinged plate slightly raised off the box’s floor. Pushing down on that treadle would trigger the door to fall shut. The tension was carefully adjusted so that it would take a heavy footstep to do that.

A couple times in the past, I’d trotted back to camp from the ridge, which I climbed most every morning, with news that the Shar Khuls trapdoor was down. I’d rushed to gather up gear, piled into a van alongside as many crew members as could fit in, raced around the ridge to the box, and discovered nothing but the food inside. Violent wind gusts sometimes caused the door to drop by shaking it until the stays gave way. Although the trap weighed hundreds of pounds, one Gobi windstorm rolled the whole thing over onto its side. We wrestled it back into place and toted boulders from a nearby talus field to pile on top. Since then, the box was at least staying right side up. Still, with springtime temperatures cycling between sweaty hot and freezing in the course of twenty-four hours, metal parts were constantly stretching or shrinking a bit. Maybe balances shifted. Maybe weak spots developed. For all we could tell, gazriin ezen—local rock and tree spirits—came and messed with the system too. Something had to explain the windless times when we found the door fallen, crept toward the trap, and peered in only to find a bewildered hare or pint-size hedgehog peering back.

What we wanted to find in these live traps were bears. Big, unruly, long-eared, bed-hair-shaggy, chocolate-colored, bronze, or golden Gobi grizzly bears. Ursus arctos, found across much of the Northern Hemisphere, is commonly called either the brown bear or grizzly. Gobi bears are a unique variety or subspecies, Ursus arctos gobiensis. Mongolians call them mazaalai. Scientists weren’t even able to confirm their existence until 1943, and not many details about their lives have been uncovered since. During the second half of the twentieth century, portions of the Gobi were hit by a combination of expanded livestock grazing and drought, both of which reduced the desert’s already sparse vegetation. The bears lost half to two-thirds of their range, and their numbers fell sharply. Today, no more than three to four dozen individuals remain. Gobi grizzlies have become the rarest bears in the world. There are none in captivity. All the known survivors inhabit outlying ranges of the Gobi-Altai Mountains in southwestern Mongolia, keeping almost entirely to three of the tallest, most rugged portions of a reserve established there in 1976. This is the Great Gobi Strictly Protected Area–A. Called the GGSPA for short, and it covers roughly 18,000 square miles, an area slightly larger than Israel and Kuwait combined.

For decades, the Gobi bears’ sole home and refuge has been Great Gobi A Strictly Protected Area (GGSPA), situated in the desert mountains of southwestern Mongolia. The new Tost Nature Reserve now links the GGSPA with Gobi Gurvan Saikhan National Park. This creates one of the world’s largest continuous protected landscapes and opportunities for these bears to begin reclaiming portions of their former range.

Since 2005, the Gobi Bear Project team of Mongolian biologists, GGSPA personnel, and lead scientist Harry Reynolds, an American bear expert who started this study in his mid-sixties, has been working together to catch and radio-collar mazaalai. They continue to do this for a month every spring between the time most bears emerge from hibernation and the start of searing temperatures that bring with them a risk of fatal heat stress for a captured animal.

Nearly all Mongolians have a nickname. Purevdorj Narangerel, aka Puji (or Puugee), is the ranger assigned to patrol the central third of the reserve. When trapping operations are based in his sector, he joins the team and is typically the one who makes the daily rounds to check the baited boxes. He does it the same way he keeps an eye on thousands of square miles of the reserve the rest of the year—alone astride a motorcycle. It is the fastest means of travel in this roadless desert terrain. Equally important, a dirt bike like his sips lightly from the limited fuel supply the Project is able to haul in to a remote base camp.

Of medium height with close-cropped hair, Puji often wore a stern expression; not severe, just set in place. I could never tell how much of this reflected a personality trait and how much was a carryover from endless hours of riding through great empty landscapes, cutting the wind and sharp cold or baking heat with his face, concentrating hard on the path he was choosing, where any one of a million rocks could send him and his machine cartwheeling. Puji, who looked to be in his mid-thirties, readily shared information when it was needed. Otherwise, he tended to keep his thoughts to himself, a serious man with the serious skills needed to crisscross a hard place month after month and return intact. This morning, he once again pulled a balaclava over his head, wrapped his greatcoat more tightly around himself and bound it in place with the sash at its waist, fit his motorcycle goggles over his eyes, fired up the bike, and raced off to run the trapline without a backward glance.

On average, the team caught just two bears in a season. So far in 2014, we had been trying for two weeks without any luck. All eyes were on the moto-ranger as he returned in midmorning, cut the bike’s engine, and rolled to a stop beside his tent. Looking up, Puji shook his head. Zero for four again; no bear in the traps. The rest of the crew soon set off in the van, leaving Puji at camp along with Boldbayar (Boyoko) Mijiddorj, who grew up in a village close to the reserve and was now a Mongolian university student in biology. Geerlee Namkhai, the tireless older woman from the GGSPA headquarters who kept the ger in order and cooked for the team, would sometimes drop everything to join in a day’s exploration if it sounded promising. Not this morning, though. With this much dust and wind streaming by, she chose to stay behind too.

Following rough dirt tracks and wildlife trails, GGSPA patrol ranger Purevdorj (Puji or Puugee) Narangerel covers the middle third of the enormous reserve by motorbike. Photo: Joe Riis

The plain to the north was shaped like a colossal dish. At its center, we rolled along over a series of flat alkali pans (takyr in Mongolian) where water from rare heavy rains had pooled and then evaporated. The sun baked the briny deposits of clay-rich silt into hard white speedways. But it seemed as though the Russian van manufacturers must not have intended their products to be driven south of Siberia, for we never raced far before we had to turn the machine’s nose into the hard wind and shut off the engine to keep it from burning up.

Harry and I had the same habit of using van cool-down breaks to go on short walkabouts, searching for animal signs and unusual stones. Both of us kept rock collections beside our tents at camp. Our favorites were pieces cut and polished by airborne grains of dust and sand. The term for such stones, I learned later, is ventifacted—literally, wind-wrought. Outcroppings of crumbling bedrock amid the takyrs offered a striking variety of examples, because the passing air picked up velocity traveling across these smooth pans. Intense solar radiation interacts with minerals both within the stone and in the fine clay particles that winds plaster onto its surface. This adds a shiny patina to the sculptures—a desert glaze. With their odd lumps and curvatures and almost liquid smoothness, many of the results seemed less like rock than like some as-yet uncategorized Gobi life-form.

When I knelt on the ground for a closer inspection, I could feel my face being ventifacted—getting a free dermabrasion treatment at the Gobi spa. The stronger gusts really hurt, though, and left nicks in my sunglasses. These stones didn’t speak of the eons at work. They told of a geologic rush job. The specimens under my nose would be a few microns smaller and altered in shape by the time the van engine was ready to haul us on the next leg of the journey.

"Yawi-awi. My Mongolian language abilities are worse than rudimentary. I’m only repeating a phrase we all called out on journeys, and I’m probably spelling it wrong. I knew what it meant, though: Let’s go!"

Eventually, our traverse of the plain was complete. Next we rounded the target mountain range, beginning a long, butt-banging, kidney-rearranging drive upslope. As the angle of the incline gradually increased, we found ourselves halting every twenty minutes for an engine cool-down of fifteen minutes. This was my fourth consecutive spring expedition with the Gobi Bear Project. Between bad weather, impassable ground, and vehicle breakdowns, I’d taken part in many an all-day odyssey that never reached our destination. Having undergone one just the day before, I didn’t like feeling condemned to another, but the only thing I could do about it was shut my eyes and retreat into other thoughts.

I began to nod off. You know how strange dreams can be. If I had drifted into a truly bizarre one like, say, being packed into a Russki van with a small horde of Mongols careening around after grizzly bears nobody knows exist way the hell and gone in the middle of Thirstland watching people’s heads bounce off the ceiling … nothing would have changed after I woke up. But I knew why I was here.

Ten thousand years ago, the planet’s human population was around 5 million. As of 1930, there were 400,000 times that many folks—about 2 billion. The total hit 3.5 billion by 1970. Between then and 2012, it doubled to 7 billion. During that forty-two-year interval, Earth’s total population of vertebrate wildlife—fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals—fell by more than half, according to the World Wildlife Fund. The International Union for the Conservation of Nature predicts that one of every four species of mammals will vanish in the near future. A third of all species presently known, and possibly more, may be gone by the end of the century.

This was the context in which our attempts to learn more about Gobi bears played out. For me, it kept our daily dramas with malfunctioning equipment, accidents, dwindling supplies, or big-jawed camel spiders that can race thirty feet in two seconds in perspective. When a series of minor setbacks began to feed a real sense of frustration anyway, I’d focus instead on how heartening it would be to actually carry off a rescue of these most critically endangered bears. The existence of grizzlies in the Gobi Desert defies long odds to begin with. If the Project proved able to help them rebound, that wouldn’t change the world. But it would keep Gobi bears in it—and perhaps raise hopes for other implausible-seeming efforts to provide fellow Earthlings with a future. I pictured the team climbing a nearby peak to stand on the summit with middle fingers raised, flipping off the forces denaturing the only living planet we know.

Any thought is worth trying if it helps pass the miles, right? This really was a long ride.

By late afternoon we had chugged far enough up the base of the range that a canyon opened up below us to one side. The van made better time along its rim, where the gravel was firmer. Unhappily, the drop down to the canyon bottom soon became so long and steep that I wished we weren’t hugging the edge quite so closely. Enkhbold (Boldoo) Erdenekhuu had the wheel today. Tall and turned out in full camouflage fatigues most days, he was a senior ranger with an air of authority but an easy laugh. Rather than use his strong voice to order anyone around, which would have been a pretty un-Mongolian way to operate in a group, he preferred to lead the sessions of traditional songs that the Mongolian crew carried on for miles at a time during our travels, chorusing away about lost love and found love, a tireless horse, and the greatness of the land and immanent blue sky. Boldoo was an excellent driver and a fearless one—a little too fearless for my liking. All at once, he turned the wheel, shouted a Mongolian version of Are you ready? and drove right over the canyon rim. Yawi-awi! Yeehaw! And holy shit! We schussed downward while he fought to keep the van from slewing sideways and rolling, reached the bottom, and from there continued gradually upslope again by following the lower canyon’s curves.

Project travel depends on Russian-made four-wheel-drive vans. Loaded with people and supplies, they required periodic stops to let the engines cool. Photo: Doug Chadwick

Three-quarters of an hour after that, we were nearing the upper reaches of the mountain range when another canyon abruptly appeared, falling away from the heights we had now reached. The serpentine bottom of this new cleft lay a long way below, wrapped in deep shade, beckoning like the pathway into a lost world. Boldoo drove right up to the gorge’s rim as though he intended to drive straight down this one too. It would have been suicidal. I grabbed a door handle, preparing to leap. But he braked and killed the engine and started laughing; he’d just been messing with us. Still chuckling, Boldoo pointed at the ground just outside the window and said, "Baavgai. The word sounds like bawa," and it’s the generic Mongolian term for bear. As soon as I stepped out, I saw the fresh tracks next to the van. They continued over the edge of the chasm and down a dune stacked against the canyonside.

We put on daypacks and followed the bear’s steep route to the bottom, sliding an extra yard for every step we took in the soft sand. While descending, I looked across this new canyon to the crest of the mountain range looming above. I could make out the notch in it that we had tried to reach with the van from the south side the previous day. Had we made it that far, we would have found ourselves looking straight down past the front wheels at a thousand vertical feet of cliff.

On the floor of the gorge, the bear’s trail merged with the scat and tracks of wolves, black-tailed gazelles, wild camels, wild asses, and the region’s wild cliff-dwelling goats with horns like great knobby scimitars—Siberian ibex. It was a reminder that the reserve was established to protect not just mazaalai but an entire community of desert fauna whose rich variety of big mammals had been a revelation ever since my first trip into the Gobi. The convergence of their paths foretold of a spring waiting somewhere along the dry wash. A second clue came from the