The LIGHT fantastic

Head to the Altai Mountains of West Mongolia for natural splendour, nomadic hospitality and swirling, luminous skies

- HENRY WISMAYER

It was early evening in the Chigertei Valley when I found myself standing on a weathered buttress, cheering the sudden onset of clouds. A fresh weather-front was barrelling in over the Altai massif, and now the clouds were pluming at the mountaintops, some of them wispy and translucent, others dark and throwing shadows, draping columns of rain. By now I understood what this foreshadowed.

Soon, the cloud-cover would fracture the dusk light, and sunbeams would daub chiaroscuro patterns on the land, transmuting the grasslands into prairies of gold. Far away, on the valley floor, smoke spiralled from yurt chimneys; a pair of boy-herders chivvied their sheep alongside a stream. But these were pinpricks of humanity on a floodplain big enough to swallow Manhattan. Up here, I felt certain, the only sentient beings sharing this vantage with me were the snow leopards padding unseen on the ridgelines, and the raptors wheeling in the sky.

If you had questioned me on the Heathrow tarmac about my reasons for visiting Western Mongolia, I’m not sure I’d have been able to answer without sounding absurdly gauzy or grandiose. A couple of weeks before my trip, the world marked the 50th anniversary of the first Apollo moon landing. Neil Armstrong famously described the lunar surface as a “magnificent desolation.” That phrase approximated the palliative I sought: somewhere remote and unmarked, where humanity’s incursion felt transitory, and no-one understood the phrase ‘Instagrammability’. Short of paying Musk or Branson several million dollars to visit outer space, West Mongolia, where the Altai Mountains provide a sublime backdrop to the most sparsely populated country in the world, seemed as good a bet as any.