Douglas Steakley Photography
Mongolia Portfolio
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Mongolia Portfolio
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In September, 2018, I took a small group of photographers on an exploratory tour of Mongolia. We began in Ulaanbaatar, a large, modern city with skyscrapers and traffic jams. We stayed in a very nice tall hotel, The Blue Sky, and returned to it a couple of times throughout the tour. In Mongolia, all of the signage is in Russian, with occasional English thrown in.
Our first excursion was the Gobi Desert, where we stayed in several ger camps. Gers are nomadic style yurts and are very comfortable. The vastness of the Gobi is hard to describe—it stretches for hundreds of miles and as we drove, the horizon continually receded. Fortunately we traveled in comfortable SUVs—large Toyota Landcruisers, as the "roads" were very rough, often following dry riverbeds. Every hour or two we would see another vehicle. The landscape was vast, beautiful, and much to our surprise it was green due to recent rains.
We stopped to visit a remote family and spent an hour or two with them being fully entertained by a precocious and lovely 3 year old girl. Along the way there were large herds of goats and camels with shepherds often on motorbikes. One night was at Khongor Sand Dunes, where we were able to photograph a group of camels crossing the dunes at sunset. The next attraction was the Flaming Cliifs of Bayanzag. This is the place where in 1926 the Roy Chapman Andrews Expedition discovered dinosaur eggs and ancient dinosaur bones, which established his reputation as a paleontologist. He later became the Director of the Museum of Natural History in New York and later retired in Carmel, California. The Harrison Ford Indian Jones movies were based on Chapman’s life. The bones and eggs were 6-12 million years old and one of our drivers knew where there was a dinosaur bone still in the earth, which we uncovered it and photographed. There probably is a complete dinosaur buried under the ground there and we covered it over when we left. These cliffs are still an active paleontological l site and during the past 150 years have yielded numerous skeletons and new species. Many of the expeditions were and are Russian, since Russia is Mongolia's northern neighbor. We stayed at the very comfortable Three Camels Lodge Ger Camp, where they come in at 4:30 in the morning and light a fire so the get will be warm when we wake up.
We returned to Ulaanbaataar to visit the Gandan Monastery and museums before flying to the remote northwest Kazakh region. This remote corner of Mongolia is home to the Kazakh people who hunt in the winter with their tamed golden eagles. We spent the weekend observing and photographing the hunters in the Eagle Festival competitions. This was truly a memorable, peak experience—the Altai Festival was small and intimate so we were able to get close and personal with the eagle hunters. If you saw the documentary film “The Eagle Huntress”, you know about the festival and the young woman, Aisholpan, who was the very unlikely winner of the competition the first year she competed. She has become something of a Mongolian super-star—everyone wanted their picture taken with her, including me. She is truly beautiful and easy to spot as her clothes and hat were made of rare, white fox fur.
The western area of Mongolia is Kazakh Muslim, while the rest of the country is Tibetan Buddhist. Buddhism came to Mongolia after the reign of the Khans in the 12th and 13th centuries. There is a lot to know about the reign of Ghengis Khan, who created the largest empire in history, stretching from Japan to Europe. He created the boundaries of India, Korea and other countries by combining tribes so he could rule them and many of the international boundaries he created remain intact today. If you want to learn more, I recommend reading Genghis Khan and The Making of The Modern World by Jack Weatherford.
Click Here to view my Keynote Presentation of Mongolia. Please note that the first page does not advance automatically, please press the lower right arrow key. The following pages will advance automatically.
Our first excursion was the Gobi Desert, where we stayed in several ger camps. Gers are nomadic style yurts and are very comfortable. The vastness of the Gobi is hard to describe—it stretches for hundreds of miles and as we drove, the horizon continually receded. Fortunately we traveled in comfortable SUVs—large Toyota Landcruisers, as the "roads" were very rough, often following dry riverbeds. Every hour or two we would see another vehicle. The landscape was vast, beautiful, and much to our surprise it was green due to recent rains.
We stopped to visit a remote family and spent an hour or two with them being fully entertained by a precocious and lovely 3 year old girl. Along the way there were large herds of goats and camels with shepherds often on motorbikes. One night was at Khongor Sand Dunes, where we were able to photograph a group of camels crossing the dunes at sunset. The next attraction was the Flaming Cliifs of Bayanzag. This is the place where in 1926 the Roy Chapman Andrews Expedition discovered dinosaur eggs and ancient dinosaur bones, which established his reputation as a paleontologist. He later became the Director of the Museum of Natural History in New York and later retired in Carmel, California. The Harrison Ford Indian Jones movies were based on Chapman’s life. The bones and eggs were 6-12 million years old and one of our drivers knew where there was a dinosaur bone still in the earth, which we uncovered it and photographed. There probably is a complete dinosaur buried under the ground there and we covered it over when we left. These cliffs are still an active paleontological l site and during the past 150 years have yielded numerous skeletons and new species. Many of the expeditions were and are Russian, since Russia is Mongolia's northern neighbor. We stayed at the very comfortable Three Camels Lodge Ger Camp, where they come in at 4:30 in the morning and light a fire so the get will be warm when we wake up.
We returned to Ulaanbaataar to visit the Gandan Monastery and museums before flying to the remote northwest Kazakh region. This remote corner of Mongolia is home to the Kazakh people who hunt in the winter with their tamed golden eagles. We spent the weekend observing and photographing the hunters in the Eagle Festival competitions. This was truly a memorable, peak experience—the Altai Festival was small and intimate so we were able to get close and personal with the eagle hunters. If you saw the documentary film “The Eagle Huntress”, you know about the festival and the young woman, Aisholpan, who was the very unlikely winner of the competition the first year she competed. She has become something of a Mongolian super-star—everyone wanted their picture taken with her, including me. She is truly beautiful and easy to spot as her clothes and hat were made of rare, white fox fur.
The western area of Mongolia is Kazakh Muslim, while the rest of the country is Tibetan Buddhist. Buddhism came to Mongolia after the reign of the Khans in the 12th and 13th centuries. There is a lot to know about the reign of Ghengis Khan, who created the largest empire in history, stretching from Japan to Europe. He created the boundaries of India, Korea and other countries by combining tribes so he could rule them and many of the international boundaries he created remain intact today. If you want to learn more, I recommend reading Genghis Khan and The Making of The Modern World by Jack Weatherford.
Click Here to view my Keynote Presentation of Mongolia. Please note that the first page does not advance automatically, please press the lower right arrow key. The following pages will advance automatically.