Mongolia's Highest Peaks and the Eagle Hunters
A dawn arrives above the western steppe, and in the distance, granite peaks materialise from the dimness as if rising from beneath the earth. The Altai Mountains stretch across the far western corner of Mongolia where Russia, China, and Kazakhstan meet, forming a landscape that seems designed to resist human access. These mountains carry their glacier-sculpted ridges at altitudes where the air itself becomes a negotiation, where the silence can be almost painful in its completeness.
Tavan Bogd, the Five Sacred Peaks, dominates the landscape. Khuiten Peak stands at 4,374 metres, Mongolia's highest summit, its glaciers permanent in an age when glaciers elsewhere have abandoned the low elevations. From the summit, on clear days, you see three countries at once: Russia stretches north, China lies south, Kazakhstan marks the western horizon.
What sustains life in this seemingly forbidden landscape is a tradition that stretches back five hundred years or more. The Kazakh people of Bayan-Ölgii Province hunt with golden eagles. A Kazakh man will spend five to eight years training an eagle before the bird reaches its hunting prime. The bird, a golden eagle weighing five kilograms, with talons curved like a grizzly's claws, lives on a wooden perch in the hunter's home during training. When the first snows come and the ground hardens, the hunter rides into the high valleys with the bird on a leather-gloved wrist. The dive is swift, violent, and precise.
Beneath these mountains lies something even more ancient. Bronze Age petroglyphs cover rock faces across the Altai, tens of thousands of them, perhaps the densest concentration of rock art of this age anywhere on the planet. The carvings show animals: ibex and argali sheep, prey species that determined survival. The images date mostly to between 3000 and 1000 BCE.
The present wildlife of the Altai represents some of the world's rarest fauna. Snow leopards move through the high ridges. Argali sheep occupy the highest pastures; their horns spiral outward in curves that can reach nearly two metres. Wolves hunt in the valleys as they have since the Pleistocene.
Rara Avis specialises in journeys to this remote corner of Mongolia, working with local Kazakh guides and families to ensure that visits genuinely support the continuation of traditional practices rather than extracting cultural spectacle.
