You descend into the gorge through Gobi heat and emerge into cold. Ice forms in the depths of this desert canyon, persisting through summer. The lammergeier vultures overhead have a three-metre wingspan. This is one of Mongolia's strangest landscapes.
The Rara Avis Team
The temperature drops the moment you enter the gorge mouth. The Gobi's heat, relentless on the open desert, simply ceases. The air becomes cool and then cold as you walk deeper, the walls rising steeply on both sides, their faces darkened by perpetual moisture. The gorge narrows with each step; the sky above reduces to a ribbon of blue. And then you see it: ice, substantial ice, gleaming in the shadowed depths of a desert canyon. It is disorienting, impossible, and it is absolutely there.
Yolyn Am means valley of the yol, the lammergeier or bearded vulture, a raptor with a wingspan of nearly three metres. These birds are the masters of this place. They nest along the cliff faces and ride the thermals that rise from the Zuun Saikhan Mountains, their silhouettes vast against the sky. If you wait quietly long enough, you will likely see them spiralling overhead, their call a distant cry that echoes off the stone walls.
The ice itself is the product of geology and microclimate at their most particular. Cold air, being denser than warm air, pools in the gorge's depths where the sun cannot reach. Meltwater from the surrounding peaks drains downward and freezes in these shaded canyons, persisting in a landscape where ice should be impossible. As you walk further into the narrows, the walls seem to lean inward. Ibex move across cliff faces that appear nearly vertical, their hooves finding purchase on ledges where no hooves should fit. The Altai snowcock, a large mountain grouse, calls from the heights, a clear bell-like sound that carries strangely in the enclosed space. The silence between the calls is profound, the kind of silence that belongs only to high mountains and deep canyons.
Yolyn Am lies within Gurvan Saikhan National Park in the southern Gobi's Ömnögovi Province, typically visited as part of a multi-day circuit that includes the Flaming Cliffs at Bayanzag and Khongoryn Els, the singing sand dunes. The contrast that defines the Gobi finds its fullest expression here: ice and heat, silence and vastness, cold and desert light. A journey through the Gobi with Rara Avis Travel weaves these elements together, moving from ice canyon to dunes to fossil beds, each stop revealing the remarkable complexity of a landscape that appears austere only to those who have not truly looked.