Sutay Uul

  • Sutay Uul
  • 4207 m
  • Prominence 1761 m
  • Mongolia
  • Location: North 46.61725, East 093.59542 (GPS)
  • Difficulty: YDS 2
  • Climbed August 22. 2024.

Information:


How to get there:
A camp at the base of the mountain may be established near location N46.59150, E093.58827, elevation about 3160 meter. There is a small (decorated) cairn near this location. A rugged 4WD, like a landcruiser should have no big problems getting to this spot.

Route description:
The route follows the ridge that runs uphill immediately right (when seen from below) of the impressive ice that comes down very steeply from the plateau glacier. There are signs of a climbers trail, the terrain is generally easy to walk. The route continues uphill and eventually arrives at the edge of the plateau glacier. A short, lower section of this glacier may be blue ice and steep enough to require crampons. The glacier slope quickly becomes more gentle, gradually more and more flat. The summit area is quite large, the elevation changed by less than one meter along a line (walked) more than 100 meter long.
Comments:
Here is a quick summary of peaks climbed in Mongolia August 2024.
We drove from Bulgan to the base of Sutay, arriving.reasonably early in the afternoon on August 21. A few hours later, our friends Rob, Deividas and the McLellans also showed up with two Lexus 4WD. Quite a coincidence that our two independent schedules made us meet and climb this peak on the same day.
Time has been an interesting issue on this trip Mongolia has two time zones and for some reason, the time communiucated to our mobile phones keep switching between Ulaan Baatar time (6 hours ahead of Norway) and Mongolia west time (5 hours ahead of Norway). This may happen while we are asleep. Thus, an alarm set for 0530 may turn out to wake you one hour early or one hour late depending on what time zone the phone subscribed to the day before. We have now decided to use Ulaan Baatar time for the rest of the trip regardless of what our mobile phones may show. My phone showed UB time when I set the alarm and went to sleep. Then during the night, the phone switched to Mongolian West time and consequently would wake me up one hour later than planned. After several instances of this, we finally, after Sutay, disabled this on our phones, enforcing the UB time zone.
Today, we are 5 days ahead of the original schedule. Thus, we needed to agree on a plan for the rest of the trip. We wanted to include Ich Obo, this will easily take 3 days. Gangaa was positive to this, but our drivers objected. This would add 600 km mostly on bad roads to their initial schedule/plan. After some negotiations, we now agree to pay USD 250 extra for fuel and 150 USD in "tip" as a compensation to each of our 2 drivers.
We left at 0600 the next morning. This was the only morning on the entire trip that felt a little cold. The terrain was easy to ascend, signs of a climbers trail in many locations. We noticed that our friends had left shortly after us. We reached the glacier in 1.5 hours, about 900 meter vertical, so a pretty good pace. The first 3 meter of the glacier were both distictly uphill and hard ice, would be difficult without crampons. From there, the glacier became more and more flat, the summit area being completely flat across more than 100 meter. We were there in 30 minutes, spending some time to walk across the flat area. The summit was marked at a seemingly pretty random point on this pretty large plateau. We measured 4207 meter, consistent with satellite data. This likely quite accurate on such a big, level area.
It may be an interesting fact that Mongolia at this time has 3 summits quite far apart, all competing for being the second highest. This used to be Sukhbaatar Uul, but since its icecap has melted down, a rock is now its highest point at 4200 m. Similarly Tsast Uul, was recently also measured close to 4200 meter of elevation. However, it seems pretty certain that the icecaps of Sutay and Tsast will also melt down and Sukhbaatar with its rock summit will soon regain the distinction.
After 20 minutes on the summit, we descended and shortly before reaching the edge of the glacier, we met our friends in the other team. A break was called and pictures taken. Here, in Mongolia, on an ultra prominent mountain, on a glacier above 4000 meter, 6 of the top 10 "collectors of ultras" met by chance.
We continued our descent and were back at camp with a total trip time of 4:20. We were all happy knowing that our next peak should be Ich Obo. The decision to start our drive there this afternoon. Our friends had planned this as their last peak so we expected to perhaps see them again on what would be their last peak of the trip.

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