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.