Orkhon Valley
"Every direction from this valley led somewhere that changed the world. You can feel that, standing in the grass."
The Orkhon River is the reason Mongolia has a history in the sense that historians mean the word. This river — rising in the Khangai Mountains and running north six hundred kilometres to join the Selenge — watered the steppe that fed the horses that built the armies that produced, successively, the Xiongnu, the Göktürks, the Uyghur Khaganate, and finally the Mongol Empire. Every major power that has ever emerged from Central Asia has stood on these banks. You ride along them now and the grass is uninterrupted and the gers are scattered across the valley in the same rough pattern they have always occupied, and the only thing marking the passage of all that history is the particular weight the valley has — a gravity that is not superstition but something your body notices before your mind does.
I reached the valley on horseback from a ger camp near Khujirt — two days of riding that is genuinely the correct mode of transport for this terrain, not as a tourist activity but as the only sensible way to navigate a landscape without roads that follows river bends and crosses meadows at angles no vehicle can manage. On the second afternoon we came over a low ridge and suddenly the Orkhon Khürkhree — the waterfall — appeared below us, a twenty-metre drop into a black volcanic gorge that the river carved through lava fields long after any human was watching. The sound preceded the sight by several minutes, a bass note in the air that I had been hearing without identifying. Standing at the rim and looking down at the white water boiling in the basalt canyon, I felt the usual inadequacy of photographs — not that the image would be bad, but that it would be silent.
The archaeological density of the valley is remarkable if you are moving slowly enough to find it. The Orkhon inscriptions — carved in runic script on tall stone stelae by the Göktürks in the eighth century — stand in the open steppe not far from the Khöshöö Tsaidam site, and the area around Kharkhorin holds not just the capital ruins but scattered evidence of human activity dating back to the Bronze Age. I rode past a deer stone one afternoon — a tall granite slab carved with stylized deer figures, Bronze Age, standing alone in the grass without a sign or a fence — and stopped for long enough that my horse began to graze and seemed prepared to stay indefinitely.
The nomadic families of the valley are accessible in the straightforward Mongolian sense: you ride past a ger, they are visible outside doing things, you stop. Tea is produced. Questions are asked through the person in your group who speaks the most Mongolian, which in our case was no one, which did not seem to matter. The family near the waterfall had a satellite dish and a television tuned to a Korean drama, and the teenage daughter watching it was also knitting what appeared to be a very ambitious sweater. The combination did not seem contradictory to anyone present.
When to go: June through September for rideable trails and river access. July is the wettest month but the valley turns an implausible green. September is cooler and quieter — the light in that month over the valley is golden in a way that seems designed to be photographed at every angle. The waterfall is most powerful in late spring from snowmelt.