Mike Novacek

Our fabulous fossil site at Ukhaa Tolgod lies in the eastern part of the Nemegt Valley. Flanked on both the north and south by a series of black jagged mountains this valley contains, as Mark earlier noted, some of the world's best bone-hunting terrain. The original sites of the Nemegt discovered by the Russians and also worked by the Polish-Mongolian expeditions, require a 40-mile drive due west of Ukhaa. With half our team off to look for new badlands on the 21st, Guillermo, Bolortseteg, Jonathan and I decided to pay a visit to these classic western beds.

Despite an eye-stinging sandstorm in the afternoon, we found our trip interesting enough to return today, this time with Peter Langone to photo document the adventure. The drive was about as pleasant as any I remember in nine years of work in the Gobi. The great vault over the valley was filled with stately drifting cumulus, so solid and hard-edged they looked about to land. The clouds cast long riverine shadows from one mountain range to the other.

Enroute we stopped at a ger and greeted a handsome young couple laboriously drawing a bucket of water from a well with an opening no bigger than a manhole. They sloshed the water into a trough mobbed by nervous goats and stinking, snorting camels. I took some Polaroid portraits of the couple, the best of all gifts any alien can offer to a Gobi family, and we then sped westward. In a few clicks we made a right hand turn at a junction marked by two ragged trees -- practically the only such trees in the Nemegt Valley -- and plunged into a huge sandy wash.

On the other side of the wash lay the famous sand castle badlands the Poles call Eldorado. This maze of cliffs and spires has yielded dome-headed pachycephalosaur dinoaurs, and small mammals and lizards. But fossils are not easily retrieved at Eldorado, a fact brutally made known to us in our earlier years prospecting a this site. Prowling there now simply makes us appreciate the wondrous riches of Ukhaa all the more.

Today we skipped the badlands, and aimed high, striking out for a line of reddish rocks at the very footings of the Nemegt Mountains. What follows in this kind of jeep scouting is an up and down ballet -- a steep gear-winding climb over a ridge, a hard left turn to avoid plunging over the other side, a speedy ascent up the surface of the mesa and a descent into a rocky wash. After bouncing for an eternity across the wash we repeated the cycle of slope, pediment, and wash again.

Guillermo led the way with a robust arm at the wheel and a hearty laugh as and we remembered that he served much of his stint in the Argentine military driving a Mercedes jeep just like ours. With this monotonous traversing we were inching closer to our goal, a glowing pyramid of red sand. A new locality? Possibly. I was not aware of any name or record of a fossil site in this particular area. The steep slopes of the pyramid were deeply eroded red rocks very similar to the kind we have at Ukhaa.

Within a few minutes, Bolor had found a pile of battered bone, and soon we were all finding fossils on the slopes. Bolor and I extracted a small fossil turtle, encasing it in a turtle-shaped plaster jacket. Guillermo and Jonathan, carefully carved the rock away from a jumble of dinosaur bones with some odd, flat toes. We were puzzled by the identity of this creature; it seemed new to us. Perhaps a pachycephalosaur?

That would be nice, as we had not yet matched the Poles' success in finding these beasts in our several seasons in the Gobi. The skeleton was not in tip top shape and would require extensive excavation. We snapped a few Polaroids as a report for our dinosaur specialists, and protected the specimen for future removal. We spot checked a few other outcrops bordering the wash and noted the timem, 6:30 -- time to head home.

Night driving through the canyons and washes between here and Ukhaa is treacherous. On the return drive I reflected on our simple outing. We managed to find some interesting bones at an isolated site, in section of rock that caused us to think about the complex geological relationships among various fossil-bearing sites in the valley. The day was neither dramatic nor triumphant, but it was productive. Not all days can be like that glorious July day in 1993 when we stumbled into Ukhaa Tolgod. But rewards can be small and still deeply appreciated.

The Nemegt Valley remained magnificent in the evening light, the rusty weeds in the washes were aflame against the twisted green of the dwarf zak trees. Gazelles shot out in front of us at a 35 mph clip. Was this my 300th day in the Gobi? My 350th? I did not bother to calculate the accumulated days back to 1990 when we first came to this desert. I only thought about how much I loved the place.

We reached a camp full of comrades returned from their reconnaissance, clustered around a zak fire. They reported less than dramatic findings -- Cretaceous rocks, some with fossils, some without. We exchanged tales under an indigo sky "of night and light and the half- light."

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