No Roads, No Fuel Stops: Navigation and Range in the Altai

In western Mongolia the road is not a road, the map is a suggestion and the next fuel pump might be two hundred kilometres away and out of stock. Here is how range, navigation and self-sufficiency actually work in the Altai.

There is no road, and that is not a figure of speech

Riders arriving in Bayan-Ölgii for the first time keep waiting for the road to start. It does not. What you get instead, once you are out of Ölgii town, is a braid: eight or ten parallel dirt lines running roughly the same direction across a valley floor, each one carved by a vehicle that decided the previous line had got too rutted to bother with.

The braid spreads out to a couple of hundred metres wide on flat ground and squeezes down to a single line at a river crossing or a pass. Some strands are hard-packed and fast. Some are soft sand that will have your front end sighing sideways within three metres. Some end in a bog because whoever made them turned back.

Choosing between them is the entire skill of riding out there, and it is the reason two riders can cover the same valley in wildly different times and states of mind. The one who reads the ground picks the fast line and arrives relaxed. The one who fixates on the GPS arrow rides straight down the middle of the worst one.

Why your navigation will not save you

Everybody arrives with a plan built on a screen. A phone with offline maps, or a dedicated GPS with a topo layer, and a track downloaded from somewhere. All of that is worth having and none of it is sufficient, for three specific reasons.

The first is that the underlying map data is thin. Open-source mapping in western Mongolia is a patchwork put together by a handful of people, and enormous areas are simply blank or wrong. A line on your screen labelled as a track may be a line somebody drew from a satellite image five years ago.

The second is that the tracks move. This is the part that catches out experienced navigators. In a place with no engineered surface, a route is wherever vehicles happen to have driven this season. A wet spring reroutes half a valley. A washed-out crossing shifts the ford two kilometres upstream and every subsequent vehicle follows the new line. Your five-year-old GPX file is a historical document.

The third is that a screen makes you look down. In terrain where the difference between a good afternoon and a broken collarbone is reading surface texture forty metres ahead, staring at a two-inch arrow is actively dangerous.

What actually works

Three things, in this order.

Terrain logic first. The Altai is a series of enormous valleys with passes between them, and there are only so many ways through. If you know which valley you are in and which valley you want to be in, the number of plausible routes collapses to one or two, and the track you want is the one heading for the obvious low point in the ridge. Riders who navigate by landscape rather than by line stop getting lost almost immediately.

Herder logic second. People live here and they move constantly. The line with the freshest tyre marks and the most animal traffic is the line that goes somewhere. A braid strand that fades out and stops being used is telling you something. Gers are on routes, not off them.

Local knowledge third and decisively. A guide who has ridden a valley twenty times knows that the left braid is faster in August and impassable in June, that the ford below the confluence is knee-deep and the one above it is not, and that the family at the third ger will know whether the pass has cleared. None of that is on any map and none of it can be worked out from a screen.

Carry the GPS. Use it to confirm where you are and to record where you have been. Do not use it to make decisions about which line to take.

Fuel, which is the real constraint

Ölgii has proper fuel stations. After that it gets interesting.

Soum centres, the small administrative villages scattered across the province, will usually have a pump. Usually. The pump may be out of stock, because supply comes in by tanker over the same tracks you have just ridden and the schedule is aspirational. The octane will be low, often well below what a modern engine wants. And the fuel may be dirty enough that you want to be filtering it rather than trusting it.

The practical consequences stack up quickly. Low octane on a high-compression engine at altitude means pinking and reduced power, which is manageable if you ride accordingly. Dirty fuel means a funnel with a filter in it is not optional equipment, and it means carrying a spare fuel filter for the bike. And uncertain supply means you plan around the worst case rather than the map distance.

The arithmetic that matters is not your tank range on a good road. It is your tank range on soft sand and washboard at low gearing with a headwind, which can be thirty percent worse than the brochure, on top of a route that may double back or detour. Take your realistic bad-day range, halve the distance you would happily commit to, and that is your planning number.

Which is why a support vehicle carrying jerrycans is not a luxury on this trip. It is the thing that turns a series of anxious fuel calculations into a week of riding.

What the ground does to the motorcycle

Corrugations are the enemy. Washboard ripples form on any unsealed surface with regular traffic, and in the Altai they run for kilometres. There is a speed at which the bike skims across the tops and feels almost smooth, and finding it is satisfying, and holding it is how things break.

What corrugations destroy, in rough order of likelihood: fasteners, which vibrate loose everywhere and which need checking every single evening; luggage racks and pannier frames, which crack at the welds; subframes on bikes never designed for a loaded rear end on washboard; wiring, which chafes where it was never expected to move; and fork seals, which weep once grit gets past the dust seal.

The nightly routine that experienced Mongolia riders adopt within two days is simple and it works. Walk round the bike. Put a hand on every pannier mount and pull. Look at the chain. Check the spokes with a screwdriver handle, listening for the dull one. Check the tyre pressures, because you have almost certainly been running them lower than road pressure and they warm up differently out here. Twenty minutes, every night, and it removes about eighty percent of the things that would otherwise ruin somebody’s day.

Rivers

You will cross water, repeatedly, and the crossings are the single most common place where a trip goes from fine to expensive.

The rules are boring and they are the rules. Walk it first, always, unless you can see a vehicle come through in front of you. Look for the widest and therefore shallowest section rather than the narrowest, because narrow means fast and deep. Pick your exit before you pick your entry, because getting in is never the problem. Cross at an angle that works with the current rather than fighting it. Steady throttle, feet up if you can manage it, no stopping in the middle.

The thing that catches people out is time of day. Glacier and snowmelt fed rivers run low in the early morning and high in the afternoon, because the sun has spent all day melting the source. A crossing that was straightforward at nine can be a genuine hazard at four. Serious operators plan the big crossings for mornings, which is one of those decisions that is invisible when it works.

And if a bike does go over in water, the priority is getting it out and upright fast, then not starting it until somebody who knows what they are doing has checked whether water got into the airbox. An engine that ingests water on a restart turns a wet morning into a written-off trip.

Punctures and rubber

Tubed tyres are standard on the machines that work out here, which means a puncture is a tube change rather than a plug. It is worth being honest that a lot of modern adventure riders have never actually done one at the roadside, and that the first time should not be in a river valley at five in the afternoon with the light going.

Carry spare tubes, front and rear sizes. Carry proper levers, not the token ones in the bike’s toolkit. Carry a pump that works, and if it is electric, know what it draws. Tyre choice matters more here than almost anywhere: something with an aggressive enough pattern to find grip in sand and gravel, and a carcass tough enough to survive sharp volcanic rock.

Rim damage is the other one. Hitting a hidden rock in a rut at speed will dent a rim, and a dented rim on a tubed tyre will keep going but will need watching. Spokes go loose. Check them.

There is no phone signal, so plan for that

Coverage in Bayan-Ölgii exists around Ölgii and around some of the soum centres and essentially nowhere else. Assume you are unreachable from the moment you leave town.

The mitigation is a satellite communicator. A device that can send a text message and a position over a satellite network, and that has an emergency function, is the single most useful piece of safety equipment on a trip like this, and it costs less than a set of tyres. On a supported tour the group carries one; if you are riding independently in the Altai without one, you are relying on being found by somebody on horseback.

The related point is medical. The nearest facility capable of dealing with a serious injury is a long way away, and the nearest one capable of dealing with a very serious injury is in another country. This is a place where the sensible pace is well below your maximum, because the consequence curve is steeper than anywhere with an ambulance.

Distance is a lie, time is the truth

The single biggest planning error people make is looking at a two-hundred-kilometre day and assuming three hours.

Two hundred kilometres in the Altai is a full day. It might be eight hours moving. Average speeds of twenty-five to thirty-five kilometres an hour are normal across mixed terrain, and that is before a puncture, a river, a herd of two thousand sheep occupying the only line through a defile, or an hour drinking tea with a family who invited you in and who would be insulted if you said no.

That last one is worth planning for rather than resenting. The tea is the trip.

The weather does what it likes

The season is June to September and even inside it the Altai is high, continental and volatile. It can snow in July. Afternoon thunderstorms build over the peaks with very little warning and put down enough water in an hour to change a river.

The compensation is daylight. At that latitude in midsummer you have usable light very late, which gives you an enormous amount of margin. The standard practice is to start early, take the big obstacles in the morning, and keep the last three hours of light in reserve rather than spending them.

Riding the braid, technically

Since choosing and riding the right line is the whole job, it is worth spelling out what that actually involves on the bike.

Stand up. Not occasionally, not for the rough bits, but as the default position for most of the day on unsealed ground. Standing puts your mass through the footpegs instead of the seat, drops the effective centre of gravity, lets your legs work as suspension and gives you a sightline over the next fifty metres instead of the next ten. Riders who stay seated get beaten up by washboard and cannot see the line. It is tiring for the first two days and then it is not.

Weight back in sand, throttle steady, and let the front wheel do whatever it wants. The instinct when the front starts wandering is to grip harder and correct, and that instinct will put you down. Loose hands, drive from the rear, look at where you want to be rather than at the rut you are trying not to hit. Target fixation is the single most reliable way to end up in the exact hole you were staring at.

Drop your tyre pressures for the terrain and remember you have done it. Lower pressure gives you a bigger contact patch and a lot more grip in sand and gravel, at the cost of pinch-flat risk on sharp rock and vague handling if you find a stretch of hard surface. Somewhere in the low twenties psi is a common working compromise on tubed tyres out here, adjusted for load and rider weight.

And ride your own pace. The Altai has no audience. The fastest rider in the group getting to the ger camp forty minutes early has achieved nothing except a longer wait, and the terrain punishes ego with an efficiency that is almost moral.

Packing for a place with no shops

The kit list for the Altai is short and specific, and it divides into what goes on you and what goes in the van.

On you: layers, because the range from dawn to midday is enormous. A proper windproof outer, because open steppe with nothing to break the wind is colder than the thermometer suggests. Real sun protection, because at two thousand metres with thin dry air the UV is savage and a burnt neck ruins a week. Lip balm. Sunglasses and a clear visor, because you will ride in bright glare and then into a dust cloud.

In the van: everything else. Spare tubes in both sizes, tyre levers that are not toys, a pump that works, a fuel funnel with a filter, spare fuel and oil filters, cable ties, wire, a roll of self-amalgamating tape, spare levers, a spare clutch cable, and a torque wrench for putting back everything that vibrates loose.

The one thing riders consistently under-pack is a decent sleeping bag liner. Ger camp bedding is warm and it is communal, and a silk or cotton liner costs nothing, weighs nothing and makes a real difference to how well you sleep in a felt tent with six other people and a stove.

The one thing they consistently over-pack is clothing. You will wear riding gear all day, every day, and a yak-hair jumper in the evening. Nobody in Bayan-Ölgii cares what you look like, and there is nowhere to wear the spare shirts.

What it feels like when it goes right

All of the above reads like a list of problems, so it is worth saying what the reward is.

You get a day where you pick the right braid across a valley floor thirty kilometres wide, with a wall of snow-streaked mountains ahead that never seems to get closer, and there is nothing on the horizon in any direction that a human being made. The bike is working, the surface is fast, and you have not seen a vehicle since breakfast. An eagle lifts off a rock as you pass. Somewhere ahead there is a white dot that will turn out to be a ger with a family in it who will feed you.

There is not much of that left anywhere on earth, and none of it is available from a motorway.

Going alone, honestly assessed

People do ride the Altai independently and some of them have a wonderful time, so this is not a sales pitch dressed as a warning. It is a list of what you are taking on.

You are taking on fuel logistics with no margin, in a place where the pump you were relying on may be dry. You are taking on navigation with bad map data in terrain where a wrong valley costs you a day. You are taking on the language, because Kazakh and Mongolian are both spoken here and English is not, and asking a herder about a river crossing requires more than pointing. You are taking on your own mechanical failures with whatever is in your panniers. And you are taking on the medical consequences of a crash in a place with no phone signal and no ambulance.

Riders who pull it off tend to have three things: previous experience of genuinely remote riding, a satellite communicator, and a second bike alongside them. Take away any one of those and the risk profile changes sharply. It is also worth being honest that the Altai is a poor place to make your first attempt at self-supported remote travel, and a very good place to make your second, which is why a guided tour here works well as the trip that teaches you what you would need to do it alone next time.

What a supported motorbike tour actually removes from the equation is not the difficulty of the riding, which is the same either way and which is why you came. It removes the logistics tail. Somebody else carries the fuel, the tubes, the tools and your luggage, knows the fords, speaks to the families, and has a plan for the day something breaks. That is the entire difference, and in this particular corner of the world it is a large one.

Riding the Altai for real

Our ten-day Mongolia motorcycle tour flies you from Ulaanbaatar to Ölgii and back, which puts the whole week in the Altai instead of on the transit roads, and it runs with a support vehicle carrying fuel, spares, tubes and everybody’s luggage. The road captain has ridden these valleys enough to know which braid goes through this season, and the local Kazakh guide is the reason the fords, the fuel and the family visits all work.

You bring riding ability and a willingness to sleep in a ger. We bring the jerrycans, the satellite comms, the mechanic and the knowledge of which river to cross before lunch. Have a look at the 10-day Mongolia Wild West Ride and the tour dates. The season runs June to September and the departures are few, so if a big biking tour across empty country is on your list, message us on WhatsApp and we will tell you which weeks are still open.