The wind picked up and wrestled up the tent all night again, but in the morning, we woke up to this-
We cooked hot breakfast and got ready to hike through the rest of the canyon. It was a fantastic hike- more ice fields, streams and rocky walls. We spotted a wild ibex and some beautiful birds. The entire hike through the Yolin Am Canyon would be quite safe in a dry summer period or mid-winter, but in November there were a few places where we had to walk over precariously thin ice and climb some small rock walls to avoid exposed rivers.
We hiked 4-5 km through the canyon before we reached a dirt road that lead to an extremely windy valley. The wind was so strong that we could barely even hear each other speak. According to mapsme, we needed to walk another 10km or so down this road to reach the main road that went back to Dalanzadgad. Lucky for us, there were a couple of cars in this valley and one of them stopped to give us a lift.
It was another family. They didn’t speak much English, but after about a 20 minute drive, we understood that they weren’t going back to the main road, but to another canyon.
“Cool!”, we thought, “another extra cherry on the pie” :)
This other canyon was called “Mukhart Shivert”, it was much smaller than Yolin Am and had a dead end, but was a spectacular sight as well. It was like a big trench with tall vertical walls and a floorbed of slick, glassy blue ice. At the dead end, there was a big frozen waterfall.
It took us about an hour and a half to walk through the whole canyon, make lunch, and then get back out onto the dirt road again. There were plenty of families in Mukhart Shivert, so it wasn't hard to hitch another lift back to Dalanzadgad. The first car on the road stopped and drove us all the way there :)
We spent one more night in Baatar’s yurt ($4) and got ready to hitch back to Ulaanbaatar the next day.
Total expenses of day 25:
$4 yurt
$2 food
$1 shower
$7.50 handmade local artwork (for my parents)
=$14.50
Total expenses so far of 25 days in Mongolia (including the price of getting to Mongolia):
$287.50