There are those who drift, and those who root. But the most ancient, most human instinct is to roam. Before walls, before maps, before borders and deeds, there were only people and the path ahead. And of all the modern nomads who carry the ember of that ancestral fire, none burn brighter than Jack Wheeler—a rare analog soul in a digital storm, a cartographer of culture, a wanderer whose compass points to the unexplored. When you look at Jack you can see galaxies behind his eyes.
Jack has orbited every country and territory on the planet, but again and again he returns to Mongolia—the marrow of the Earth’s great nomadic tradition. This time, he invited a few of us to join, to drink from the wellspring of a lifestyle that sings in the blood like a memory, buried but not forgotten.
It begins, as it often does, with a horizon, and a drive from the capital city of Ulaanbaatar east across the steppes to the Genghis Khan Monument, at 131 foot high the world’s largest equestrian statue, erupting from the grasslands like a steel mirage. We climb into the belly of the great nomad, ascending to a lookout that opens across the wind-brushed lands he once conquered—not with walls, but with motion. He was born into the forests of Khentii, so thick with trees, the Secret History of the Mongols tells us, “A snake could not creep in.”
Today’s trees struggle to take root. But even now, a new generation of Mongolians plants with hope—part of the “billion tree” initiative, their shovels striking against desertification, a reminder that even those who rove feel deep stewardship for the land. It is the Mongolian way: not a nostalgic retreat, but a future tied to the past.
Then, we are airborne to Ölgii, Mongolia’s westernmost airport, a mile-high town inhabited predominantly by Kazakhs. From here, our Land Cruisers trundle up into the spine of the Altai Mountains, to a temporary camp of gers—circular wool-wrapped dwellings engineered not just for warmth but for movement. No cement foundations, no anchors. Everything about a ger speaks of mobility, adaptation, impermanence. The shelter reminds me of my first North Face dome tent, inspired by Bucky Fuller’s geodesic epiphanies. Did Bucky come here first? I wonder. Because everything essential is already here—portable, efficient, poetic.
Inside, the ger glows with warmth from a wood-burning stove, and when I lay on my bed, gazing up through the toono—the central smoke hole—I am reminded of a James Turrell Skyspace. Only this is older. Beautiful, but practical. This is the original Skyspace. A family can erect such a home in hours and be gone the next day, like mist across the plain.
Here, beneath the saw-toothed summits of Tsambagarav and Tsast, we meet a family of Kazakh eagle hunters—true transhumant nomads who still follow their herds with the seasons, never putting down more than a footprint. Their life is a dance with the land. No fences. No gates. No mortgages. No HOA fees. Just the logic of the grass, the rhythm of survival, the ancient contract between man and land, and the humbling proximity to the ever-blue sky. Here, ownership is a foreign concept. The earth is not something to buy. It is something to borrow.
While an eagle sits on a perch in the foyer, we sit in the family room sipping milk and salt tea and noshing on horse meat beside a dung-fed fire. If the tea’s surface spins clockwise, we are welcome. If counterclockwise, we must go. Ours spins with grace.
Orken, a 65-year-old world champion eagle hunter with a wall full of medals, sits regal in a wolfskin coat and a hat of fox pelts. He raises his golden eagle—always a female, larger and more commanding—and explains how she was captured as a fledgling from the nest, trained with food and voice, and set to hunt by hunger and an inimitable bond. There is no force here, only respect. No captivity, only partnership.
The pastoral Kazakhs live much as their ancestors did—moving with weather and need, not with jobs or fashion. They measure wealth not in square footage or credit scores, but in sheep and self-determination. They are, in many ways, living reminders of who we once were, and perhaps, who we are meant to be.
In Mongolia, over 800,000 people still live this way—nearly a third of the population—making it the last great bastion of true nomadism. The country is twice the size of France yet has fewer people per square mile than any other sovereign state. This absence of density is not a void—it is a canvas. And the nomads are brushstrokes.
Each day unfolds like a scroll. We leapfrog across this painterly expanse in Cessna Caravans and with long Land Cruiser drives, to places with names that sound like the wind: Tavanbogd, Khar Us Nuur, Harhorin, Dalanzadgad. We sail over a series of endorheic lakes, flying parallel to the Chinese border and along the main ridge of the Altai Mountains. We cross over aprons of emptiness, only occasionally seeing the white dome of a ger dotting the widescreen landscape. We land at Ulaanhuis, just as the ground crew chases a goat off the grass runway.
One night, over a steppe-to-table dinner in Hovd, we are serenaded by throat singers with horsehead fiddles, a Chinese Yangqin piano, and a delicate dancer wearing a wrap-around angle-length deel. Their harmonics weave into the horsehair strings of Mongolia’s traveling nature. The guttural sounds are the audible soul of Mongolia’s nomadic heritage, passed down through generations. The music doesn’t ask to be understood—it asks to be felt. Like the land itself.
We hike alpine valleys where a trip of biscuit-colored Yangir Ibex, and a scattering of Altai Argali (the world’s largest wild sheep species with horns that weigh up to seventy-five pounds) cling to vertical stone. We pass sacred ovoos—piles of stones and prayer flags marking sky-bound shrines—and add rocks of our own. We sip camel milk vodka beneath flaming cliffs where the first dinosaur eggs were discovered.
In the late afternoon we drive to Moltsog Sands, first passing a herd of Mongolian horses, fat from the lush grass, manes tumbling in the wind, their colors a mix of dun, chestnut, and skewbald. Then we drive alongside dozens of Dzeren gazelles, distinctive white patches on their rumps, known for their nomadic lifestyle and ability to thrive in arid environments.
As we pull into a remote family camp, we hear what sounds like old men snorting and harrumphing—a caravan of camels. They are tall, with impossibly long and knobby legs and a high-handed look.
One stares directly at me with long lashes and Bette Davis eyes, and I feel I could fall into her camelids. So, I mount the resting charge, and she unkneels and stands erect. Jack and the others unfurl their ships, and we amble off for a sundowner ride with the local nomads on the two-humped Bactrian camels. These ungulates endure wide variations in temperature, from freezing cold to blistering heat, and can survive for months without drinking water. A man, other than a Nomadic Mongol, can last but one.
The Author on a Bactrian Camel in the Gobi Desert.
And the animals can pack a lot. They traveled the fabled Silk Route to Europe, and the south-to-north Tea Road, carrying up to 900 lbs. of leaves per beast from the Great Wall of China, across Mongolia, to Russia.
On camelback we saunter up into the Gobi sand dunes, sensually shaped honey-colored ridges, soft as talcum. We ride a landscape more sky than soil, as the light changes the sand from beige to pumpkin to scarlet, and the shadows form ever-shifting patterns and textures, akin to abstract art. The dunes are migratory, like the nomads they host.
In the soft blue light of the early evening the terrain turns pointillist, as though entering a dreamscape of flat lakebeds flagged with sharp, dark stones. It is time to head back to our gers for a deep and untroubled sleep.
The day following, in the high Yol Valley, in the vault of blue above, we see the Bearded Vulture (Gypaetus barbatus), also known as the Lammergeier, soaring high above a ravine. Yol is the Mongolian name for this large migratory bird.
We hike into a glacial gorge whose glacier is now gone—a stark lesson in fragility, in the disappearance of things we once thought permanent.
But permanence, nomads will tell you, is an illusion. It is motion, not stasis, which defines life. The seed moves before it roots. The animal migrates before it mates. The human, in our deepest design, is a traveler. Sedentarism is a recent experiment. Nomadism is our natural code.
At Karakorum, the ruins of the Mongol Empire’s ancient capital, we walk ghost trails among fallen stones. This was once the epicenter of a civilization that spanned continents, the largest contiguous kingdom the world has ever known. Yet its leaders lived not in palaces, but in tents. They ruled from the saddle. Even at the height of empire, they remained nomads.
This is not to romanticize hardship. The unteathered life is tough, unpredictable, and stripped of modern comforts. But it is also deeply aligned with our original design. We evolved not to stare at screens under LED skies, but to scan horizons, read weather, and follow stars. We were meant to live lightly on the land, not smother it in concrete.
In the final days of our journey, I watch a caravan of camels dissolve into twilight. I think of cities far away—of elevators and deadlines, of subscriptions and streaming. And I wonder: is that truly living? Or is it slow suffocation dressed up as security?
On our last night, inside a grand yurt beneath the Bogd Khan Mountains, our Mongolian guide, Batana, himself raised in single-story gers between pastures, lifts his glass and offers this toast:
“The people who made the Great Wall were great. But the people who made the Chinese build the Great Wall… were the greatest.”
While the settled world builds walls, the nomadic spirit remains unbound, adaptable, in tune with the earth and its heavens.
Jack Wheeler points to a swastika painted on a wooden pillar behind our dinner table. It predates its association with Nazi Germany, and even with Bhuddism, he explains. Known as the “Tsagaan Khas” in Mongolian, it is a symbol of spirituality, eternity, well-being, and good luck, especially for the itinerate.
To wander, to adapt, to live with the land, not against it—that may be the freest state of all.
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Photo by Richard Bangs