Dave: It looks Montana-esque out there.

Mike: How low does your sleeping bag go? What temperature is it rated to?

The expedition “boys” are up and gathered in the narrow hall of the night train from Beijing to Hohhot. After a breathless scramble to get our 17 bags of equipment onto the train in time, we went to bed with great anticipation of what the landscape would hold when we awoke.

Now, perched on a tiny seat in the hall outside the sleeper rooms I sit in front of a long window. A blue morning has arrived and the much-awaited landscape is emerging. First, faintly rolling hills ease out of the sky, then needle-thin trees and a silver snake of a river. As the orange sun rises further, the hills are no longer smooth – now they are rocky, rough and weathered. It is much cooler here than Beijing, and not just because it is morning. We’re 3,000 feet above sea level and will travel higher before we reach camp.

Dave: There you go, there’s snow – see? Where the overhang is? The snow is still packed where there must have been a shady spot.

Andy: Well, the river doesn’t have ice on it. That’s a good sign.

We’re all feeling a little trepidation about the cold. After many seasons of fieldwork in the Sahara, we’re not sure what to expect from Inner Mongolia. Rumors of night temperatures in the 30s have left everyone concerned they didn’t pack enough warm clothes.

The race to the train required the team to load 17 heavy equipment bags onto two rickety carts. The bicycle cart that met them in Hohhot were more stable.

The highlight of the train chase last night – after the episode when the carts were too wide to fit through a metal gate and had to be taken off the rickety carts and loaded back onto them, but before we had to pack them into our rooms so tightly there were bags on everyone’s beds and no floor space at all – was the moment when we turned a corner and saw before us a series of steep, 45 degree inclines. While some team members had to throw themselves in front of each cart to slow the downward slide, other team members pitched themselves, crouching, onto the backs of the carts to act as human brakes. 

The escapade was a good way to break in the new team – five Americans and one French.

Andy Gray is an undergraduate at the University of Chicago. Andy sports a goatee and lamb-chop sideburns, a bevy of surfer-slang of terms – despite a childhood in Maine – and complete openness to new experiences. For the last two years he has been working in the lab at the University of Chicago and logged nearly 600 hours working on cleaning cement-hard sandstone concretions off an enormous crocodile skull from Niger.  At 22 Andy is the youngest expedition member and is chomping at the bit for the fieldwork to begin. This is Andy’s first expedition and his main goal to date is to find a fully articulated dinosaur skeleton.

Andy reads on the night train to Hohhot.

Mike Hettwer, expedition photographer and website co-producer and tech troubleshooter, is a veteran of the Niger 2000 expedition. His early days as an electrical engineer with a computer design bent lend themselves perfectly for developing a field-website system. Mike has had to address website glitches – software, hardware and power-related alike – in the Sahara and now in the Gobi. Mike is jovial, generous, among the most eager for every prospecting bout, and has a passion for hard lemon candy that rival’s Paul’s passion for chocolate.

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