Gumbolt keeps a ger with his younger sister Pooray. His brother Dawachoo keeps a ger nearby. Together they shepherd the family stock--herds that blanket the hillside. You count more than 1000 fat-tail sheep, but nomads never discuss numbers. Animals and herds are intertwined with government regulations, subsidies and incentives, and it is all a matter--a personal matter--of poverty or wealth. Their ger caps a hilltop and you can see the distant herders and their herds for miles around.

It is late September in Arkhangay, and I am herding Gumbolt's yaks. This is the altar namar--the golden autumn when vegetation withers and turns the lands a golden hue--and Arkhangay is the wild jewel of Central Mongolia. Gumbolt drives the yaks over the crest of the mountain, down a vertical slope of loose scree and across highway A1002--a paved road, rare in Mongolia. The yaks bellow complaints, look backwards, stampede ahead. Gumbolt gallops his horse down the steep slope and up the other side. Then he stops to watch me.

Gumbolt and Pooray tend a cut on a goat's hooves with iodine.

The milking of mare's, goats, yaks and sheep occurs at first light, before the nomads set off to find pasture. The women lead the work, bundling the animals together on tethers and milking them on little wooden stools (the men are nearby and often help). They collect the milk in old tin pails, or cheap plastic buckets, and you see the by-products hanging from the walls of the ger, stored in sheep's stomachs and hand-made leather satchels. The animals seem to know what needs to be done and cooperate to help the nomads do it.

The steppe is the nomads' "middle of everywhere" and the center of every thing. You will see horsemen riding five in stride, like high plains drifters of the wild American cowboy genre, like a posse. And everywhere you see a horse, or two, saddled, standing solemnly, a little bleary, worse for wear and tear, hitched to a post or to an old Russian truck, reins hanging down, beside every nomad's ger, or dotting some vast expanse, but ready to ride on demand. These Mongolian steeds are no ponies. They are fiery, spirited equine beasts, less than half tamed, all hellfire and brimstone. Here Dawachoo uses a traditional 'urga' -- a lasso attached to a long pole -- to snare the horse he wants.

Meat and dairy products produced from domesticated animals are the staple of life: vegetables are a rarity. Possessions are often few, with modern solar technology and TV by satellite found alongside traditional technologies.

Mongolian culture has for thousands of years revolved around nomadic pastoralism. Nature is central to the nomad's way, and all things revolve around the five snouts: yak, sheep, goat, camel and--snout of all snouts--horse. Pigs and chickens are not un-heard-of, but they are un-herd-able, and so you find them only where nomads have more permanently settled. Mongols sing about land, their mothers, and their horses, and life on the steppe demands continuous adaptation to climatic conditions and the availability of pasture. The steppe is vast, relatively unpopulated, with mountains, lakes, flatlands and valleys that roll on, and on, and on, where--on bike or horse--you can sometimes see where you are going days in advance. Life is hard for an old woman who must haul precious water to her ger.

The folk taxonomy of Mongolia, as everywhere, is under attack from globalization and the economies of commodification, sound-bite advertising and permanent warfare. Languages in Mongolia are going extinct, and with them the vast knowledge and the universe of meaning of the small-scale herder culture. The taxonomy of the nomadic language allows nomads to talk easily but precisely about where they have been, where the herds are going, or where the neighbors are migrating. The naming of the landscape is based on spiritual and religious beliefs. Nomads believe that spirits inhabit the waters, the mountain peaks, the natural springs and ridges. One must not cross a mountain pass without leaving an offering. The folk taxonomy of the language and culture revolves around the subtlest of clues available to the high-plains horsemen in their daily quest for survival.

On the great Mongol steppe, killing droughts come with the ghang, where summer sunshine scorches grasslands, and the qara zhud, a snowless winter in a waterless desert. Torrential rains bring floods. The caghan zhud is a blizzard of frozen snowy starvation and the tugharai-yin zhud defines another kind of hunger: too many cattle or horses, thousands of hooves ripping apart the land; too many sheep or goats, devouring every last grass. Winter plunges the mercury to minus 35 or minus 40 or colder -- minus 70 in recent years -- the killing temperatures. Whole herds vanish overnight, and with them the livelihoods of whole families. Hardest hit were small-scale Mongolian herders. Ghang struck again in the winter of 2010, killing some 8 million (17%) of the country's livestock. Conditions since then have only gotten worse. However, ghang and zhud have now also become big businesses in Mongolia: absent the appropriate land management policies, or the enforcement of laws, in a system rife with corruption, the effects of climate mayhem have been exacerbated by government officials with over-sized herds who capitalize on ordinary people's losses and monopolize government subsidies, capitalize on western donors' support, and dominate the best grazing land.

A typical night in the family ger somewhere on the vast steppe (temperature outside, minus 20 degrees F.).

One of the 'five snouts' crucial to Mongol existence, the Bactrian camel provides meat, milk, cheese, skins and fur and can survive the harsh climatic extremes of the Mongol steppe, from the deserts of Uvs province in the northwest to the vast Gobi that stretches across the south.

A nomad peruses a letter while waiting for a meal at a shack on the roadless steppe.

Ger cities are more and more common. Public schools that arguably flourished under communism have been decimated by capitalism as privatization has sold off public (school) lands and assets (e.g. public parks). There is a rising anger amongst youth and adults alike as they witness their way of life being taken from them without recourse.

Hundreds of people work each day picking through garbage in the city dumps; many of them live there: western charity and aid groups have preyed on them, promising all kinds of changes, using images of them in fancy brochures to win new grants, but providing no substantive relief.

Children work like slaves to support families who live in city dumps. Everyone is very sensitive to having their picture taken -- photographers have demeaned these migrants and daily dump workers, and the Mongolians are a proud people.

Temperatures in the city dumps of Ulaanbaator, where people search for something to keep themselves alive, some product to sell or metal to recycle, or something to eat, often hit 30 below zero during early fall months and can fall to 40 below during mid-winter.

Ger cities peopled by artisanal miners have also risen up in places where minerals have been located, and social problems like alcoholism and prostitution have followed the "gold rush".

Former state run energy systems relied on coal and comraderie, and mining offers one option for displaced nomads seeking to recover some semblance of hope.

City infrastructure is a mix of communist hold-outs and budding capitalist privatization; at one point there were scores of thousands of Ulaanbaator's homeless children living in huge underground piping systems offering heat to survive the brutal winter.

Communities of herders that have stood up, peacefully and unarmed, for their environmental and human rights--clean air, clean water, clean pastures--have been met with paramilitary violence. These women protest the illegal arrest, detention and torture of family members with signs, silence and hunger fasts.

Patrons at an Ulaanbaatar nightclub adorned with Nazi memorabilia and full-life statues of Gestapo storm troopers give the straight-arm "Heil Hitler" salute. Mongolian witnesses to public protests claim that 'riots' (e.g. post-election 'riots') were designed to justify arrests, since they were manufactured by neo-Nazi provocateurs tolerated and promoted by police. More than 72 people disappeared after one 'riot' in 2008, while official tolls reported only five people killed. Far-right groups in Mongolia are proliferating, and the neo-Nazis allegedly serve as mafia thugs for government parliamentarians and other recipients of western largesse.

Capitalism ushered in western advertising, with the allure and promise of democracy and wealth, but the privatization that bough the shiny new skyscrapers to Ulaanbaatar have brought greater dispossession to the Mongolian people.

Skulls, totems, prayer silks and empty booze bottles left on a sacred ovoo mound belie the mix of spirituality and confusion brought by shifting ideologies of power, class and private profit. Ovoos and prayer flags are found in the most remote locations, but also pepper the outskirts of the cities.

Old horses never die here, but they don't last forever. They wander over the steppe. Their bodies give out, but their souls never do. You see the skeletons on the land.

Every nook and cranny of a nomad's landscape is committed to memory and every geographical feature has some spiritual meaning. Nomads survive by knowing nature: the season, the moss growing on a tree, the excavations of a marmot's burrow. They can detect the inclination of a slope under their horse through the balance organs of their ears. Their sense of orientation relies on natural clues and the use of all of the senses. They interpret the moans and groans and squeaks and snarls of the earth beneath their feet--the texture--to tell them the conditions of the land and the availability of fodder. The precise locations of herders, many miles distant, are known and communicated through mental mapping systems, binoculars, and gossip. These nomads -- who never get lost -- are finding life increasingly uncertain.