By Ron Gluckman /Ulaan Baatar, Khinte, and the Gobi

FROM SLABS OF BLACK ROCK deep inside Yolyn Am (Vulture’s Mouth) Gorge protrudes an icy tongue, sparkling blue-white, glistening like diamonds, sprayed with dew, under a cloudless Mongolian sky.

   Among so many wonders in a remote stretch of Mongolia, near the Flaming Cliffs, famed for mankind’s greatest dinosaur discoveries, the opalescent glacier is merely one more lip-smacking sight in a country full of head-banging marvels.

  To get to this place, we have driven for days over some of the starkest terrain on earth, crossing vast stretches of emptiness on nearly invisible tracks scratched into a rolling carpet of dirt, scrub, and moss.

  But if the Gobi’s mesmerizing topography borders on the monotonous, that’s just part of its allure. Just when the endless flatness lulls you into a trance—insofar as this is possible while bumping along in a dilapidated Russian jeep—the desert offers up unexpected marvels: deep canyons, or windswept sand dunes, or dazzling rock formations.

  Or, this icy tongue wiggling through Yolyn Am — an odd juncture where the northern hemisphere's southernmost glacier meets its northernmost desert, and the only place on Earth where desert sand is licked by glacier.

  Minutes before, in shorts and sandals, I was hiking through fields of wildflowers. Now, the sunscreen is frozen on my skin. Such are the dramatic contrasts that define the Last Great Place.

  At least, that’s the way recent stories have portrayed Mongolia: as a vast, undiscovered country; the final frontier.  Many travel writers call it their favorite destination, although Mongolia remains mostly off the map and out of the news.

  Except when some natural disaster, like devastating snow storms, sadly several winters in a row now, flings Mongolia onto the front pages, and then just as abruptly back into obscurity.