Orkhon Waterfall spends most of the year not falling. On the open steppe of Övörkhangai province in central Mongolia the grassland ends without warning at a gorge of black basalt, and when the river has water in it the Orkhon drops about twenty metres over that edge — the widest fall in the country. It only has water after the summer rains. The fall thunders through July and August, thins as the land dries, and in a lean year is down to a trickle by autumn. The rock it pours over came from lava that flooded this part of the valley some twenty thousand years ago, and the gorge is a fissure in that flow. The river seems to fall into a crack in the ground, with the steppe running on unbroken either side of it.
Larch woods grow right up to the lip, threaded by short paths from one lookout to the next, which give you the fall head-on from the edge and then side-on from among the trees. They also give you the only shade for a long way. On the rocky high ground above the gorge stands an ovoo, a Mongolian sacred cairn of stones hung with blue silk scarves. The short climb to it gives you the best view there is: straight down the black gorge and out over the grassland the river crosses. This has been the seat of one steppe empire after another for two thousand years. The ruins of Karakorum, the Mongol capital, lie a few hours downstream, and nomads have grazed these pastures without a break the whole time. At the foot of the falls a scramble down the rocks reaches a pool that hits you as a shock of cold after the heat of the plain, and families camped on the rim swim in it. Then, for much of the winter, there is no waterfall at all: the river stops in mid-drop and the black gorge holds a wall of ice that does not move.