The grassland north of the Khangai range does not look like a museum, and that is its quality. Rolling green hills run off to the horizon under a vast sky, herds of horses and yaks drift across the slopes, and here and there a lone grey stone rises from the grass. A Bronze Age complex of this kind, with deer stones and burial mounds, belonged to the nomadic herders who lived on the steppe in the second and first millennia BC. Their world was horses, bows and open sky, and their monuments are simple, bold and without any written record.
The typical complex has a pattern. One or more deer stones stand in a row to the east of a group of stone mounds, while around them are low round or square enclosures and satellite mounds, each with a buried horse. The main mound, the khirigsuur, covers a central burial and is surrounded by a ring or a square of stones, sometimes with lines of small cairns radiating out like the spokes of a wheel. Archaeologists suspect the layout was linked to ideas about the sun and the cosmos. Some of these monuments are very large, and the ring of stones can be hundreds of metres in diameter.
The geography is stern and beautiful. There are no towns listed in my data for this site, so treat this as remote country where help is far away. The steppe has wide river valleys, patches of larch forest on the north-facing slopes, and sudden, sharp rainstorms. Eagles and vultures circle over the hills, and marmots whistle from their burrows, while in the evening the light turns the grass to gold.
Practically, you should plan for self-sufficiency. Carry fuel and water for the whole leg, tell someone where you are going, and keep a spare tube, tools and a paper map in case your phone fails. Tracks branch and rejoin without signs, and rivers can run high after rain. A guide or a local driver with experience is a sensible option for many travellers. Respect the monuments by not climbing on the stones or moving them, and leave no rubbish.