We weren’t looking for reindeer. We came to Mongolia because there’s a ski area here. Just one. It opened in 2009. Its slogan is TASTE OF LIFE. It has two quad chairlifts, nine runs, 626 feet of vertical, 300 rental snowboards, 480 lockers, 170 staff members, a gift shop, and a rifle range. It’s called Sky Resort—maybe to honor the country’s onetime god, the Eternal Blue Sky, or maybe to be optimistic about its possibilities (because the sky’s the limit). We wanted to investigate the emergence, or reemergence, of ski culture here, because even though a few Mongolians have skied for a while—using horses as rope tows, sometimes—this Sky Resort was the first step toward what Western Hemispherical elitists call real skiing, a pastime that the new rich, who are being lifted by a rising tide of enormous mining developments in the far south of the country, can now, apparently, afford.