Don’t look at the cheese, I told myself.

It was a tense moment in the yurt. I’d finished my fourth bowl of tea, and our host, Gulinara, was offering more of the strong, homemade version of Parmesan around. To refuse would be impolite, of course, but since I didn’t speak a word of Russian, to refuse was downright impossible. The cheese was very strong, very salty and was served in huge chunks.

The table in the center of the warm, hide-bound yurt was crammed with goodies —sweets, cream, butter, fried potatoes, meat — and most of us sitting on tiny perches around the low table were getting liberally dosed with vodka. Since I was driving the Land Rover back to our base camp, I was not drinking. As “designated driver” is not a concept recognized on the steppe, I had to become “allergic” to the spirit.

We were in the Altai, an astoundingly beautiful region of steppe and rugged mountains situated in the far southeast of Russia, close to the Mongolian border. Semi-autonomous within Russia, this republic is not somewhere many foreigners reach, and I was lucky to be on an organized trip with Biosphere Expeditions.

Mornings are chilly on the steppe.

We were here to survey snow leopards, prey animals and any other wildlife we happened to come across. The group consisted of 12 volunteers, a British expedition leader, a Ukrainian scientist and a half-dozen Russians who would be our interface with the local people and environment.

We were visiting the yurts because families like Gulinara and her family live a semi-nomadic existence and are invaluable sources of information on snow leopard movements and prey animals, since it is they who see them most often.

Biosphere has focused on snow leopards, as they are endangered worldwide, with perhaps just a few thousand remaining, scattered across tracts of mountainous country throughout Asia. Only 50 to 100 are thought to exist in Russia, and our chances of seeing one were very slim indeed, as was made abundantly clear at early briefings.

The Altai, with its steep, rocky ridges and high-altitude valleys, is an important corridor for leopard movement between populations, so any data we gleaned would go toward helping establish protection for them in this region.

If I had to pick out a particular highlight, it would probably be the finding of an ibex and argali trail crossing a ridgeline at 10,500 feet (3,200 m). Argali are wild sheep and, together with ibex, they make up major prey items in a snow leopard’s diet. In this region they are also scarce, and we found few fresh signs of these wary animals.

By this point, we had acclimatized to the altitude and the strenuous exercise. Our debut climb began after driving two hours from camp along bouncy tracks and across boulder-strewn rivers. We reached a quiet valley with grassy hills rising all around.

Clambering up the slopes, we soon forgot our aching limbs, and started developing our tracking skills. It took me a while to get into the subtlety of picking out signs of animal passage, but eventually some neatly cut white gentian stems caught my eye. Volodya, our Ukrainian scientist, ambled over to take a look.