Snow Leopards and Frozen Lakes

The only movement and sound is the ruffle of a light breeze on last night’s fresh snow. There are no birds. No blooming flowers. No sense of time and space. There is just the cold. It is all encompassing and seems to eat deep into your bones.  This landscape is too big. Too daunting. Too powerful. It will be, you conclude, impossible to find what you are looking for in such a vast amphitheatre of frozen rock and ice. But, just as you’re ready to give up and retreat to the warmth of your homestay with its view across the valley to a large Tibetan Buddhist monastery, the guide gasps. “There” he says as he lowers his binoculars and points toward a nearby cliff face, “She’s just over there”. All thoughts of cold immediately retreat from mind. Hurriedly you point your binoculars toward the cliff and there – obvious now you know where to look – is the ghost of the mountains. A female snow leopard basking in the weak winter sunshine. And as you watch there is a movement behind her and two tiny balls of fluff come into focus. Mummy snow leopard has babies.

There is no animal in the Himalaya more iconic than the snow leopard and none that are more elusive (except perhaps the yeti!). For many years the chances of seeing a truly wild snow leopard were considered close to zero. But, in just the past few years, conservationists working in the trans-Himalayan region of Ladakh in northern India have discovered that, if you know where to look and when, the chance of seeing a snow leopard in the wild are actually pretty good. In fact, spend a few days with one of our expert local guides in the mountain valleys of Ladakh and you’d be unlucky not to see one.

For much of the year the snow leopards are high up in the mountains, way beyond the tree line where the air is painfully thin and few of us have the ability to venture. But come winter and the leopards follow their prey down into the lower altitude valleys. And this is when it’s possible to lay eyes on the Ghost of the Himalaya.

But this adventure doesn’t just focus on snow leopards. We also venture onto the vast, high-altitude Changtang plateau to visit spectacular frozen salt lakes. We will drink yak butter tea with nomads in their felt-hair tents. We will pause at 5000m plus mountain passes festooned in prayer flags. We chat to monks in treasure filled Buddhist monasteries and we hike snowy paths to stunning viewpoints.

Ladakh has long been a popular area of India to visit in the summer, but between November and March only the most determined travel to this frozen land, but if temperatures that drop way below zero Celsius don’t put you off, then winter in Ladakh, when the landscape is stripped to essentials, is a truly magical time to visit.