LADAKH
PART THREE
The next morning was my first real day of snow leoparding. The sun doesn't come up until a bit after 6am, and there is no electricity (apart for a generator in the evening) so there's no point getting up earlier. Usually I would wake up and then just lie there for an hour or so before it was light enough to bother rising. Dolma would bring a thermos of tea to my room around 6.10, and then at 7am I would go down for breakfast which would be some form of fried dough and a fried omelette. I had little appetite for the first couple of days but soon got over that, and by the end of my stay there I was even starting to tolerate the Tibetan cuisine (it is based largely around dough made of wheat-flour and water, with additions of root vegetables and sometimes rice and dal). Breakfast would be as stated above; lunch would be much the same but also including a boiled egg and potato (I took lunch out with me every day); dinner would usually be some sort of stew of dough and vegetables. The trick was to eat a dough item at the same time as a vegetable item to enable you to actually get it down. If you tried just eating a dough item by itself it would end up being like trying to chew a wad of glue.
My basic plan was to walk each day down to the Husing and Tarbung Valleys and sit somewhere high and advantageous to scan the cliffs for signs of life. It takes so long to walk anywhere at this altitude that there seemed little point in trying to move around too much - planting myself in one likely spot for the day was probably the best strategy. The real problem (of course) is that snow leopards are incredibly shy and elusive, and also incredibly well camouflaged. There could be a dozen snow leopards within a hundred metres of you in this terrain and you'd never see them until they move. And from one position you can see maybe five to ten cliff-faces and mountain-sides, out of the hundreds or thousands that a snow leopard could currently be on.
The mountains here are actually amazingly varied. You've got domed sand-coloured ones, and then right behind those there would be deep purple ones, and then behind those there would be great jagged spires. It was like someone had been tasked with designing the Himalayas but had never seen mountain ranges before, so they just emptied out the whole box in one spot and said "that'll do". The rocks come in every colour imaginable, including bright green and red and white; some rocks are striped with bands of different colours. There are cliffs which look like they are covered in fuzzy green fur because they are entirely composed of shattering slate. Slopes may be jumbles of rocks, sheer slabs of granite, or screes of slate chips. Some areas look straight out of Barsoom. The terrain is really quite bewildering in its complexity. And it's completely silent apart for the calls of choughs now and then, or the occasional clatter of stones dislodged by bharal. Sometimes it felt like I was on the moon.
So this first morning, I walked past the groups of chukar and hill pigeons in the village, over the frozen stream, through the second campsite, and made my way back down the Rumbak Valley to the Husing Valley. It took a little longer than anticipated because I kept stopping along the way to scan the surrounding cliffs. Near the Husing Valley I came across a small group of bharal (blue sheep), which are the snow leopard's prey. As winter progresses the bharal move down the mountains away from the snow (so they can still feed), and the snow leopards follow them down. This group was small, only eight animals, mostly females and young. I saw the same group almost every day in the Husing Valley. There is no hunting here so all the animals are very casual around humans. They aren't tame but they aren't afraid either - I suppose you could say they are aloof. So long as you don't approach too closely (say, within fifty metres) they mostly ignore you.
Today was almost like a reconnaissance, to get the lay of the land as it were. I climbed (slowly, breathing hard) up the Husing Valley. After a good amount of climbing quite a way up I decided that tour groups wouldn't be taking old people up through such rugged terrain, so I headed downwards. As it turned out the scanning positions for the tour groups aren't very far up into the valley after all. The prime spot is still about twenty minutes in, but that is only because you have to keep stopping to breathe. Once I had found what seemed like the the best spot to sit and wait, I did just that. The only animals I saw were yellow-billed choughs. But it would have been silly to have expected to see a snow leopard on my first day - especially when doing it solo you should never expect to see a snow leopard, simply hope to see a snow leopard!
The main problem with staying in the village rather than at the first campsite is the one of travel times. You don't get down to the Husing Valley until about 9am and then in order to get back to the village before dark you have to leave the valley at about 3.30 or 4pm (giving yourself 20-30 minutes to get down from the Husing, an hour up the Rumbak, and then 20-30 minutes to the village itself). So the days are much shorter than they would be otherwise. Heading back to the village on this first day I saw the bharal herd again, the same large-eared pikas as before, and two new birds for the trip, brown dipper and brown accentor (the latter being a lifer for me). Back at the village I saw another woolly hare.
The next two days were repeats of the first - down to the Husing, sit and watch. The same herd of eight bharal, the same flock of yellow-billed choughs. No snow leopard. Still, I wasn't too worried. Three days out of my allotted eleven was fine, and I wasn't really expecting to see one so soon anyway. I was, however, becoming a little concerned that the only bharal I was seeing down there were the same eight every day. The weather did seem warmer than I had been expecting, and if there are no bharal moving down then there won't be any snow leopards! I decided that for the fourth day I would visit the Tarbung Valley and see what, if anything, was happening there. When I got back to the village (on the third day) there was a flock of twenty bharal on the nearby slopes, which the next morning had become forty. Hopefully that was a good sign.
The following morning, as I was heading out of the village to the Tarbung Valley, a man with some better English than most asked where I was going. I said to the Tarbung and he scoffed and said (as far as I could tell) that there were no snow leopards down there yet - I needed to go upwards towards Yurutse, not downwards. I decided to stick with the Tarbung for now (I had already told the people at my homestay where I was going, as I did every morning in case I hadn't returned in the evening) and then would try going upwards tomorrow. Further down the valley I passed the donkey man who I had seen in the Husing for the last two days (his donkeys are sent up there to graze). I said I was going to the Tarbung and he replied "snow leopard, no". I couldn't tell if he was asking if I had seen any yet, or telling me there were none down there yet. But it was starting to tie in with me not seeing many bharal and my worry that it was just too early for the cats to be moving downwards. On the other hand, I knew the tour groups start coming up in September or October, and why would they do that if that was too early for any success?
The Tarbung Valley mouth is about ten or fifteen minutes walk further back down the road from the mouth of the Husing Valley. It is on the opposite side, and you need to cross the little river to get to it. The access isn't as easy as the Husing - I mean, it isn't difficult, it is just the initial part is forcing through some scrubby juniper and then there are a couple of precipitous donkey-tracks across the sides of steep hillsides, sometimes no wider than one of my boots, the first one winding across a slope of gravelly sand and the second across a nerve-wracking scree of slate shards. Once past these (and the return seemed even more treacherous!) the valley is really nice with good vantage spots. I saw a small group of bharal, perhaps even the same goup from the Husing, a golden eagle, and a big flock of rock doves. I was seeing pairs or singles of golden eagles and lammergeiers quite often, but always soaring, never close up. The doves were my first truly wild rock doves. This species is the original of the domestic pigeon, the feral form being what you see in cities all over the world. There were a few around Rumbak but I wasn't sure if they were actual wild birds (as the hill pigeons were) or domestics. These ones in the Tarbung were the genuine article though, so I was quite pleased to see them.
There were, however, no snow leopards.
Tomorrow I would try looking higher up the mountains, further up than Rumbak.
PART THREE
The next morning was my first real day of snow leoparding. The sun doesn't come up until a bit after 6am, and there is no electricity (apart for a generator in the evening) so there's no point getting up earlier. Usually I would wake up and then just lie there for an hour or so before it was light enough to bother rising. Dolma would bring a thermos of tea to my room around 6.10, and then at 7am I would go down for breakfast which would be some form of fried dough and a fried omelette. I had little appetite for the first couple of days but soon got over that, and by the end of my stay there I was even starting to tolerate the Tibetan cuisine (it is based largely around dough made of wheat-flour and water, with additions of root vegetables and sometimes rice and dal). Breakfast would be as stated above; lunch would be much the same but also including a boiled egg and potato (I took lunch out with me every day); dinner would usually be some sort of stew of dough and vegetables. The trick was to eat a dough item at the same time as a vegetable item to enable you to actually get it down. If you tried just eating a dough item by itself it would end up being like trying to chew a wad of glue.
My basic plan was to walk each day down to the Husing and Tarbung Valleys and sit somewhere high and advantageous to scan the cliffs for signs of life. It takes so long to walk anywhere at this altitude that there seemed little point in trying to move around too much - planting myself in one likely spot for the day was probably the best strategy. The real problem (of course) is that snow leopards are incredibly shy and elusive, and also incredibly well camouflaged. There could be a dozen snow leopards within a hundred metres of you in this terrain and you'd never see them until they move. And from one position you can see maybe five to ten cliff-faces and mountain-sides, out of the hundreds or thousands that a snow leopard could currently be on.
The mountains here are actually amazingly varied. You've got domed sand-coloured ones, and then right behind those there would be deep purple ones, and then behind those there would be great jagged spires. It was like someone had been tasked with designing the Himalayas but had never seen mountain ranges before, so they just emptied out the whole box in one spot and said "that'll do". The rocks come in every colour imaginable, including bright green and red and white; some rocks are striped with bands of different colours. There are cliffs which look like they are covered in fuzzy green fur because they are entirely composed of shattering slate. Slopes may be jumbles of rocks, sheer slabs of granite, or screes of slate chips. Some areas look straight out of Barsoom. The terrain is really quite bewildering in its complexity. And it's completely silent apart for the calls of choughs now and then, or the occasional clatter of stones dislodged by bharal. Sometimes it felt like I was on the moon.
So this first morning, I walked past the groups of chukar and hill pigeons in the village, over the frozen stream, through the second campsite, and made my way back down the Rumbak Valley to the Husing Valley. It took a little longer than anticipated because I kept stopping along the way to scan the surrounding cliffs. Near the Husing Valley I came across a small group of bharal (blue sheep), which are the snow leopard's prey. As winter progresses the bharal move down the mountains away from the snow (so they can still feed), and the snow leopards follow them down. This group was small, only eight animals, mostly females and young. I saw the same group almost every day in the Husing Valley. There is no hunting here so all the animals are very casual around humans. They aren't tame but they aren't afraid either - I suppose you could say they are aloof. So long as you don't approach too closely (say, within fifty metres) they mostly ignore you.
Today was almost like a reconnaissance, to get the lay of the land as it were. I climbed (slowly, breathing hard) up the Husing Valley. After a good amount of climbing quite a way up I decided that tour groups wouldn't be taking old people up through such rugged terrain, so I headed downwards. As it turned out the scanning positions for the tour groups aren't very far up into the valley after all. The prime spot is still about twenty minutes in, but that is only because you have to keep stopping to breathe. Once I had found what seemed like the the best spot to sit and wait, I did just that. The only animals I saw were yellow-billed choughs. But it would have been silly to have expected to see a snow leopard on my first day - especially when doing it solo you should never expect to see a snow leopard, simply hope to see a snow leopard!
The main problem with staying in the village rather than at the first campsite is the one of travel times. You don't get down to the Husing Valley until about 9am and then in order to get back to the village before dark you have to leave the valley at about 3.30 or 4pm (giving yourself 20-30 minutes to get down from the Husing, an hour up the Rumbak, and then 20-30 minutes to the village itself). So the days are much shorter than they would be otherwise. Heading back to the village on this first day I saw the bharal herd again, the same large-eared pikas as before, and two new birds for the trip, brown dipper and brown accentor (the latter being a lifer for me). Back at the village I saw another woolly hare.
The next two days were repeats of the first - down to the Husing, sit and watch. The same herd of eight bharal, the same flock of yellow-billed choughs. No snow leopard. Still, I wasn't too worried. Three days out of my allotted eleven was fine, and I wasn't really expecting to see one so soon anyway. I was, however, becoming a little concerned that the only bharal I was seeing down there were the same eight every day. The weather did seem warmer than I had been expecting, and if there are no bharal moving down then there won't be any snow leopards! I decided that for the fourth day I would visit the Tarbung Valley and see what, if anything, was happening there. When I got back to the village (on the third day) there was a flock of twenty bharal on the nearby slopes, which the next morning had become forty. Hopefully that was a good sign.
The following morning, as I was heading out of the village to the Tarbung Valley, a man with some better English than most asked where I was going. I said to the Tarbung and he scoffed and said (as far as I could tell) that there were no snow leopards down there yet - I needed to go upwards towards Yurutse, not downwards. I decided to stick with the Tarbung for now (I had already told the people at my homestay where I was going, as I did every morning in case I hadn't returned in the evening) and then would try going upwards tomorrow. Further down the valley I passed the donkey man who I had seen in the Husing for the last two days (his donkeys are sent up there to graze). I said I was going to the Tarbung and he replied "snow leopard, no". I couldn't tell if he was asking if I had seen any yet, or telling me there were none down there yet. But it was starting to tie in with me not seeing many bharal and my worry that it was just too early for the cats to be moving downwards. On the other hand, I knew the tour groups start coming up in September or October, and why would they do that if that was too early for any success?
The Tarbung Valley mouth is about ten or fifteen minutes walk further back down the road from the mouth of the Husing Valley. It is on the opposite side, and you need to cross the little river to get to it. The access isn't as easy as the Husing - I mean, it isn't difficult, it is just the initial part is forcing through some scrubby juniper and then there are a couple of precipitous donkey-tracks across the sides of steep hillsides, sometimes no wider than one of my boots, the first one winding across a slope of gravelly sand and the second across a nerve-wracking scree of slate shards. Once past these (and the return seemed even more treacherous!) the valley is really nice with good vantage spots. I saw a small group of bharal, perhaps even the same goup from the Husing, a golden eagle, and a big flock of rock doves. I was seeing pairs or singles of golden eagles and lammergeiers quite often, but always soaring, never close up. The doves were my first truly wild rock doves. This species is the original of the domestic pigeon, the feral form being what you see in cities all over the world. There were a few around Rumbak but I wasn't sure if they were actual wild birds (as the hill pigeons were) or domestics. These ones in the Tarbung were the genuine article though, so I was quite pleased to see them.
There were, however, no snow leopards.
Tomorrow I would try looking higher up the mountains, further up than Rumbak.
