AN ELUSIVE PREY
A lifelong obsession with snow leopards led Dina Mishev to northern India.
In November, the landscape in the northern Indian territory of Ladakh is barren. Prickly sea buckthorn bushes and red-limbed willows are among the few species that can survive in the region’s cold desert climate and high altitudes. The mouth of the Ulley Valley in central Ladakh is about 3,650 metres (12,000 feet) above sea level. The village of Ulley, the last in the valley and the end of the scrawny road that is the area’s only connection to the outside world, is about 4,360 m (14,300 ft) in elevation.
Standing on a small outcrop and scanning the snow-dusted ridgelines, I can’t see any signs of life. Neither can I imagine anything able to live in such an inhospitable environment.
Except I know snow leopards are here. I know this, and enough other snow leopard trivia, because when I was too young to know it wasn’t possible, I wanted to grow up to be one.
Snow leopards can jump more than 15 m (50 ft) in one pounce, have bushy tails and purr but don’t roar. Also, they’re so tough that they live where few other animals can — in the high altitudes of Nepal, Bhutan, Pakistan, Tajikistan, western China, Afghanistan and northern India.
What four-year-old wouldn’t want to be a snow leopard?!
Although found across a wide swath of Central Asia, snow leopards are among the most difficult wildlife to see in the wild. Estimates of their worldwide population vary, but the highest is only about 7,500. They’re also solitary, camouflaged and not particularly large: usually less than two feet tall and between three and five feet long.
Thanks to several residents who are master wildlife trackers, the Ulley Valley is among the most reliable places in the world to see a snow leopard in the wild.
Of course my grow-up-to-be-asnow-leopard dream didn’t make it through kindergarten. When it died, I pivoted: I’d grow up to be a veterinarian who worked with snow leopards. This lasted until I was 15 and a volunteer at a wildlife sanctuary where the biggest animals were blue herons. By the end of my first day, I realized pretty much every animal at the sanctuary terrified me.
So I amended my snow leopard dream one last time: I would see one in the wild.
Twenty-nine years later, I book a spot on a snow leopard safari. I find a trip organized by andbeyond, a travel company that specializes in wildlife-focused trips around the world.
Starting and ending in Delhi, it is 11 days and includes six nights at the Snow Leopard Lodge in the Ulley Valley and also the eagle eyes of wildlife spotters Tsewang Norboo and Tsetan Namgail.
I pick this trip because since andbeyond started running it in 2017, according to its travel planners, between 80 per cent and 90 per cent of groups have seen a snow leopard.
I meet the andbeyond group in Leh, Ladakh’s most populous (about 50,000 people) city.
Spending two or three nights in Leh, which is 3,505 m (11,500 ft) in elevation, lessens the likelihood of getting altitude sickness when we move up to the Snow Leopard Lodge, at 4,358 m (14,300 ft).
Leh has Buddhist temples and Ladakhi historical sites including Leh Palace, home of the Ladakhi royal family from the early-1600s until the mid-1800s. Even though we’re just killing time waiting for our bodies to produce more red blood cells to carry oxygen, the days pass quickly. Still I count the hours until our departure for the Snow Leopard Lodge and the professional snow leopard spotters.
When we pull into the lodge’s dirt parking lot after a four-hour drive, Namgail, Norboo and his family, most of the staff, and a handful of curious villagers greet us. Yaks and cows, generally too big to be prey for snow leopards or wolves, roam free around us; donkeys, goats and sheep are kept in leopard-proof mesh-topped pens.
We’re whisked into lunch, which starts with a bowl of mushroom soup seasoned with ginger. The main course is fried rice with vegetables and soy dumplings.
Most lodge rooms have private bathrooms, and all of its bathrooms have running water and Western-style toilets. Every evening, staff members tuck bladders of hot water between guests’ sheets. Every morning, a hot beverage of your choice is delivered to your room.
The first spotting session starts after lunch.
Namgail, Norboo and Stanzin, Norboo’s middle son and the manager of the Snow Leopard Lodge, each stand at a Zeiss spotting scope. Two other scopes are open for the six guests to scan on their own. There are also several pairs of binoculars. We’re instructed to focus on ridgelines, where movement and silhouettes are most easily seen.
Almost immediately Norboo finds a group of male Asiatic ibex on a hillside on the opposite side of the valley. They are invisible to my naked eye. With Stanzin’s help I find them through a scope. Their chins are wispy with beards and their heads crowned with long horns that curve sharply back.
The presence of ibex, a species of mountain goat, bodes well for a snow leopard sighting. Along with blue sheep, they are among the cats’ favourite prey.
But there are no snow leopards that afternoon. We see a couple of golden eagles, a Himalayan snowcock and another group of ibex.
The next morning, I begin washing my face in a bucket of hot water delivered to my room just as someone runs through the lodge: “Wolves!” The pair of wolves is even more difficult for me to see than the ibex, even though they’re half the distance away. Finally I find them — two shaggy forms saunter across the hillside immediately opposite the lodge. When it’s my turn on a scope, I can see the lolling tongue of the front wolf.
That afternoon, I accompany Norboo on a tracking expedition to a low pass on the east side of the valley. This pass is a known snow leopard crossing.
It is a 305-m (1,000-ft) trail-less clamber up steep, loose terrain to the pass. With trekking poles it’s hard walking for me. Norboo walks easily, even with a tripod and spotting scope slung over a shoulder. He stops to scan for wildlife just often and just long enough for me to catch up. He also stops to point out signs of snow leopards.
At an overhanging school-bussized boulder, Norboo finds tracks in the dirt. I recognize the shape indicative of a snow leopard; Norboo sees a mom and two cubs. “About two days ago,” he says.
Next is a rubbing rock. The evidence? Several strands of snow leopard fur cling to it.
Norboo lifts up the carcass of a young ibex by one of its legs, which are the only parts that haven’t been picked completely clean. A snow leopard kill. Taking several steps to the left, he stops and studies the ground: “This is where they ate it. A mom and cubs again, about two weeks ago.”
He offers me the carcass, and, although handling dead wildlife is about as appealing to me as hanging out with herons, I take it and look closely at the bones for impressions of snow leopard teeth, which I do not find. Still, holding the leftovers of a snow leopard meal is the single coolest thing about the trip so far.
It is an afternoon toward the end of our stay at the lodge that Namgail spots snow leopards: a mom and two cubs, maybe even the ones of which Norboo and I saw the tracks.
We spent days driving up and down the valley searching for different vantage points — and Namgail finds the family while scanning from a flat spot a two-minute walk from the lodge’s front entrance.
The snow leopards are, by far, the most difficult animals of the entire trip for me to make out. Stanzin calls me to a scope he positioned so the family is in the middle of its field of view. He tells me that the mother is lying on the top of a rock on the ridgeline and the cubs running and jumping below her.
Through the scope I scan the visible section of the ridgeline, but I see no snow leopards. The rest of the group has already found the cats, but minutes pass and I still see only the same empty, hostile landscape that I’ve seen for the last two weeks.
And then something flies off one of the ridge’s serrations. A second something follows. The cubs have leaped off the top of a 7.5-m-tall (25-ft-tall) rock.
Now that I’ve got them, I can follow them. They scamper, wrestle, take breaks, and climb a rock back to the top of the ridge where, thanks to a head turn and flick of her tail — which is every bit as magnificent as snow leopard tails look in photos and documentaries — mom finally becomes visible. We watch the cats until it gets too dark to see them anymore, about an hour.
That night, childhood dreams fill my sleep.