24 January to 2 February 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh.
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(Ladakh Trip).
Links go to posts with the colour versions of the images (where there may also be more information). If an image does not have a link, the preceding one applies.
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Stok Kangri, highest peak in Ladakh.
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Moonlight.
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24 January to 2 February 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh.
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(Ladakh Trip).
Links go to posts with the colour versions of the images (where there may also be more information). If an image does not have a link (or a caption), the preceding one applies.
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A bridge festooned with prayer flags and banners.
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Our drivers conducting a ceremony to bless our trip with good fortune.
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Ponies coming to pick up our baggage to the camp.
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Tashi the Yak.
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Ponies.
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Crossing the ice in the frozen river.
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Loading the ponies to move camp.
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Moving camp,
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Crossing the icy stream in front of the new camp.
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Ponies returning to Rumbak Village.
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Walking through Rumbak Village on the way to the High Plateau.
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Slipped on the ice.
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Back to the bridge.
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24 January 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh.
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(Ladakh Trip).
Links go to posts with the colour versions of the images (where there may also be more information). If an image does not have a link (or a caption), the preceding one applies.
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The village Rumbak, the great metropolis near where we were camping, is in Hemis National Park.
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One of the many carved stones.
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Stupa and ruins beyond the village. Path over the mountains behind the stupa.
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Remains of ruined house.
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A closer look at the stupa.
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A corner of the village’s ceremonial hall.
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A Buddhist flag on the trail up the main valley.
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More stones with writing.
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Ancient huts or houses.
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This one has a chimney so it is clearly an old house and associated pen.
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The track across the ice into Rumbak.
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Inscribed stones.
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Inscribed stones and stupas.
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A row of stupas.
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Stupas and house.
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Stupa with blue sheep horns guarding the village.
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Blue sheep horns and mountains.
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2 February 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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After breakfast, we packed up and prepared to walk out of the national park. Here the ponies are being fed prior to taking our stuff back along the trail.
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Our villager support crew is packing everything up with remarkable speed and efficiency.
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A view of the frozen river.
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The ponies pass us by carrying all our baggage. The chairs appear to be going back to Leh too.
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One pony has slipped over crossing the ice on the frozen river. He is soon lifted up and got on his way.
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Back in the cars, here are some views of the River Indus.
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You may remember, this bridge was in the first image of the post Walking In. With some symmetry, this is the last image for Walking Out. These ponies are from another group.
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1 February 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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We are on our way to climb a high plateau behind Rumbak village. Passing through the village, here is a pony and three donkeys in a sheltered pen attached to a house.
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A blue sheep skull in front of a house with animal feed on the roof.
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Here we are climbing up to an intermediate ridge. In the high altitude, climbing is very slow going.
Turning around, Jools is behind me. Further back, Emma (wearing red) is pausing for breath and Tashi, our chief guide and organiser, is monitoring her progress.
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We have reached the intermediate ridge. There is a stupa on a high point in the middle though you may need to click on the image to see it. They occur in places where you wonder about the effort to build them. You can also see a trail up to there.
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I paused for this panorama. Stok Kangri, to the right of the cloud at the left, is the highest peak in Ladakh at 6,150 metres (20,200 feet).
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Some of the others set off immediately for the small high plateau. I followed them after a time and missed the brief period of calm with no wind that those others encountered. This and following images are from the high plateau.
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We are at 4,300 metres or 14,100 feet.
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I called this post “On the Roof of the World”, a phrase which normally relates to Tibet. Well, we are on the Himalayan plateau in an area that is historically and culturally Tibetan (though part of India) and we are at one of the highest levels of Ladakh.
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A closer view of Stok Kangri, highest peak in Ladakh.
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Back in camp, I decided to venture out late at around 9pm when it was dark (and cold) for an image of the stars with the land illuminated by the light of the full moon.
We are at the same point where we viewed the three snow leopards. They were at the skyline at far right or perhaps further to the right.
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There may be some constellations visible, for those who can pick them. Click the image for a larger view.
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31 January 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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On this day we went back and revisited the village of Rumbak.
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This is the route across the frozen river to the first house. There are two considerations here. First, the ice needs to be thick enough to walk on and second, it can be slippery and you don’t want to fall over. You can see footprints on the ice towards the right. In general you find a flat place to cross, watch the colour and consistency of the ice and if necessary, you can throw some handfuls of dirt on it. Disconcerting at first but almost normal after a while.
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I wanted to get some more pictures of the fascinating inscribed stones.
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And in some places there can be a lot of them.
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Inscribed stones and a stupa (or chorten).
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A row of stupas (inside the village).
A stupa was originally used to house the remains of the Bhudda. Later this became sacred texts and images, or the stupas were simply sacred in their own right as a supporting object for meditation. Stupa is the Sanscript word, Chorta the Tibetan and Dagoba the Sinhalese. In China, Japan and Korea, the stupa developed into the pagoda.
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Stupas and residences.
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One of the residences that also doubles as a homestay.
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There were maybe four of these, mini-stupas surmounted by blue sheep skulls and other “sacred” objects, and coated by what may be an iron oxide pigment. I didn’t ask about the significance of these but I wonder whether they are to keep malign spirits out of the village and represent the pre-Buddhist Bon religion, whether rolled up as part of local Bhuddhism or separate.
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More engraved stones.
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This is I think a common redstart on the engraved stones. It is actually out of focus, as with all the bird images in this post, but hopefully I can get away with it at this size.
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The shed and some of the houses in the background have animal feed on top, to prevent them being prematurely devoured.
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This is the Eurasian magpie, bactriana subspecies, unrelated to the Australian Magpie.
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I had wanted to get some photographs of them but they do not hang around when a camera is pointed at them so I sat down on a vantage point near the village and waited.
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This is a Tibetan snowcock, which I had previously seen but also been unable to photograph.
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They are quite different in colouring to the Himalayan snowcock I mentioned in an earlier post. They are in the pheasant family and though they can fly, they seem disinclined to do so in most circumstances.
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There was something interesting the magpies in this small gulley.
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Hello!
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Mmm. That bag looks interesting.
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Are you still here?
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Ahh. Lunch!
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Blue sheep skulls on top of a shed.
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Skull, inscribed stones, stupa and house.
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Down below the camp, at the main river. The platform is covered by inscribed stones and I presume it qualifies as a stupa.
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A frozen mini-waterfall in the village near the camp.
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And the wider view.
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30 January 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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We knew when we signed up for the tour that there was no guarantee that we would see a snow leopard. It was also not a good year for the purpose because there had been unusually light snowfall so the snow and the snow leopards were much higher and further away than usual. However, this was the day when we found the missing “S” and “W” to turn “No Leopards” to “Snow Leopards”.
We were just emerging from our tents for breakfast after our first night in the new campsite at the head of the Rumbak valley when the cry of “Snow Leopard!!!” rang out from the small plateau about thirty feet above us. So we grabbed cameras and raced up there (relatively speaking and perhaps inadvisedly, given the altitude). Three of our guides were up there with spotting scopes and we were able to take turns to look through them and see snow leopards. There was a mother and two cubs and she was conducting a learning exercise in “how to hunt blue sheep”. One of the cubs ran at the blue sheep too soon though, so the blue sheep ran away. I didn’t see that but I did see a snow leopard run across my vision as I was looking through a spotting scope.
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Here is an image containing a snow leopard (towards the top left corner) courtesy of expedition photographer and doctor Andrew Peacock (For his photography see footloosephotography.com). He is using a high resolution full-frame Canon camera, a 600mm lens and a 1.4x teleconverter for a focal length of 840mm. I estimate from Bing Maps and Google Earth that the snow leopard was about two kilometres away. If you want to see it more clearly, click on the image.
In theory I could have got an image nearly as close albeit with a smaller, lower resolution sensor and not quite so stellar a lens but my lens was damaged and wouldn’t focus for far distances.
We could see more clearly through the spotting scopes which had a much higher magnification than 840mm, probably equivalent to 3000mm and perhaps 4000mm. At other times through the scopes I saw blue sheep, golden eagles and a bird with a white head and black body that was described as potential food for the golden eagles and was probably a Himalayan Snowcock.
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There were also more distant snow-capped peaks visible from where we were viewing the snow leopards.
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This is a red-billed chough (not actually in focus at larger magnification). It is similar in appearance to the white winged chough that we have in Australia (and in the reserve out the back from where I live) but they are only distantly related.
After lunch we took off seeking more snow leopard sightings. From a similar viewpoint to where we views the snow leopards, here are some ponies returning to Rumbak village.
Another stone pen.
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Ancient wall and mountain view.
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Footprint of a Tibetan wolf.
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Where I have circled in red is either another snow leopard or probably the same one, though we are up a different valley and several kilometres from out first sighting. This is at 560mm or a full-frame equivalent of 780mm, so the snow leopard is a long way away. This is taken with my lens so it is out of focus. Even so, at 1:1 I can just make out, though blurred, a head and ears above the rock line and a body and legs below. You will not be able to see this even if you click on the image for a larger view.
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A plant struggling to survive though covered by the icy river.
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Apart from the snow leopards, there were also dramatic views available of mountains and coloured rocks.
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This one has a chimney so it is clearly an old house and associated pen.
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28 January 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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It was decided that we should move camp up river to the mouth of the side valley that heads to the village of Rumbak. This afforded different opportunities to look for snow leopards and offered better vistas.
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One gas bottle to be loaded on the right side of a pony.
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Another one coming up…
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… to be loaded on the left side.
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And off they go…
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They know the way…
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…and in any case there’s only one path.
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Crossing the river over a small bridge
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Now behind the ponies (who walk faster than us), we pass by the frozen waterfall again.
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And I pause for some images of the frozen river.
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A Buddhist flag on a trackside stupa…
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… and more of the inscribed stones.
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It’s a couple of hours walk and we’re getting close now. A view towards the end of the main valley.
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Jools crossing the ice at the frozen stream beside our destination with the camp starting to take shape in the background.
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The tents are now up and we’re starting to get organised inside them.
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After lunch we take off again in search of snow leopards. There are other structures than the tents around.
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Maybe all but at least some of these were dwellings because some have chimneys.
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Most appear not to have been in use for a long time.
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We are heading off towards the end of the valley.
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This is the side valley to the left.
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Some more blue sheep are visible though they are not really in focus due to the damage to my long lens.
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Snow leopard paw print!
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Heading back now, there is a row of ancient stupas above the ridge to the left.
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Another old stone shack.
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… and a last view towards the mouth of the valley.
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27 January 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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We headed off for the ridge where we had searched the distant mountain sides for snow leopards on the first day. When we were almost there, the spotters told us no snow leopards were visible so we kept on going up the valley. This became a day when I was mainly looking for macro opportunities.
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I was struck by some of the patterns of lichen on the rocks.
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… and the variety of colours as well as patterns.
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This is the large stone pen I had photographed from a greater distance on the first day.
A few people ventured further than we did up the distant valley to the left and found four snow leopard paw prints at a place with a commanding view where one had stood and searched the vista for blue sheep.
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A section of the dry stone wall at the pen.
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A bush bearing red buds.
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The buds appear to be rose hips so it must be a wild rose.
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Leaves and shadows. The stream actually had running water here (rather than ice).
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Pebbles on the bottom distorted by the running water.
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Ice and dry vegetation.
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Back in camp for lunch.
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The dining tent is the big green one on the right. Ours is the light coloured one second from the left. The long drop toilet is in the background with two compartments was very modern as it had rickety seats over the holes.
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After lunch I ventured out looking for shapes in the frozen river with my macro lens.
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Ice pig.
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Perhaps a face.
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26 January 2018, Hemis National Park, Ladakh, India
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Far up on a mountainside we spotted some blue sheep, also known as bharal. Not to be confused with the red sheep of Voltaire’s Candide. This is the female.
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And this is the male.
Blue sheep are the main food source of snow leopards so this was an indication there may be snow leopards around.
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An hour later, we are in a side valley and you can see a bit of the floor of the main valley in the distance. I think the blue sheep were on the other side of the main valley.
We are 3,500 to 4,000 metres high. Walking uphill is very slow in these conditions. If you try to go at all quickly you soon have to stop and recover. It is better to walk very slowly and keep going.
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You can also see the track across the scree slope to the ridge here on the far left of the previous image. A bit later, when a few more people were there, Jools and I set off across the scree slope to join them. Half way across they waved us back. There was just a narrow ledge and no room for any more.
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Back at the resting point, there was the remains of an old structure, too small for a house. I decided it looked easier to get down to the valley by going on further rather than going back the way we came. I didn’t find anything of particular interest further on in that valley though.
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Crossing the ice in the frozen river of the main valley is a delicate task, especially the first couple of times.
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Remarkable details of a flag on a stupa.
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More blue sheep, from a valley on the other side of the main valley. Their coats look a bit more blue here so you can see how they get their name.
I had a few equipment problems. In particular, my long zoom lens fell three feet to the ground off my monopod at one point. It seemed to be working but images from the longer end of the zoom range are not sharp (including the shots of the blue sheep in this post). It is now in for repair.
I also had problems with both cameras (Fuji X-T2s) due to the cold weather. One showed some strange looking images in the viewfinder (eg monochrome plus blue) but this did not affect the RAW files so the camera was still usable and it returned to normal when I reset it when I got home. The other one got stuck on particular shutter speeds from 1/320 to 1/800 sec which was a bit more inconvenient. Fuji fixed that under warranty when I got home.
I was not the only one with equipment problems in the extreme conditions. One photographer’s Nikon D850 stopped working entirely.
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Distant mountains in the late afternoon light.
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Murray Foote 