Journey Into Zanskar

by Darla Hillard

There were signs, right from the start, that the expedition we had in mind wasn’t going to go according to plan. Heavy, out-of-season rains soaked the high deserts of India’s far north, washing out a bridge on the jeep road that wound its way for 125 miles to the trail head. Then Dorjay Stanzin, our cook, came down with dysentery, erupting unappetizingly from both ends. And there was Rani, the mule with the name that means Queen. She’d been with Jugmet Singh for nine of the thirteen years he’d made his living in the pack-mule business. Nine is only middle-aged for a mule, but she tottered like a frail old lady on knees that were hugely, permanently swollen. Her ribs rippled like a pair of washboards under her grizzled brown hide. This unlikely specimen was the lead mule. But at the time, these signs just seemed like business-as-usual. We’ve learned, over the twenty years we’ve been making these periodic journeys into the realm of the endangered snow leopard, to expect the unexpected.

“Rani can manage,” shrugged Jugmet Singh, a Hindu from Himachal Pradesh. “She’s been like that since she was four. But she’s a good mule. She helped me earn the money to buy the other three.”

Rinchen Wangchuk, India Field Program Director for the Snow Leopard Conservancy, translated. But I understood that Jugmet Singh loved Rani just by watching his face, the way his black-coffee eyes seemed to deepen with some memory of their years together-some fight for survival probably, in country like this. Then too, he was desperate for work, in a summer when tourists were staying away from India. He had left home as usual in June, bringing his mules north, a fourteen-day walk, to work the trekking routes. At the end of September they’d return home to spend the fall ferrying potatoes from the fields to the road heads, and the winter hauling logs.

Rani stood quietly, willing enough to carry our camping gear, while Jugmet Singh cinched her load, and Rinchen slapped her bony rump. Rinchen was itching to get going, intent as were Rodney and field assistant Jigmet Dadool, on following up on reports of snow leopards killing livestock in the heart of Zanskar, once a kingdom that was part of Tibet, now a 3,000 square-mile region of the State of Jammu & Kashmir.

I was prepared for trips like this. Ever since the Nepal study in the 1980s, when Rodney and I lived in a tent for eight months at a stretch, a week’s walk from the nearest airstrip, I’ve learned to expect the worst and be pleasantly surprised when it isn’t.

Rinchen crossing the longest fiber suspension bridge in Kashmir

Rinchen was born in Buddhist Ladakh-Zanskar’s “twin” former kingdom to the north-in sight of the peaks of the Karakorum mountains. In his younger days, he summited several peaks, including Ladakh’s 24,660-foot Saser Kangri II, but he was more captivated by the animals he saw in the mountains than he was by climbing, and he put his ropes and pitons aside to do work that would benefit both wildlife and the local people. Lucky snow leopards. Gazing beyond the mule at the prayer flags flapping above the houses of Zangla, he savored the fact that we wouldn’t see another village until we reached Shade (pronounced Shah-day), four days’ walk along a little-used trail through some of northern India’s wildest back country.

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