Nearly three months ago, a hand injury forced me suspend posts on this blog. I then hoped to be back online in six weeks, but it took longer than expected to return to posting/writing. Let me restart with posting an image of this little curious fellow, which I made in Ladakh last week when I was leading a photography tour to the region to capture its winter landscapes.
Every year, some time during Dec-Jan months, the famous Pangong Lake in Ladakh freezes over and turns into a large field of ice. The azure waters of the lake are now trapped under a white skin. The mountains, barren and brown in the summer months, now have a sprinkling of snow that decorates their slopes. I made a visit to Pangong and the highlands around it, photographing the expanse of snow and the life that thrives even in these harsh conditions.
While it is a delight to watch the frozen lake, it takes some effort to get this far. The roads to Ladakh are closed in the winter months, with all the high passes buried under deep snow. The temperatures in the region dips to unbelievable lows, like -25C or lesser. Yet, the venerable BRO works all through the winter to keep the road from Leh to Pangong open, without whose efforts a visit would have been impossible.
I spent a week traversing the highlands of Ladakh in last winter. When we were on the way to Pangong Lake, we stopped for a while at an ice field formed on either side of a gently flowing stream. The place looked beautiful, with a large patch of ice covering the ground and often forming curious patterns created from trapped air bubbles, flowing water or brown grass sticking out from the solid surface of ice. On either side of the stream, melting ice trickled gently into water from the ice bed, allowing icicles to form. Along with the distant mountains covered in snow, the patterns in the ice and the flowing water offered excellent photography opportunities. So, our short stop extended for more than 30 minutes.
Here is one of the many images made at the ice field. I was so delighted and so happy to see the beauty of this place, that I felt it was worth my money on the trip, even if we did not make it to Pangong. Of course, we reached Pangong Tso in the next few hours, after many photo-stops on the way.
Somewhere in the process of admiring the icicles and photographing them, I got carried away and lied down on the ice for a few minutes to get that perfect image that I had created in my mind. Our outspoken driver Angchuk and the sober cook Norbu found this very amusing. For rest of the tour, they would tease me whenever we found ice-fields along the way, asking me if we should stop the car for and let me lie down.
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