Walking (and slipping) across history – the fragile beauty of the frozen river route.

After the Finish Line, Before the Freeze

“Some journeys start where the applause ends when the body is finally quiet enough to hear a river make ice.”

The September sun of 2014 still lived in my legs. I had run the Ladakh Marathon in a city that sleeps with mountains at its windows, lungs bargaining with thin air, the finish line less a ribbon than a covenant. After the race, Leh taught me a quieter pacing: small cups of butter tea, slow walks to Shanti Stupa, the grammar of dusk. That is when the winter idea arrived not as bravado but as weather: Chadar. The frozen Zanskar. The old lifeline. The winter road made of breath held by a valley.

By late January 2015, I came back. Not to run, but to listen. The plan was both simple and audacious: walk the full route from Chilling to Zangla and back, then drift into Padum and if weather and wisdom allowed, make a winter visit to Phugtal the cave monastery that looks like a thought clinging to a cliff. I wanted not a trophy but a conversation. I wanted to learn how a river becomes a hallway, how a foot learns to be a fin, how a person learns to be a careful animal again.

Leh in late January is a lesson in pale light and blue smoke. Permits stamped with stiff fingers. Market lanes with shawls braided into windbreaks. Rental shops with gumboots stacked like short black terms of peace. My kit turned into a small architecture: -30°C sleeping bag, foam mat over aluminum roll, microspikes and gumboots, ice staff, down jacket, woolen inner layers, thermos, tiny-sins trash pouch, headlamp with a blunt will to live. I joined a small crew: Tashithe cook, Stanzin the sledge-man whose laugh sounded like falling slate, and Rigzin who knew every bend by the mood of its wind.

“Walk like you’re late for a prayer and early for a fall,” Rigzin said on the jeep ride to Chilling. I nodded, both reassured and terrified. Outside the window, the Indus ran green and unbothered. Soon the Zanskar would arrive from its choke of canyons, offering its winter body a map written in whiteness, cracks, and sound.

 

Day 1   Tilad Do: First Steps on a Moving Floor

“Ice is a language. Learn the vowels before you try to sing.”

We reached Tilad Do at noon: a bank of pitted limestone, prayer flags stiff as verdicts, the river below wearing its new winter suit with awkward grace. A group was returning early, faces windburned and satisfied, their leader saying, “Black ice walk on it. White ice think about it. Grey ice talk to someone wise.” I tried to memorize that catechism and failed, so I wrote it on the inside of my head.

First steps: ankles soft, knees loose, weight over mid-foot. The staff tapped like a metronome tok, tok, tok finding honesty beneath glare. The ice was both glass and grain, patched and polished, groaning under sun’s persuasion. Where the river bent wide, the chadar lay broad and smug; where it pinched, it cracked and remade itself hourly.

Tashi’s sledge hissed behind us, loaded with cylinders, rations, and a stack of aluminum pots that rang like a small brass band. The Indus–Zanskar confluence was already behind our backs: one river still liquid arrogance, the other pretending to be stillness. We were walking inside a paradox: a frozen shortcut built by movement; a road that changed while you traveled on it.

We met the first zar an open pool where the ice had chosen not to be ethical. The guide led us to the inside bend, where thickening usually started, then banged the staff in a marching rhythm, listening. “Hear that?” he asked. I heard a low drum, a hollow with a depth that made my shoulders notice gravity again. “Not yet.” We retreated and climbed a short gully to bypass, crampons biting moraine, breath jerking a little in the cold.

Camp that night was under a scooped brown wall, a place the wind had the decency to bypass. Tents bloomed, stoves throbbed, tea turned hands human again. I wrote in the notebook with a pencil that had grown shy of working below -20°C: Today we learned to read the river’s eyebrows.

Sleep arrived in pairs: two socks, two quilts, two dreams one of glass corridors, one of falling that dissolves into flightbecause the brain is kind when the night is hard.

 

Day 2   Shingra Koma to Tibb: The Cathedral of Cold

“If stone can make shelter, ice can make faith.”

Morning was a small museum of frost flowers on the tent ceiling. Our breath had become botany overnight. We packed while the stoves repeated their confident whuff. Out on the river, the soundtrack settled into itself: staff tapping, sledge hissing, zippers’ metallic gossip, the river’s deep throatiness under everything, like a bass note no one tuned but everyone trusts.

Shingra Koma to Tibb Cave is where the gorge’s walls learn to be vertical without apology. The sun appears briefly at noon and then leaves. On a bend called Tsomo, the ice had stitched itself in three textures: black pane, white chalk, beige ribbing where the current had blown air bubbles into corrugations. We moved across all three like students in a lab. The language came: black is strong but mind the frictionless arrogance; white can be old packed snow, fine if cold, treacherous if sun-soft; beige is silt sock it hides cracks with politeness but keeps your boot honest.

Tibb is a cave and a congregation. In winter it turns into a hotel where the only amenity is story. We reached it at a respectable hour faces pinked, gloves stiff, eyes delighted that the wind finally stopped having opinions. Inside, blackened rock did the work of a wall. Soot held memory of a thousand stoves. Guides made thukpa with a monk’s economy, the broth proportioned by instinct. A wool cap hung from a nail like a custodian of naps.

A group of porters from Zangla joined us, their sledges heavy with rice, salt, oil, letters. We shared biscuits that broke like pottery. One man, Sonam, had walked this valley since boyhood. “Every year, chadar becomes more moody,” he said. “The river remembers things now. Some planes fly so low our thoughts shake.” He laughed softly, not cynically.

At night, the cave gave heat back in reluctant drips. The river outside sighed in a tone you feel in your neck bones. I lay listening to ancient water make young ice. Somewhere, not far, the wind rehearsed for the next day’s disagreements.

 

Day 3   Tibb to Nyerak: The Waterfall That Dreamed Itself Still

“In a desert of cold, a frozen fall is the one thing that looks exactly like prayer.”

The day of Nyerak is odd: you’re never entirely sure whether you’re approaching it or dreaming of it. The canyon climbs its own height. The river tightens. The ice starts to speak louder small pops like distant knuckles, sleek booms like drums under a lake. Every sound has a grammar: pop means a micro-settle; boom means the whole shelf adjusted its opinionand hopes you aren’t offended.

We passed crows that looked like ink blots pasted on this winter book. A fox tracked us from the higher shelf, choosing us not as prey but as entertainment. On a narrow braid, the guide crouched and pressed his ear to the surface. “Running beneath,” he said. “Stand like a door, not like a roof.” He meant: keep your weight stacked vertical, don’t sprawl. He meant: become a column, not a ceiling.

Then Nyerak. The waterfall pours here in summer like a long conversation; in winter it stacks itself into blue glass and white lace, hard mid-sentence. Sun found it and believed for a minute in cathedral windows. We dropped our packs without permission. Everyone became a child. Someone shouted and the gorge threw our joy back with a minor key.

At the Nyerak village exit, we saw the old rope bridge, boards asleep under snow. Up the slope, stucco houses clung to the script of the slope. A woman watched us with a smile that had evaluated twenty seasons. She sold us dry apricots and tea, and refused our overpayment with a look that says we are neighbors in winter, not tourists in a catalog. A boy in rubber sandals held a sling and a puppy with equal authority.

Our camp tucked into a sunless pocket where even the rumor of heat felt extravagant. Night reached quickly. Stars appeared with harsh honesty. The cooks told jackal stories and snow stories. We listened with our boots off, socks steaming in tiny ghosts.

 

Day 4   Nyerak to Hanumil: The Old Road Inside the New

“A lifeline is not a line but a braid foot, sledge, story.”

Past Nyerak, trekkers thin out. The full route toward Zangla wears fewer boot prints and more sledge ruts. The Zanskari traffic takes over: porters with bales of supplies; schoolchildren with cheek-apple rosy faces moving like the river taught them fast, quiet, attentive; monks with letters inside woolen robes; one man with a door on his sledge, salvaged for a cousin who will marry into a house that needs one.

The ice grew opinionated near sharp bends. In the inside elbow safe territory the chadar lay felted, snow-glued, mat-like. In the outside scythe, it crawled and cracked, winter’s labor visible in grey seams. When a zar forced us around, we climbed gullies of silt and root. The crampons bit; my thighs filed complaints. Wind found us and took what it wanted: a little warmth, a little patience, sometimes a little courage before handing it back.

At Hanumil, a stove in a stone room is the way the world should be. Pans blackened into a pedigree. Jars of salt and chili. Butter as currency. We paid to sleep on tightly woven carpets under quilts that smelled of smoke and sleep. A man mended a sledge for his daughter’s dowry, sanding its runners as if they were a boat he’d sail. At dinner, we learned half of his family winters in Leh, selling vegetables at the Main Bazaar; the other half stays to guard water and language.

The chadar has a social life we borrowed for a few hours. Stories skated across rooms; jokes found familiar corners. Outside, the river re-stated its thesis: everything moves even when still.

 

Day 5   Hanumil to Pishu to Zangla: Stepping into a Town Made of Quiet

“Arrival is not the end of walking; it is walking gentled into listening.”

We crossed broad lawns of ice that seemed kind. They were, until noon, when sunlight began to rearrange their politics. By then we had made distance: the lateral moraine to our right, the valley sighing open in front of us. Pishu showed itself: fields in coma, houses holding warmth like some people hold secrets, smoke practicing cursive above roofs.

Children raced us, then turned to show off slides, then asked for pens. We gave oranges instead and got pure laughter. A grandmother warmed our hands by the stove with the authority of an empress. “Zangla?” she asked, and when we nodded, she nodded back, a passport stamp made of chin.

From Pishu to Zangla the river feels less like an exam and more like recess, though winter likes to put tricks at the end of a chapter. A last section of glare ice forced us into the penguin shuffle, microspikes insufficient, posture comic. Rigzin cackled. “Now you look like Zanskari babies learning to walk. Good!”

Zangla arrived with the sound of fewer winds. The fort on its knoll wore history like a shawl. The lane had footprintslayered into harmony. We stayed in a house where tea arrived without names and sleep arrived without struggle. The next day we would take the winter road into Padum and then decide whether the longing called Phugtal was wise this year. But that night we were simply guests of a town patient with travelers.

A monk from Karsha sat near the stove with a bowl of tsampa, face carved in good humor. “Road from Nimmu is eating the Chadar little by little,” he said. “Don’t be sad. Rivers must be allowed to be rivers.” He tore off a piece of dried cheese and gave it to me like a sacrament.

 

Day 6   Padum in Winter: The Valley’s Soft Machine

“Cold makes a town honest. You hear the hinge of every door.”

Padum in late January is not summer’s dusty crossroads; it’s a quiet machine that knows its weight. Karsha looks over like an older sibling. Stongde keeps counsel on its ridge. The bazaar speaks in low transactions salt for rice, oil for stories. I got my thermos fixed by a man who hammered the lid into obedience, then poured tea to prove virtue.

We walked the lanes where apricot trees rehearsed their spring in dreams. I sent a postcard that would likely arrive in June. A mechanic oiled my chain with a patience he usually reserves for family. At a shop, a boy named Thinley sold me dried yak meat and an argument about football. A nun passed, laughing, the sound like warm metal.

Everyone had an opinion about Phugtal in winter. The Tsarap was moody; Purne was reachable “maybe”; the trail was “hungry.” The January ices of 2015 had shown new tempers. We listened and chose caution’s version of bravery: go until the river says no.

 

Day 7   The Side Letter to Phugtal: We Go Until We Don’t

“A monastery clinging to rock is not a miracle; it is a practice.”

We left our big packs in Padum and took a light kit on the winter track toward Reru. Rangdum massifs looked welded to the sky by cold light. The frozen lake near Reru wore a color that made my throat forget adjectives. Locals in felt boots brushed past us with competence you could not fake.

From Reru to Purne, the Tsarap played judge. Where it spread, it offered a wide page to write on; where it tightened, it licked the rock and frowned. A man named Norboo guided us for a few bends, then pointed with his staff: “There the river bites. There, it sleeps. There, it tells you to go away. Listen.”

We listened. We reached the confluence where the Phugtal stream joins the Tsarap and saw the gash of the trail high up, summer’s footpath turned winter balcony. The ice below crazed into polygons that looked like a map of decisions we were not equipped to take at this hour in this temperature with this humbleness. Phugtal was not far in summer terms. We stopped in Purne, found a room where smoke did domestic work, and stared into the valley where the monasteryperched out of sight, holding its lesson for us until a year we might be braver or luckier or both.

That night, the stove discussed ethics with the wind. The decision to turn back had no drama; it had care. In the morning we left an offering a spare pair of gloves with a family whose boy wanted to be a monk and a goalkeeper. The best people are multiple futures at once.

 

Day 8   Back to Zangla: The Return Has Different Ice

“You never step on the same chadar twice.”

On returns, the river auditions a new character. Temperature had shifted a degree; sun had been generous for a day; bends that seemed sure now smiled differently. The inside edges still bore trust, but some mid-channel panes that felt like airport floors on the way in now whispered no.

We threaded back through Pishu and Hanumil, then to Nyerak. At a notorious bend Roc Bend, the guides call it we found a bridge of ice that was new-born and boastful, a teenage miracle. Rigzin shook his head. “Climb.” We took the high goat track, our crampons finding purchase in the dust-frost. Below, a team of porters used ladder and rope to tease loads over a rock rib. The choreography had the grace of necessity, which is to say perfect and unperformative.

At Tibb, the cave was crowded with travelers reconsidering their choices and locals confirming theirs. A schoolteacherfrom Zangla explained the calendar: exams in March, road maybe open by July, food stocks until April, hope until always. We traded a chocolate bar for advice on the next day’s micro-traps in the ice. A fair market.

Night delivered -25°C with politeness. The moon climbed the cliff and then forgot to come down for a while. I slept with the thermos inside the bag, the boot liners too, a small kindergarten of items needing warmth to behave tomorrow.

 

Day 9   Tibb to Shingra Koma: The Day of Slips and Laughter

“Falling well is also a skill.”

We invented a game: who slips most gracefully. The river gave the rules. On a stretch of polished pane, my microspikes may as well have been decorative. Feet apart, knees bent, weight stacked I knew the theory. Practice was another planet. I went down with elegance only I will insist upon. The sledge crew laughed a kind laugh, the kind that stitches strangers to you briefly.

A zar forced a wade in water just above boot height. We sealed trouser cuffs with tape, stepped fast-light, and came out with yells that froze in the air like small comets. We stamped blood back into toes, Tashi poured sweet tea, and the river went on being older than our complaints.

At a bend called Tiger Mouth, the ice offered a thin tongue which we crawled across on hands and knees, packs sliding behind. A group ahead sang Buddhist mantras softly as they moved rhythm turned into rope. I whispered anything the alphabet, shopping lists, football teams just to match breath to a count. It worked. Everything works a little up here, and that’s enough.

We camped in a spot with shadows slow to leave. Someone found juniper, a sprig to sweeten the air. Smoke rose with memories in it. The guides told how a handful of winters ago, the Tsarap had clogged itself upstream and made an ice dam that troubled everyone’s sleep for weeks. “Rivers have moods,” Rigzin said. “Roads pretend they don’t.” We let the line sit until it felt like an old lesson we had always known.

 

Day 10   Shingra Koma to Tilad Do: The Exit Looks Like an Entrance

“You return with the road inside you; the ice keeps the part of you that listens.”

The last morning wanted quiet. The gorge felt taller now that we understood its punctuation. We moved in morningshadow, stepping around holes we had talked to on the way in, touching the rock where it sticks out of ice like the knuckle of the mountain.

At a final narrows, we paused. A team of Zanskaris came into view five porters, a child, a dog with manager energy. Their sledges carried schoolbooks, spices, a radio. “Julley!” we chorused, a performance that by now felt earned. The child’s laughter was a sound warmer than our clothes. We stepped aside these are the owners of the corridor and watched dignity move past without need of commentary.

When the cliff opened and the river grudgingly became river again, we reached Tilad Do. Our boots found dirt and then road. A jeep waited, engine idling, the sound both blasphemy and blessing. We turned once to see the blue mouth of the gorge swallow our footprints. We couldn’t help it we bowed.

On the ride back to Leh, cold flicked our cheeks like playful uncles. The Indus ran beside us green as accusation. Hemisand Thiksey floated on their hilltops, winter’s twin lanterns. That evening, I washed my face with warm water and felt like I was stealing from the river. Sleep came angled and thorough.

 

Field Notes for a Frozen Runway

“Technique is respect with timing.”

• Feet: Gumboots with wool liners and microspikes walk soft, stacked, small steps.
• Staff: Three taps: left, right, forward listen for drum (hollow), thud (solid), whine (sheen).
• Heat: Thermos inside sleeping bag, boot liners too; drink warm, not scalding.
• Rhythm: Match the guide’s cadence; when in doubt, copy the sledge runner’s feet.
• Bypasses: Inside bend first; if climbing, keep three points of contact; breathe economically.
• Etiquette: Yield to locals; offer to carry something small; don’t film faces without yes.
• Leave No Trace: Blue bags for human waste when off-river, carry out microtrash; juniper only if gathering is invited by locals.
• Language: Julley works almost everywhere; gratitude does, too.

 

Epilogue   The Road Beneath the Road

“Chadar was never the point; it was the teacher. The lesson was presence.”

Years later, when I hear the word Chadar, I don’t first see the blue of Nyerak or the white planes near Pishu or the brown rip of Tiger Mouth. I hear boots on glass, sledges stitching, staff tapping like a careful drummer mapping a night road. I taste salt tea and smoke. I feel the way cold makes time precise.

The winter I walked it late January to early February of 2015 felt like a threshold. Roads from Nimmu and from Darcha were leaning toward Padum, their machines patient, their surveyors hopeful, their supporters practical. Everyone said the Chadar is changing. A lifeline was learning to be a memory. That knowledge didn’t make the ice less holy; it made every step more accountable.

I did not conquer a river; I rehearsed humility on it. I did not discover a secret; I entered a room everyone in the valley already knew how to use. Zanskar will always require presence on wheels, on foot, across river, along road. The mode changes; the ask doesn’t: walk soft, pay attention, carry your weight kindly, leave with less noise.

If you go, go with winter manners. Let locals set the tempo. Comfort a little less; wonder a little more. And if you find yourself on that frozen runway, hear the valley’s request whispered through the ice:

Don’t hurry the lesson.