Walking and slipping across the frozen Zanskar, January 2015
The first sound I remember from the Chadar was not silence. It was the staff hitting ice.
Tok. Tok. Tok.
Each tap asked a question before my boot was allowed to answer. The Zanskar lay below us near Tilad Do, wide in places, pinched in others, its winter skin patched in black, white and dull grey. It looked like a road only from a distance. Up close, it was a surface negotiating with water, cold, current, shadow and the weight of men who had somewhere to go.
I stepped onto it with my knees loose and my pack sitting badly against my shoulders. This was January 2015, and I had come back to Ladakh after running the Ladakh Marathon the previous September. The marathon had left something unfinished in me not ambition exactly, but a restlessness for the winter version of a place I had only known in dust, sun and altitude. By January, that restlessness had become a self-funded Chadar trek: Chilling/Tilad Do to Zangla and back, with a crew from Leh and the small private confidence of a man who had not yet understood how temporary a frozen river can be.
My first confidence lasted less than a minute. The ice shifted under one boot with a small clean sound, not a crack exactly, more like a warning clearing its throat. Rigzin, our guide, looked at the surface, then at us, and chose a slower line along the inside of the bend. Tashi, the cook, came behind with the sort of calm that makes a newcomer feel both safer and more foolish. Stanzin worked the sledge with a rhythm I would spend the next days trying to copy. None of them made the ice dramatic. They treated it as work.
That was the first correction the river made in me. I had arrived with the phrase “frozen river trek” in my head. The Zanskar immediately made it more specific: staff, boot, sledge, cold, judgement, repeat.
Walking on the thin ice sheet on the zanskar river
After the finish line
The idea had begun months earlier, in the afterglow of the Ladakh Marathon. In September 2014, Leh had been full of lungs bargaining with altitude, runners folded over at the finish, and the peculiar happiness that comes when the body survives something it had every reason to question. I stayed on after the race, drinking butter tea, walking slowly and letting the town return to itself. Somewhere in those days, someone mentioned the Chadar not as a trek but as an old winter route, a way Zanskaris had moved when summer roads were absent and the river briefly agreed to hold weight.
By late January I was back in Leh with warmer clothes, worse nerves and a kit that made my bag look more competent than I felt. Gumboots, wool liners, microspikes, a sleeping bag, foam mat, thermos, headlamp, layers I could barely name once my fingers went numb. I was staying with a friend in Leh before the trek, and the arrangement itself was self-funded. That mattered later, because I did not want the story polished by obligation. I had paid to be cold, frightened and instructed by ice, and the ice accepted.
We drove out towards Chilling with the Indus beside us for part of the way, green and moving, as if to remind me what rivers prefer to be. The Zanskar waited in its gorge. At the start, other groups were already moving in both directions, some returning with windburnt faces, others just beginning their own careful education. I remember watching the locals more than the trekkers: how they set their feet, how they read the dullness or shine of a patch, how the sledge runners found their own thin certainty.
The crew did not offer speeches. They offered pace. That was more useful. When the ice looked clean and dark, they still tested it. When it looked snow-covered and safe, they looked harder. When open water cut the way, they moved without outrage, choosing a bypass as if the river changing its mind was not an interruption but the central fact of the journey.
The first open-water detour came early enough to remove romance from the day. We left the river briefly and climbed through loose, cold earth where the crampon points bit unevenly and my thighs began filing complaints. Below us, the water moved black and alive through a gap in the ice. It was not large enough to be spectacular. It was large enough to teach respect.
The daily work of ice
By the second day, the Chadar had become less a view and more a set of tasks. Walk small. Keep weight centred. Do not trust a surface because it looks beautiful. Watch the crew. Drink before thirst announces itself. Keep gloves dry if possible, which was a noble theory and not always an achievable plan. The cold made every small mistake administrative. A loose strap took longer to fix. A wet sock became news. A misplaced bottle froze into stubbornness.
We slept some nights in tents, some near or inside caves, and later in village houses at Nyerak and Zangla. Each camp had its own practical weather. In a tent, breath turned to frost by morning and settled on the inner fabric like a private snowfall. In a cave, soot-darkened rock held a little of the day’s cooking smoke and gave back less warmth than you hoped but more than the open gorge. I learned to keep what needed to function close to the body: boot liners, batteries, sometimes the thermos if there was room and dignity left.
Food was ordinary in the way essential things are ordinary: tea, thukpa, rice, dal, biscuits that hardened in the cold and broke with a dry snap. Tashi worked with a small economy of movement, making the stove seem less temperamental than it was. Steam on a winter river has a way of making men quiet. We held cups with both hands and watched our fingers return to us.
There were falls, of course. Mine was not elegant, though I would have preferred witnesses to remember it differently. On a polished section, my feet went ahead and the rest of me arrived later, shoulder first, pride last. The crew laughed without cruelty, which is the only acceptable way to laugh at a man who has just learned friction is conditional. I stood up, checked that nothing was broken except reputation, and walked more slowly.
There was also a wade through water just high enough to make everyone alert. We sealed cuffs as best we could, stepped quickly and came out stamping heat back into our toes. The river, unbothered by our discomfort, continued underneath and beside us. That is what I remember most from those days: even when frozen, it was never still. Under the Chadar there was always movement, a throat sound, a low working note, water travelling beneath our road.
Nyerak to Zangla
Nyerak changed the scale of the journey. After days of gorge walls, ice shelves and camp routines, a village house felt almost extravagant. Walls, a stove, a floor that did not shift underfoot. The warmth was not dramatic; it was domestic, which made it more powerful. I remember socks steaming, faces loosening, the simple relief of being inside a room built for winter rather than merely surviving beside one.
The old frozen waterfall near Nyerak stood in blue and white folds, but I do not want to pretend it explained anything. We stopped because it was beautiful and because everyone stops there. Ice had taken the shape of falling and held it mid-thought. Cameras came out. Gloves came off for too long. Then the cold corrected us, and we moved again.
Beyond Nyerak, the route felt less like a trekker’s performance and more like a working winter corridor. We saw local movement on the ice: sledges, supplies, people who did not treat the gorge as exotic because they had use for it. I was careful then, or tried to be, about remembering my place. I was a visitor borrowing a route that had existed before my curiosity and would continue, in some form, after my footprints were gone.
The approach towards Zangla opened the landscape. The river widened, the valley loosened, and the ice in places became broad enough to tempt carelessness. Sunlight rearranged the surface as the day went on. What felt solid in the morning could become doubtful by noon. The crew kept adjusting the line, sometimes dropping to the river, sometimes climbing out around open water, sometimes pausing long enough for me to understand that a halt was not indecision. It was part of the reading.
Zangla arrived without spectacle. That is perhaps why I remember it clearly. A house, tea, the relief of removing boots, the sense that my body had been carrying the sound of ice even after we left it. We had reached the far point of our walk. The old article in my head had imagined Padum and perhaps Phugtal beyond, but the journey I actually made was to Zangla and back. That was enough. More than enough, if I am honest.
When Winter Is a Classroom: Learning in Zangla Fort’s Shadow
Returning over a changed road
The return taught me that the Chadar was not a road in the way I had understood roads. It did not wait in the same condition because we had once crossed it safely. Temperature, sun, current and shadow had continued their work while we were away. A section that had felt reassuring earlier now required a bypass. A patch we had barely noticed on the way in had become slick enough to slow the whole group. The river did not care for symmetry.
One difficult section forced us low, almost crawling, packs awkward behind us while the ice offered only a narrow tongue of passage. I remember the smell of cold stone close to my face, the scrape of fabric, the sound of someone ahead moving carefully rather than quickly. There was no heroism in it. Just the necessary indignity of choosing the safest method available. At another break in the ice, we climbed again, using the bank where the river had withdrawn its permission.
By then fatigue had changed texture. Early tiredness is loud and complaining. Later tiredness becomes quiet, almost bureaucratic. It slows the hands, shortens patience, makes every instruction arrive through a slight delay. I began to understand why the crew guarded rhythm so carefully. Rhythm was not style; it was safety. Stop too long and the cold entered. Rush and the ice answered.
On the last day, as we neared Tilad Do again, dirt appeared underfoot with a strangeness I had not expected. After days of adjusting to ice, ordinary ground felt blunt and almost rude. A vehicle waited. The engine noise seemed too easy, a mechanical shortcut after the river’s long examination. I turned back once towards the gorge, not to bow or make a moment out of it, but because the body sometimes looks back before the mind has decided why.
We had walked the Chadar from 10 to 18 January 2015. Soon after, news around the Phuktal river blockage and official restrictions would make that winter feel even narrower in memory. I call it a last season because that is how it felt to me: not the final time anyone would walk on Zanskar ice, but the last time I would meet the route with that particular innocence. Later, roads would advance, reports would name risks more clearly, and the frozen river would sit differently in public imagination. My certainty is smaller and more useful than the old title: I was there for those days, on that ice, before the season changed around us.
Back in Leh, I washed my face with warm water and watched the dust and soot leave my hands in grey threads. My boots stood near the door, stiff and scarred from the river. For a while after the engine stopped and the room settled, I could still hear the staff on ice: tok, tok, tok — not a lesson, exactly, just the sound of a road that had never stopped moving.
