BharatSangraha

Ladakh & Zanskar · Western Himalaya & Trans-Himalaya

Terrain and eco-zones

Cold desert. The Indus valley around Leh receives roughly 100 mm of precipitation a year, much of it as winter snow; Zanskar and the Changthang get more snow and no more rain. The diurnal range is extreme — twenty degrees between afternoon and dawn is ordinary — because thin dry air holds no heat after sunset. Leh sits near -15 °C on a January night and in the mid-twenties on a July afternoon; Drass, at the western edge, is among the coldest inhabited places in the country. The monsoon reaches the region only as a weak and increasingly erratic spill over the Himalayan crest.

Landforms

The Indus suture — the join between the Indian plate and the Ladakh batholith, which the river followsLadakh, Zanskar and Karakoram ranges, with valley floors themselves at 3,000–4,500 mCold-desert dunes at Hunder in Nubra, on the bed of a lake dammed by a landslide and long since drainedLacustrine badlands at Lamayuru, the sediment of another vanished lake, weathered into fins and gulliesBrackish and hypersaline closed-basin lakes on the Changthang, with no outletAlluvial fans at every side stream, which is where villages sit because that is where water can be taken off

Rivers and waters

Indus (Senge Tsangpo) — the axis of the region, entering from the east and running north-west past LehZanskar — formed where the Doda and the Tsarap meet at Padum, and joining the Indus at NimmuShyok and Nubra — the northern system beyond the Khardung LaSuru — the western drainage past Kargil, under the Nun and Kun peaksHanle and Puga streams on the Changthang, and the closed basins of Tso Moriri and Tso Kar

Through the year

SeasonMonthsTypicalWhat it is like
WinterNovember–March-25–5 °CPasses closed, canals frozen, no field work. Households live on the store: dried meat, dried vegetables, chhurpi, barley flour and butter. Losar and Galdan Namchot fall here, deliberately — the festivals sit in the months with nothing to do.
SpringApril–May0–18 °CThe melt begins, the channels are cleared by the whole village under the churpon's direction, and barley is sown. This is the tightest moment in the year: sowing needs water weeks before the glaciers give it freely.
SummerJune–August8–28 °CRoads open, high pastures occupied, the monastic festival season runs, and the apricots of Nubra and the lower Indus ripen. Also the season of glacial-melt flooding and of cloudbursts on the Himalayan flank.
AutumnSeptember–October-2–20 °CHarvest, threshing on flat village floors, and drying — apricots on roofs, greens on walls, meat hung in sheds once the nights turn hard. Everything eaten between November and April is put up in these weeks.

Best time to visitJune to September for the road passes, the monastic festivals and the Changthang lakes; late January and February for the winter festivals, the Chadar and an empty Leh, if you are equipped for -20 °C. Allow two days in Leh before going higher — altitude, not distance, is what limits a Ladakh itinerary.

The climate, landforms, rivers and seasons of Ladakh & Zanskar, and the best time of year to visit. (4)