Roopkund

High in the Garhwal Himalaya, at roughly 5,000 metres beneath the slopes of Trishul, lies a small glacial tarn that has become one of the most haunting sites in the mountains. For most of the year Roopkund is frozen and buried in snow. When it thaws, the shallow water and the scree around its edge reveal the bones of hundreds of people, scattered among the rocks together with scraps of leather footwear, wooden objects and iron fragments. The lake itself is modest, rarely more than about 40 metres across and only a few metres deep, but its setting is immense: a bowl of rock and ice below the Trishul massif, with Nanda Ghunti rising nearby.

The skeletons were brought to wider attention in 1942, when a forest ranger came across them. During the war some officials briefly wondered whether they were the remains of Japanese soldiers, but the bones proved far older. Local songs had long explained the dead in their own way: tradition holds that a king of Kannauj, Raja Jasdhaval, set out on a pilgrimage to the goddess Nanda Devi with his pregnant queen, servants and dancers, and that the whole party was struck down by a storm of enormous hailstones. Early studies of skull injuries seemed to fit that story, and for decades the lake was thought to hold the victims of a single disaster.

Science later complicated the picture. A genetic study published in 2019, based on ancient DNA from 38 individuals, found three distinct groups. Most had South Asian ancestry and died around 800 CE, apparently over more than one event. A second group, dated to around 1800 CE, had ancestry closest to people of the eastern Mediterranean, particularly Greece and Crete, and one individual of the same period had Southeast Asian ancestry. How a party from the Mediterranean came to die at a Himalayan lake remains unexplained. The mystery sits on a living pilgrimage route: once every twelve years the Nanda Devi Raj Jat procession passes this way, carrying the goddess through the high country, and the meadows of Bedni Bugyal below the lake host an annual religious fair.

Getting there

Roopkund is in Chamoli district of Uttarakhand and can be reached only on foot. The multi-day trek usually begins at the village of Lohajung and climbs through the high meadows of Ali and Bedni Bugyal before the final ascent to the lake. The nearest railhead normally used is Kathgodam, roughly 210 km by road from Lohajung. The nearest airport is Pantnagar (PGH), about 140 km away in a straight line; Almora, about 74 km away as the crow flies, is the nearest sizeable town.