Valley of Flowers National Park

For a few weeks each summer, a high hanging valley in the Garhwal Himalaya turns into a sweep of alpine flowers. The Valley of Flowers lies at around 3,350 to 3,650 metres in the upper basin of the Pushpawati river in Uttarakhand, about eight kilometres long and two wide, below peaks that rise to Gauri Parbat at 6,719 metres. It is snowbound for most of the year and opens to visitors only in the warm season, roughly June to October.

The outside world learned of it by accident. In 1931 the British mountaineers Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and R. L. Holdsworth lost their way returning from Kamet and came down into a valley full of flowers; Smythe gave it its English name and wrote a book about it. In 1939 the botanist Joan Margaret Legge, sent by Kew Gardens, fell to her death while collecting plants on its slopes, and her sister later put up a memorial near the spot. The valley was declared a national park in the early 1980s and lies, together with Nanda Devi National Park to the east, within the Nanda Devi Biosphere Reserve.

The flowers are the point. A decade of fieldwork by the botanist Chandra Prakash Kala recorded about 520 species of higher plants, of which 498 are flowering: orchids, poppies, primulas, marigolds, daisies and anemones spread across the meadows, and the park is also rich in medicinal plants. Because the valley sits where eastern and western Himalayan floras meet, and between the Zanskar and Great Himalaya ranges, many species are rare or threatened. The monsoon brings mist and low cloud that keep the soil damp, so the best display comes after the rains begin, from July to early September. Wildlife is sparse but notable: Asiatic black bear, musk deer, blue sheep and, more rarely seen, the snow leopard, with the Himalayan monal among the birds.

There is no accommodation inside the park, and visitors walk in and out each day from the base settlement of Ghangaria, about 3 km from the valley.

Getting there

The nearest town of any size is Joshimath, about 270 km by road from Haridwar or Dehradun; the nearest larger town on the map is Srinagar in Garhwal, about 98 km away. The trek starts at Govindghat, about an hour's drive from Joshimath: shared taxis cover the first 4 km, then a trail of under 11 km climbs to Ghangaria, shared with Sikh pilgrims bound for Hemkund Sahib; mules, porters and a helicopter service are also available. The nearest practical airport is Dehradun Jolly Grant (DED), about 151 km away in a straight line and much farther by mountain road. From Delhi, trains run to Haridwar, with buses onward via Rishikesh to Govindghat.