Nanda Devi National Park

Listen for a moment. Somewhere below you, water is moving fast over stone. The air is thin and cold, and it carries the smell of pine resin and damp earth. High above the ridgelines, if the clouds allow it, a pale double summit catches the light before anything else around it. That summit is Nanda Devi. The wild country that guards it is one of the most carefully protected landscapes in the Himalaya.

You are in Chamoli district, in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, in the region locals call Garhwal. Nanda Devi National Park was established in 1982. Six years later, in 1988, UNESCO listed it as a World Heritage Site. In 2005 the listing grew to include the nearby Valley of Flowers National Park. Today the two are recognised together as a single protected landscape of high peaks, glaciers and alpine meadows.

At the centre of it all stands the mountain itself. Nanda Devi rises to about 7,816 metres. It is the second-highest mountain in India. It is also the highest peak that lies entirely within India's borders. The mountain has two summits joined by a long ridge, and from many viewpoints they look like a pair of raised shoulders. On a clear morning, the eastern face turns gold while the valleys below stay in blue shadow.

Here is the first thing most visitors do not realise. The mountain sits inside a natural fortress. A great ring of peaks surrounds it, many of them above six thousand metres. Mountaineers call the enclosed basin the Nanda Devi Sanctuary. For centuries there was only one realistic way in — a narrow, savage gorge cut by the Rishi Ganga river. Its walls are so steep that early explorers spent years searching for a route through.

That search ended in 1934. Two British mountaineers, Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, forced a path up the Rishi Ganga gorge with the help of local porters. They became the first known outsiders to enter the inner sanctuary. Two years later, in 1936, Tilman and Noel Odell stood on the summit. It was, for many years, the highest mountain anyone had ever climbed.

But the mountain is not only a climbing prize. For the people of Garhwal and the neighbouring region of Kumaon, Nanda Devi is a goddess. She is the patron deity of these hills — a daughter of the mountains, in local belief, who left her home to marry. Every twelve years or so, a great pilgrimage called the Nanda Devi Raj Jat carries her symbolic journey across the high passes. Villagers walk for days, singing, to escort her home.

Now for the second surprise. This park is, for most people, closed. The core zone, including the inner sanctuary, was shut to visitors in 1983. Climbing expeditions had left behind rubbish, cut juniper for firewood, and disturbed the wildlife. The government decided the land needed rest. Since then, very few people have walked where Shipton and Tilman once walked. The closure is the reason the sanctuary remains so wild today.

And the sanctuary hides a stranger story. In 1965, a secret mission involving American and Indian intelligence carried a nuclear-powered monitoring device up toward the summit. The aim was to watch for Chinese missile tests across the border. A storm forced the climbers to leave the device on the mountain. When they returned the next season, it was gone — likely swept away by snow and ice. It has never been publicly confirmed as found.

What survives inside these walls is a quiet community of animals. The park is home to the snow leopard, though it is rarely seen. Himalayan tahr, a shaggy wild goat, moves along the cliffs. Bharal, known as blue sheep, graze on high slopes, their grey coats blending with the rock. The shy Himalayan musk deer and the Asiatic black bear live in the forests lower down. Above all of them, large birds of prey ride the warm air.

The forests change as you climb. Lower slopes carry fir, birch and rhododendron. Higher up, trees give way to juniper scrub, then to open meadows called bugyals by local people. These grasslands bloom briefly in the short summer. Beyond them lies a world of moraine — the rubble left behind by glaciers — and finally bare ice and rock.

The villages around the park have their own place in history. Near the mouth of the Rishi Ganga stands the village of Reni. In 1974, women from Reni, led by a woman named Gaura Devi, hugged the trees to stop contractors from felling their forest. This became part of the Chipko movement — chipko means to cling, or to hug. It grew into one of India's best-known environmental campaigns. It began here, on the edge of this park.

The mountains here are also fragile. In February 2021, a huge mass of rock and ice broke away high in the Rishi Ganga catchment. A wall of water and debris rushed down the valley, destroying hydropower works and taking many lives. Scientists still study the event. It is a reminder that these slopes are young, steep and constantly changing. The beauty you see is also raw geological force.

So pause where you are standing. Look at the ridges, and notice how the snowline cuts across them like a clean edge. Listen again to the river below — some of that water has travelled down from the sanctuary itself. You are looking toward a place that very few people will ever enter. Perhaps that is its greatest gift: a mountain kept quiet, so the goddess and the snow leopard can keep it for themselves.