Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Parks

Listen first. Water is moving somewhere below you, fast and cold, carrying snowmelt down from the ice. The air is thin and damp, and it smells of wet earth and crushed leaves. Mist slides across the slopes, and the mountains keep vanishing and returning. You are standing in one of the highest protected landscapes in India, high in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand. Two national parks share one name here, and one place on UNESCO's World Heritage List.

The first is Nanda Devi National Park, built around a single mountain. Nanda Devi rises to roughly 7,800 metres. It is the second-highest peak in India, and the highest that stands entirely within the country's borders. UNESCO listed this park in 1988. In 2005, the listing grew to include a second, gentler place a short distance to the northwest... the Valley of Flowers. Together they protect two very different faces of the same mountains.

Start with the great peak. Nanda Devi sits inside a natural fortress that climbers call the Sanctuary. A ring of high summits surrounds it on almost every side, like the wall of a bowl. For a long time the only way in was through the Rishi Ganga gorge — a narrow, violent cut where the river forces its way out. Early explorers spent years searching for a route. The gorge was so difficult that the inner basin stayed almost untouched by people.

That isolation is the reason this park matters. Inside the ring of peaks, plants and animals lived for centuries with very little human pressure. Climbers did reach the summit in 1936, in a British and American expedition. Later decades brought more expeditions, and with them litter, cut timber and grazing animals. In the early 1980s, the authorities closed the inner Sanctuary to visitors. It has stayed largely closed since then, and that decision is a large part of why the ecosystem is still intact.

Here is a story many visitors never hear. In 1965, during the Cold War, a secret team of Indian and American climbers carried a nuclear-powered monitoring device up Nanda Devi. The goal was to watch Chinese missile tests from the high Himalaya. A storm forced the team to leave the equipment on the mountain. When climbers returned the next season, it was gone, probably swept away by snow and ice. The device has never been publicly recovered, and the episode still raises worry downstream.

For the people who live in these valleys, Nanda Devi is not only a mountain. She is a goddess — the protector of Garhwal and Kumaon, the two regions of Uttarakhand. Villages hold festivals in her name. Roughly every twelve years, a long pilgrimage called the Nanda Devi Raj Jat carries her symbolic presence across the high country, through forests and passes. Locals describe it as the goddess returning to her husband's home in the mountains. To many here, climbing her summit was always a delicate question.

The region carries another story of protection. Near the mouth of the Rishi Ganga sits the village of Reni. In the 1970s, women from this area stood beside the trees to stop contractors from cutting the forest. This became part of the Chipko movement — a name that comes from the Hindi word for hugging or clinging. The movement became one of the best-known grassroots environmental campaigns in the world, and it began in valleys like these.

Now turn toward the Valley of Flowers. The mood changes completely. Instead of a fortress of ice, you find a long, high meadow along the Pushpawati river. For much of the year it lies under snow. Then the monsoon arrives in summer, and the slopes turn green, then purple, yellow, white and blue. Hundreds of species of flowering plants grow here. Some of them grow in very few other places on Earth.

The valley's modern fame began almost by accident. In 1931, the British mountaineer Frank Smythe was returning from a climb on the nearby peak of Kamet. His team lost their way and came down into this meadow in full bloom. Smythe was amazed. He came back later to study the plants, and he wrote a book called The Valley of Flowers. That title stayed with the place. Local shepherds, of course, had known this meadow long before, as the Bhyundar valley.

There is a quieter story here too. In 1939, a British botanist named Joan Margaret Legge came to collect plants in the valley. While she was working on a steep slope, she slipped and fell, and she died here. Her sister later had a memorial built for her inside the valley. Walkers still pass the small stone grave among the flowers. It is a simple marker, and many people stop for a moment in silence.

Look closely at what grows around you. The Himalayan blue poppy has petals the colour of a clear evening sky. The Brahma kamal is a pale, cupped flower that people offer at shrines, and it is sacred in local tradition. You may also see primulas, wild geraniums, and many medicinal herbs that villagers have gathered for generations. The plants change week by week, so the valley in early summer looks different from the valley at the end of the monsoon.

These parks also shelter animals that are rarely seen. The snow leopard moves through the high, rocky ground. Himalayan musk deer, Asiatic black bears and blue sheep live on these slopes. Blue sheep, despite the name, have a grey-brown coat with a slight bluish tint. Most visitors will not see the large mammals. But you will hear birds in the scrub, and you may see butterflies over the flowers.

The usual route into the valley begins near Govindghat, then climbs on foot to the small settlement of Ghangaria. Many walkers on this path are Sikh pilgrims heading to Hemkund Sahib, a shrine beside a high glacial lake. The path is steep and the air is thin. So walk slowly, drink often, and be ready for rain at any hour. The weather here can change in minutes.

Before you move on, stand still for a moment. Look at the closest flower at your feet, and then lift your eyes to the snow on the ridges above. Both belong to the same system — the ice feeds the river, and the river feeds the meadow. Listen again to that water below you. As you walk away, keep to the path, and leave the flowers where they grow.