The Mountain That Eats Light
The Spiti Valley in February is a world that has decided to stop. The river is sealed under ice of improbable thickness. The villages — Pin, Kaza, Kibber — sit under snow so heavy the rooftops groan at night. The road from Manali has been closed since November. You arrive by choice or you do not arrive at all.
I came the first time in February 2019 following a tip from a wildlife biologist based at the Snow Leopard Trust field station in Kibber. She had been tracking a female, GPS-collared the previous spring, and her movement data suggested a corridor through the upper boulder fields above the village that the cat used with almost calendar regularity.
"The camera is the least interesting part of this work. The interesting part is learning to read a mountain — understanding why a leopard uses a certain boulder, at what light, in what temperature, after what kind of snowfall."
— Field notes, Kibber, February 2019
I spent eight days that first winter not photographing a snow leopard. I photographed the absence of one — tracks in fresh snow, a carcass of a bharal dragged behind a boulder and cached under stones, the watching eyes of the herder who knew every movement on that hillside better than any GPS collar ever could.
Snow leopard tracks in fresh snowfall, 4,400m, Kibber · 2019
Bharal (blue sheep) herd above Kibber — primary prey species · 2019
Learning to Wait
By the third expedition, in January 2021, I had learned that the snow leopard's world operates on rhythms I could not hurry. The bharal moved to lower slopes as temperatures dropped. The leopard followed. But the corridor — the narrow band of habitat between human settlements and the high snowfields above — was contracting.
Climate science had already documented what the locals had known for years: the snowlines were rising. The high-altitude pastures were greening earlier, drawing livestock further into leopard territory. The buffer zone that had allowed both species to exist in the same valley was being quietly erased by degrees.
The Photograph That Arrived
The encounter that produced the defining image of this project happened on the fourteenth morning of my fourth winter expedition. I was positioned before sunrise at a rocky outcrop at 4,620 metres — a spot the biologist had identified as a favourite resting site for a sub-adult male she had designated SL-07.
He walked out of the boulder field at 06:47, when the light was still blue-grey and diffused by thin cloud. He was forty metres away. He looked directly at me for seven seconds — long enough for me to make three exposures — then moved past with the absolute indifference that is the defining quality of a large predator that has never learned to fear anything.
"In those seven seconds I was not a photographer. I was a part of the landscape, correctly positioned and sufficiently still. The camera was incidental."
— Field notes, Kibber, February 2022
GALLERY — Selected frames from the encounter, February 14, 2022
What This Project Asks
This is not a project about photography. It is a project about a corridor — a thin ribbon of altitude and climate and habit that connects the snow leopard's high-altitude hunting grounds to the lower pastures where its prey spends the winter. That corridor is narrowing.
SL-07, the sub-adult male whose seven-second gaze produced the photograph that anchors this series, was last detected by his GPS collar in November 2023. The collar's battery had been scheduled to last another eight months. The signal stopped without explanation.
The Snow Leopard Trust estimates the species' numbers will decline by at least 10% over the next 16 years if current warming trends continue. These images are not advocacy. They are a record. The difference, I have come to believe, matters less than we would like it to.