Valley of Flowers National Park

The Valley of Flowers lies high in the upper Himalaya of Uttarakhand, a glacial valley that spends most of the year under snow and then, for a few weeks after the monsoon arrives, fills with alpine flowers. You reach it on foot: a steep climb from Govindghat to the village of Ghangaria, then a further walk into the park itself, which can only be visited as a day trip. The valley floor is a broad meadow crossed by a stream, banked by steep slopes and hanging glaciers, with primula, anemone, potentilla and blue poppy among hundreds of species that turn over week by week through the short season.

History

Colonel Edmund Smyth is recorded as finding the Pushpawati valley in 1862, but the place stayed little known until 1931, when the British mountaineers Frank Smythe, Eric Shipton and R. L. Holdsworth lost their way back from a successful climb of Kamet, came upon the valley in flower and named it the Valley of Flowers; Smythe later wrote a book of that name. In 1939 the botanist Joan Margaret Legge, sent by the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, slipped and died on a rocky slope here while collecting flowers, and her sister later put up a memorial near the spot. A government order of 1980 declared the valley a national park, whose establishment is also dated to 1982, and from 1993 the botanist Chandra Prakash Kala spent a decade studying it for the Wildlife Institute of India, recording 520 alpine plants. The park lies at 3,352 to 3,658 metres and covers 87.5 square kilometres, and in 2000 it was added to the Nanda Devi biosphere reserve as a second core zone (Wikipedia, Valley of Flowers National Park).

The landscape

• The flowering meadow - the valley floor carpeted with alpine species that shift through the season.
• The Pushpawati stream - the meltwater channel running the length of the valley.
• Snow peaks and hanging glaciers - the walls of the valley above the treeline.
• The climb from Ghangaria - a steep forested approach with waterfalls along the way.

When to go

The window is short. The park opens around the start of June, but flowers peak from mid-July to late August, which is also the wettest part of the monsoon. By September the bloom is fading and the valley closes in early October. Go with the rain rather than waiting for clear weather, because clear weather here usually means no flowers.

Good to know

It rains, often all day, and the trail turns to mud and slush. The trek is long and steep, altitude affects some people at Ghangaria, and there is no accommodation inside the park, so every visit means walking in and back out the same day. Ghangaria itself is a crowded, basic huddle of lodges. Landslides regularly close the road approach at short notice.

Nearby

The pilgrimage lake of Hemkund Sahib is a further steep climb from the same village.

Key facts