A Renowned Glacial Lake
Roopkund Trek: The Skeleton Lake of the Garhwal Himalayas
At 4,800 metres in Uttarakhand's Chamoli district, tucked into a rocky bowl below the Trishul massif, sits a small glacial lake that most people hear about for an unusual reason first: it's full of bones. Roopkund, known locally as the Mystery Lake and to most of the world as Skeleton Lake, has drawn trekkers and researchers alike since a forest ranger stumbled on it in 1942 and found the scattered remains of several hundred people frozen at its edge, along with old wooden artefacts, jewellery, and the bones of pack horses.
Set the mystery aside for a moment, though, and Roopkund still holds up as one of the better treks in the Indian Himalayas. It's a week spent climbing through oak forest and open meadow to bare, glacier-scoured rock, with Trishul and Nanda Ghunti standing over nearly every camp along the way. What makes the trek what it is, really, is the combination: a genuinely unresolved piece of history, paired with a trail worth doing on its own merits.
For years, nobody had a real answer. The bones were first assumed to belong to Japanese soldiers (this was wartime, after all), then to traders or a lost army unit. It wasn't until 2004 that a joint Indian-European team took a proper forensic look and noticed something strange: many of the skulls and shoulder blades carried short, deep fractures, the kind caused by a blunt, rounded object rather than a weapon or a fall. Their conclusion was that a group of pilgrims and porters, caught in the open with nowhere to shelter, had been killed by an unusually violent hailstorm, with stones reportedly the size of cricket balls. Radiocarbon dating placed these deaths somewhere in the 7th to 10th century CE.
It's a compelling story, and for a portion of the skeletons, it's probably accurate. But a 2019 genetic study in Nature Communications, which sequenced ancient DNA from 38 of the skeletons, made the picture considerably stranger. The remains turned out to belong to at least three genetically distinct groups of people who died roughly a thousand years apart. Of these, 23 individuals, with ancestry typical of present-day South Asians, do date to that 7th–10th century window, consistent with the hailstorm theory. A second group of 14, though, carried ancestry from the eastern Mediterranean, Crete and Greece in particular, and died at Roopkund only around two centuries ago. Nobody has yet explained how they got there. It remains one of the genuinely open questions in Himalayan archaeology.
Local folklore has its own version, older than any of the science: a folk song still sung by women in villages near Roopkund tells of a goddess enraged that outsiders had defiled her mountain sanctuary, who destroyed them with a hailstorm of supernatural force. Some also connect the earlier deaths to the Nanda Devi Raj Jat, a Hindu pilgrimage that has passed close to the lake once every twelve years for generations, though this link remains a theory rather than an established fact.
Roopkund treks begin at Lohajung, a small village where the last stretch of motorable road runs out. From there, the trail climbs through oak and rhododendron forest via the villages of Wan and Didna before breaking above the treeline into Ali Bugyal and Bedni Bugyal, two of the largest high-altitude meadows in this part of the Himalayas, and reason enough on their own for many trekkers to do this route. Shepherds graze sheep, horses, and mules here through the summer months, and on a clear day the views open up to Trishul, Nanda Ghunti, and, further off, the Chaukhamba range.
Past the meadows, the trail turns rockier and quieter, past the small stone shrine at Kalu Vinayak and across long stretches of moraine and old snowfield, before Roopkund itself comes into view: small, still, and hemmed in by rock and ice on almost every side. It's an odd place to stand, somewhere between a viewpoint and a memorial, and most trekkers will say photos don't quite do it justice.
Roopkund is graded moderate to difficult, and most itineraries run 7 to 9 days round trip from Lohajung. The day-by-day route, altitude profile, and packing list are coming up next.
