THE GHOST OF THE MOUNTAINS By KULBHUSHANSINGH SURYAWANSHI

A rare combination of field memoir, conservation science and literary mountain writing, The Ghost of the Mountains follows one of the world’s leading snow leopard scientists through nearly two decades of work in the high mountains of Asia

The Ghost of the Mountains: Unravelling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard by Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi arrives at a moment when even the farthest ridges of the Himalaya are no longer beyond the reach of a changing world. Climate change threatens glaciers and rivers, cashmere markets reshape rangelands, mining reaches desert mountains, tourism finds the once-unseen cat, and solar power projects raise difficult questions about what green futures may cost fragile high-altitude ecosystems. This is a timely and unusual book: part field memoir, part scientific quest, part mountain journey. Across Spiti, Ladakh, Mongolia, Kyrgyzstan and Nepal, Suryawanshi follows the snow leopard not as a myth alone, but as a living animal whose survival depends on blue sheep, ibex, herders, women, dogs, corrals, data, governments and the patience to read a landscape one pug mark at a time.

At its heart, The Ghost of the Mountains is a story of entanglement. A snow leopard must eat; a herder must sleep; a mother must raise cubs through snow and hunger; a blue sheep must find grass in a winter that has stripped the mountains bare. The book carries the reader from the joy of a first sighting to the grief of livestock loss, from the tenderness of cubs playing with their mother’s tail to the hard truth that conservation is not done in an empty wilderness but among people who have lived with these animals for generations. Suryawanshi’s search becomes an act of listening: to the alarm whistle of blue sheep, to the anxieties of women guarding livestock at night, to the knowledge of herders who design their own corrals, and to the mountains themselves, where science and humility must walk together.

Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi is a wildlife biologist and conservation scientist whose work has focused on snow leopards and high-mountain ecosystems for nearly two decades. Trained in Wildlife Biology and Conservation at the National Centre for Biological Sciences, he began his career in the mountains through fieldwork in Spiti and went on to conduct snow leopard research across India and Central Asia. He works as a scientist with the Nature Conservation Foundation and as the country director of the India Program of the Snow Leopard Trust. He is a Fellow of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research and the British Ecological Society. The book’s text and images are by Suryawanshi; the map is credited to Emily Faccini.