Roopkund, the Skeleton Lake: Five Hundred Dead in the Himalayas Who Died a Thousand Years Apart
High in the Indian Himalayas, more than sixteen thousand feet above the sea, in a lonely bowl of rock and ice where no one lives and few have any reason to go, there lies a small, shallow glacial lake called Roopkund. For most of the year it is frozen and buried under snow. But when the brief mountain summer thaws its surface and clears the ice from its shores, the lake gives up a spectacle that has horrified and baffled every traveler who has come upon it. Scattered across its bed and heaped along its banks are human bones — hundreds upon hundreds of them. Skulls, ribs, thigh bones, whole skeletons, along with scraps of hair, leather, and preserved flesh, lie exposed in the thin cold air. By most estimates the remains of somewhere between three hundred and six hundred people rest in and around this one tiny alpine pool. It is known, with grim simplicity, as Skeleton Lake. A Discovery in Wartime The bones had long been known to the shepherds and pilgrims of the region, but the wider...