10 maps, 48 colour pictures. When Harish Kohli and his team of seven members reached the summit of the Karakoram Pass in the early afternoon of 17th February 1995, they had been on the move for twelve gruelling hours. As they began the treacherous descent, the light breeze turned into a storm and then into a blizzard, plummet-ing the temperature to minus 48 degrees Celcius. Later that night when they reached their base, after twenty-six horrifying hours, two of the members were frostbitten, one of them losing seven of his fingers. But for the Ski-Himalaya team, it was only the beginning of their adventure, which became one of the most momentous journeys in mountaineering history.

The present volume is the literary record of the journey of the author giving an account of day to day proceeding.

‘A tour de force of luminous writing.’ Mark Cocker, Spectator

The Himalaya, Asia's jagged backbone, lured photographer Andrea Baldeck on four journeys covering thousands of miles from northern India to western China, the distillation of which is Himalaya: Land of the Snow Lion. This volume opens a window onto an ancient enduring culture, bound by shared ethnicity and religion and challenged by daunting geography. Portraits, landscapes, architecture, and still-life images convey the texture and rhythm of this mountain life, which is ever more threatened by the forces of geopolitics, migration, and modernization. In a series of succinct essays accompanying the images, the artist invites the viewer to imagine aspects of life and travel in a region where a remote, starkly beautiful environment test and tempers all who call it home.