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Greenland '99
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The Snow Leopard
Update from Huspung Camp, Pakistan
August 11, 1999
 Mortenson | |
|  Snow leopard prints |
It just jumped over a little fence into a little encampment with goats and sheep in there. They've got tin cans there, and immediately, everybody woke up, and for about ten seconds, with a flashlight, we were able to see the snow leopard running out of the little compound. It was rather tawny-skinned. I expected to see something white, but it was tawny-skinned. Later on, I found out that snow leopards are pretty common in this area.
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| "We were awoken by a clanging of tin cans. A local shepherd, Gulam, jumped up and told me that there was a snow leopard there..." |
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Hunting snow leopards was banned about 12 years ago, and fortunately, that has resulted in their proliferation. The local villages have suffered. Every year about 50 to 100 hundred of their livestock are killed. Snow leopards kill their yaks, their zeows (which are rather like big cows), their sheep, and their goats.
The snow leopard, as soon as we shined the flashlight, ran out of the compound. I hope to get some photo prints in the morning of the snow leopard. I guess the mother comes out at night and does the hunting for her two babies. It was an incredible experience. My heart was beating—we woke up out of our sleep and there it was in front of us.
Snow leopards apparently come down to about 4000 meters this time of year, and as the snow comes down, they follow the ibex [wild goat] herds. During the winter, they go rather hungry. In the spring, around March, the ibex head up between two passes to the high mountains. You get about 300 to 400 ibex—they congregate in one area, and the snow leopards come down there and get their spring fill.
This is Greg over and out.
— Greg Mortenson, MountainZone.com Correspondent
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