damaru
Gadsar Valley
Gadsar Valley is known as the ‘valley of flowers’ and I’d be hard pressed to think of a better name for a valley. The term Gadsar itself, I’m rather unreliably informed, means ‘lake of the fishes’ in Kashmiri (ﻏﺎﮌ ﺳﺁﺭ). A lake of fishes in a valley of flowers. It sounds like paradise, and looks rather like it as well.
You can’t see Gadsar Lake in this photograph, but it’s there. Over that ridge, perhaps, or behind that rise, or…well, it’s there. It’s a smallish lake; maybe half a mile long and half a mile wide, generally frozen over from November to April. Ice, I’m told, can often be seen floating in the center of the lake even in summer. The water is numbingly cold, but said to be singularly clear and full of trout.
And not just trout, if local lore is to be believed. The lake is sometimes called Yemsar, which apparently means ‘lake of the demon.’ Some shepherds who graze their flocks in the alpine meadows of Gadsar Valley over the summer season claim a tentacled beast lives in the lake. It seizes sheep that linger too long by the water’s edge and drags them under the surface.
Sadly, there probably aren’t any freshwater cephalopoda living in the small, icy lakes of Kashmir. That’s probably a good thing. If there were such a creature, then the valley of flowers and the lake of fishes would likely be overrun by the noise and mess of humankind, and the lake isn’t large enough to hold a population of lake monsters sufficient to eat all the tourists.
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