Shey Phoksundo Lake

I had read about Phoksundo’s color for years before I saw it and assumed, as one does, that the photographs were exaggerated. They were not. The lake sits at nearly 3,600 meters inside Shey Phoksundo National Park, and the water is a turquoise so saturated it looks lit from beneath — a mineral trick of glacial silt and depth that no filter I own has ever managed to replicate honestly.

Getting There Is the Trek

There’s no shortcut into Dolpo. From Juphal airstrip it’s four to five days of walking through pine forest, past the Bon Buddhist village of Ringmo, before the lake reveals itself at a bend in the trail. Ringmo itself deserves its own attention — a cluster of flat-roofed stone houses and a Bon monastery, the oldest surviving pre-Buddhist tradition of the Tibetan plateau, still practiced here largely undisturbed by the sectarian tourism that has reshaped so much of the rest of the Himalaya.

I sat with a Bon monk one evening who explained, patiently and with visible amusement at my confusion, that Bon predates Buddhism in Tibet and that the swastika motifs painted on the monastery walls run counterclockwise rather than clockwise — the opposite of the Buddhist version. I had never once considered that a symbol could carry two entirely separate meanings depending on which direction it curled.

A Lake With No Fish

Local legend holds that Phoksundo has no fish because a local deity forbade it after a fisherman’s greed angered the lake spirit. Whatever the explanation, the water really is fishless, and the effect is a stillness that feels almost engineered — nothing rising, nothing rippling, just wind on glass. I walked the trail above the lake’s northern shore toward the waterfall that drains it, one of the tallest in Nepal, and stood there for a long time doing nothing useful at all.

The permit system here — a restricted-area fee on top of the park entrance — keeps numbers genuinely low, which is rare for anywhere this photogenic. I met perhaps a dozen other foreign trekkers across five days, and half of them were on their way to the higher passes toward Shey Gompa, a further trek I didn’t have the days left to attempt. I’ve already decided I’m coming back for it.

When to go: Late May through October is the only realistic window, since the high passes into Dolpo close under snow the rest of the year. September and early October bring the clearest skies right after monsoon, though the trek requires a restricted-area permit and typically a registered guide.