This lake below - I don't know the name of it - is at a height of more than 16000 feet high at a point called Goche-La in Sikkim. The best part about visiting this lake was that I did not know about the existence of this. This is how it happened:
We had been walking for nearly 2 hours. I was walking up the slope very slowly as I was quite tired and our porter had gone ahead to our destination. I could see we were just a few hundred meters away from the final point and I was walking parallel to a ridge. To my right was a valley a few 100 feet deep. The slope I was walking on was pretty dry but the valley was filled with ice, and so were the hills across the valley. Looking up to my left, I could see there was a ridge very close to me and there must be a small valley on the other side of the ridge too. So, instead of taking the path taken by the porter, I decided to climb up and walk along the ridge so I can enjoy view of both sides. As I closed in towards the ridge, I could see some ice deposits on the top. I climbed further up to the top and look down - and wow! It was the most beautiful thing I had seen ever! Deep down on the other side was a lake - in semi-crystallized form. It's deep turquoise colors and the reflection from ice crystals on the top was just too good to be imagined. And I was there - on the top of a ridge wide enough for just one person to walk - with a valley to the right and the lake on the other side, and in front of me were majestic ice-clad Himalayan mountains, including the mighty Kanchenjunga! And right next to me on the other side of the lake was Goche summit just about a 100meters climb. And descending from Goche was a beautiful glacier that would dump ice into the lake. Excuse me for struggling for words; it was so beautiful it looked as if I am in a completely different world. The short walk on the ridge is one of the finest moments of the Sikkim trip. It was like one of the scene straight out of hollywood movies where you see just one person walking on a huge mountain ridge with breathtaking visuals! And how I longed to be in such places!
TECHNICALS:
Not having a wide angle lens, I took nearly 5-6 pictures of the surroundings to cover the entire landscape using my 28mm lens. The film used is Fuji Sensia and seems to have got a blue tint in the picture. Probably all the pictures had some exposure correction if focused on ice, or otherwise were spot metered to a grey region.
