Watching Sunrise at Pangong Lake: What It Actually Feels Like

The alarm was set for 4:30 AM. I had gone to sleep at 11 PM after watching the Milky Way for an hour from outside the tent, my fingers numb inside my gloves. The sleeping bag was not quite warm enough. I had zipped it all the way to my chin and pulled my wool hat down over my ears and still felt the 4,350m altitude seeping through the canvas.

When the alarm went off, I genuinely considered not going.

The Walk to the Shore

The lake camp was twenty metres from the water. In the dark, the lake was invisible — only its presence was felt, a vast cold absence beyond the circle of tent lights. The sky was beginning to lighten in the east, not yet dawn but no longer the thick black of midnight. The stars near the horizon were fading. The ones overhead were not.

I was the only person outside. Everyone else was sensible. I walked to the shore and found a flat rock and sat down and pulled my knees up and waited.

What Happens at Dawn

The sequence of colours at Pangong sunrise is not like watching a sunrise anywhere else I have been. It goes like this:

First, the mountains behind you (to the west and south) begin to glow faintly pink along their ridgelines while the sky ahead is still dark. The lake is black and mirror-still. Then the eastern sky begins to move — the darkness becoming deep blue, then purple, then a band of orange at the horizon so narrow it looks painted. Then the first direct light hits the water and the lake stops being black and becomes a colour for which English has no name. Not turquoise, not blue, not green — all of these simultaneously, shifting as the light changes angle, as if the lake is an object that generates its own colour rather than reflecting the sky.

This lasted about twenty minutes. I did not take a single photo for the first ten of them. I couldn't.

The Silence

There was no wind. This was the other thing. Pangong in the middle of the day is often windy — the kind of constant, cold wind that makes photography difficult and standing outside unpleasant. At dawn, particularly on clear mornings, there is sometimes a perfect stillness before the valley heat begins to generate convection. The lake was as flat as glass. The reflections of the mountains were indistinguishable from the mountains themselves.

A single bar-headed goose flew across the lake, low, its wing-beats leaving small ripples in the reflection. That was the only sound for twenty minutes.

Coming Back

By 6:30 AM I was back in the tent for hot tea and bread and jam from the camp kitchen. Three other guests had appeared at some point during the last half-hour of sunrise — I had not noticed them arrive. We sat with our tea and said very little.

If someone had asked me before the trip whether I would get up at 4:30 AM in temperatures below 5°C to sit on a rock by a lake for an hour, I would have said probably not. If someone asks me now whether it was worth it, I have no way to answer the question that doesn't sound like an exaggeration.

Go. Set the alarm. Go.