The Snow Leopard

A story of a wintertrek over five passes in the Nepal Himalaya;
An account of the author’s search for the rare snow leopard, travelling on
foot from Kathmandu to the remote Crystal Mountain, high in the Himalayas by
way of Annapurna. What began as an expedition became, for Mathiessen, a true
pilgrimage of the heart. The book won the US National Book Award.
‹In 1973, Matthiessen journeyed with George Schaller, a field biologist, to
Crystal Mountain in the Himalayas, to study the wild blue sheep of the region
called bharal. They also hoped to see the rare snow leopard, an almost
mythical creature which Schaller once glimpsed on a previous visit.
Matthiessen is a student of Zen Buddhism and for him this was as much an inner
journey as a field trip. He succeeds well in blending the spiritual with the
earthly and his book is an evocative account of a remote and timeless place
and its people›