Destinations
Chandratal and Kunzum Pass
A crescent lake at 4,270m, an hour off the pass that separates Spiti from Lahaul. Open for about five months, reached on a rough spur, and the one place in Himachal people plan an entire trip around.
Suits — Spiti trips going out via Manali, camping, photographers
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Chandratal is the picture that sells Spiti, and it is also the part of a Spiti trip most likely not to happen. Both of those things are worth understanding before you build a holiday around it.
The season is shorter than the pass season
Kunzum La is usually cleared somewhere in the second half of May, and that date gets published and repeated and treated as the date Chandratal opens. It is not. The spur road that turns off towards the lake is cleared separately and later — typically a week or two after the pass itself — and the camps only start operating once it is through, which in a normal year means the middle of June.
So a trip planned for the first week of June can quite easily cross Kunzum successfully and still not get to the lake. Going the other way, the whole thing shuts with the first serious snow, which can be the middle of October or can be the first week of November.
We check this with people who have driven it that week. A published opening date is a forecast, not a fact.
Why the drive takes as long as it does
Ninety-seven kilometres from Kaza sounds like three hours and is closer to five. The road as far as Losar is fine. After that it climbs to the pass, drops down the other side towards Batal, and the section either side of the turning is rock, river crossing and no surface at all — the meltwater channels run across the road rather than under it, and they are deeper in the afternoon than in the morning because the day has been warming the glacier above.
The last twelve kilometres are the spur itself, which turns off a little above Batal and is unsurfaced the whole way. It ends at a car park; the lake is a twenty-minute walk beyond that and no vehicle goes closer.
None of this is dangerous in a suitable vehicle with a driver who has done it before. All of it is slow.
The night
The lake sits at 4,270 metres and the camps a little below that, and this is almost certainly the highest you will sleep on the trip. It gets seriously cold after dark — below freezing most nights of the season — and the tents are canvas with quilts rather than anything heated.
Two consequences. First, do not come here on the way in to Spiti. This is a place to sleep after a week of acclimatising, not on your second night out of Manali. Second, bring more warm clothing than the daytime temperature suggests; people arrive in shirtsleeves at two in the afternoon and are extremely unhappy by nine.
There is no signal, no power beyond a few hours of generator, and no shop.
Where it fits
Almost everyone does this at the Lahaul end of a Spiti trip: in from Shimla and Kinnaur over four or five days, up the valley through Tabo and Kaza, then out over Kunzum with a night at Chandratal and down to Manali the following day. That order climbs gradually and finishes high, which is the right shape.
Manali is 112 kilometres from the lake and it is a long day, most of it on the rough section down to Gramphu before the tunnel road takes over.
If it is shut
It is shut for more than half the year and it can be shut inside the season for a day or two after fresh snow. If that happens the honest options are to wait a day where you are, or to go back out the way you came in through Kinnaur, which is a longer drive and an open road.
What nobody should do is sit at Batal hoping. That is how people end up in the dhaba for two nights.
- Lake altitude
- 4,270m. The camps sit a little below it
- Kunzum La
- 4,551m, on the Spiti–Lahaul divide
- From Kaza
- 97km. Half a day, because of what the road is rather than how far
- Season
- Kunzum clears from mid-to-late May; the lake spur usually a fortnight later
- Give it
- One night, and only if you have already been high for several days
- Best months
- Mid-June once the lake spur is cleared, then through to the first heavy snow — anywhere from mid-October to early November.
Worth your time
What to actually go and see
The lake itself
A crescent of very clear water in a bowl of scree and old snow, with the colour changing through the day as the light moves. It is a twenty-minute walk from the parking area to the shore and a couple of hours to go all the way round, which is worth doing early before the wind gets up.
Kunzum La
The pass that divides Spiti from Lahaul, with a chorten complex at the top and prayer flags in every direction. Drivers circle the chortens clockwise before going on. On a clear morning you can see the Bara Shigri glacier system, which is one of the largest in the Himalaya.
The camps
Tented camps a short distance from the lake, seasonal and basic — bed, quilt, food, a shared washing arrangement. Camping at the shore itself is not allowed any more and that restriction is the reason the water still looks like it does.
The Batal road
The stretch between Batal and the pass is the roughest ground on the whole Spiti circuit: loose rock, meltwater crossings and no surface to speak of. It is passable and it is slow, and it is why this is half a day rather than three hours.
Chacha Chachi's dhaba
The tea shack at Batal, run by a couple who have pulled a great many stranded travellers off that road over the years. It is a landmark rather than a meal, and stopping is the done thing.
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