Every winter in the Ladakh region in northwest India, the two roads that connect the small villages in the Zanskar Valley with the rest of the country close, overwhelmed by snow. But for centuries, locals have had a workaround: a road of ice formed by the frozen Chadar River. A week-long trek in frozen temperatures connects them to the outside world. A new collaborative photo-essay, “The Feel of Climate Change,” explores this world of ice porters on the Chadar, and how this ancient way of life is rapidly changing.
Climate change is destabilizing the river’s freezing patterns, and development is bringing tourism and resources to this long-isolated region. Wealthy adventure tourists are the main Chadar trekkers these days, and though some Zanskaris still use the ice road themselves to access neighboring towns, a new partially-completed paved highway is changing that.
A photo-essay created by Karine Gagné, an associate professor in the department of sociology and anthropology at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, examines the embodied experience of climate change for the ice porters on the Chadar.
In isolated regions like the Zanskar Valley, there is little funding or resources for quantitative scientific research on climate change. “There’s no scientific research on how the river is freezing, how it is affected. So, there’s no other way to talk about it than from the experience of the people living there,” explained Gagné, who has worked in the region for over a decade.
For this project, she stitched together photos, interviews with porters and insights from her extensive fieldwork in the region. “I love to talk about this [photo-essay] because for me, it is so different,” said Gagné, “it is something that continues to be different from the strict, written format” of typical anthropology research. The photo-essay is a precursor to her larger project in the works, a “graphic ethnography” of the region.
In 2019, Gagné began distributing cameras to porters, guides and cooks on the Chadar and asking them to photograph everything in their lives, from the frozen river to their ice passages, to their ways of cooking and sleeping. “I’m interested in understanding their work, and the challenges that they’re facing… but also the things that they themselves find interesting and would like to represent in pictures. It was very open,” noted Gagné. The result was thousands of photos chronicling the day-to-day life of ice porters in a changing world.
For this photo-essay, Gagné selected just 12 pictures, moving from broad overviews of the camp set-up and river’s geography, to more intimate details of the challenges of the ice passage. In this early photo, rows of bright orange tents stand out against the canyon’s muted grays and blues. “While tourists rest in tents on the Chadar, the porters endure rougher conditions, finding shelter in caves for their sleep,” the accompanying caption explains.
As the region has grown more accessible in the past few years, tourism has increased. The photos often reflect a tension over development, juxtaposing human presence with the river’s emptiness. Here, a mass of brightly colored backpacks take up most of the frame. There are no faces, just lines of porters waiting to cross a challenging section. “It’s a bit reminiscent of the pictures that you see on Everest, the people all stuck together, right?” suggested Gagné.
“The idea is that it should not be always the best visual image, but those that are representing what is going on,” said Gagné.
This final photo, which shows meal preparation at camp, isn’t precisely focused or technically perfect. But it has a gritty realism. “It’s full of smoke, and it’s difficult, and it’s dark,” said Gagné, “it’s really representing what the work of a cook is like.”
Unlike traditional anthropological photo-essays, the porters here are not just photographed, but photographers themselves. “What [the porters] choose to document would inherently be different from an established artist,” said Lydia D. Pilcher, filmmaker and adjunct professor at the Columbia Climate School, in an interview with GlacierHub. The porter’s photos are not necessarily an artistic rendering of the ice passage, but rather a realistic glimpse into their everyday. There’s a need to “make these perspectives valued,” emphasized Gagné.
On the Chadar, porters feel their way by tapping the ice, sensing ice depth and strength.
River ice shifts, and parts of the Chadar transition rapidly between ice and water— traversing the frozen river has always been difficult. But now, warming temperatures are disrupting the river’s freezing patterns. In 2024, the river did not freeze at all, and porters were left without work for the season.
Trekking the Chadar requires long, dangerous days, spent outside in sub-zero temperatures. As porter Stanzin Angchuk put it, “Who would miss this work?” But in a region with few employment opportunities, a job on the Chadar is a means of survival. It’s possible that the new highway could negatively “impact the Chadar’s charm and future tourism,” said Gagné. It seems that in a job that no one wants to do, porters find their livelihood threatened by both climate change and development.
Isolated, impoverished mountain communities like the Zanskar Valley are some of the hardest hit by climate change, from feeling the impacts of melting glaciers to coping with extreme weather. Yet in these places, people tend to not encounter climate shifts through data or statistics, explained Gagné, but through physical experience. The photo-essay reflects that. “The project is about this radical subjectivity of climate change, as opposed to this ultimate objectivity,” she continued. “We’re coming completely from another angle to this, and just unapologetically speaking about climate change through how it can be a subjective and embodied experience.”
The river itself is called the Chadar only when frozen (“chadar” is a Hindi word for sheet or blanket). The rest of the year, the free-flowing river is known as the Zanskar. So, as the planet warms and the river’s freezing pattern is disrupted, the Chadar itself could cease to exist. Amid this uncertainty, Gagné’s work explores the sensation of climate change for ice porters. Altered by development, tourism and a warming planet, the region’s footing is shifting. In a world traversed through feel, the way ahead is unfamiliar.
