Digar La: The Best way to see Ladakh

Alright, I’ll keep this simple.

You wanna see Ladakh? Trek Digar La. Allow me to elaborate.

So you’ve always wanted to visit Leh, take in the mountains a bit with a nice hike, check out Nubra Valley that everyone always talks about and of course, visit Pangong Tso on the border of China. Yeah, you’ll need more than just good luck to fit all of that in.

Or maybe not.

Here is the Best way to See Ladakh: Leh-Nubra-Pangong Circuit 

Digar La, officially named the Leh-Nubra-Pangong Tso Circuit on our site, is an 18,000ft pass that connects the Indus Valley and Leh with Nubra Valley, and man, is it spectacular. We actually found this pass as an accident after one of our other explorations got snowed out, so we went looking for something even better, and found Digar La.

It’s like a Ladakh sightseeing gold mine. Having been to Ladakh four times in the past six months for new explorations, I hear people all too often complaining that there isn’t a way to see the highlights of Ladakh along with getting some decent trekking in before time runs out. Usually you have to pick one or the other.

After you explore Leh, you trek to Digar La at 18,000 feet, an altitude to be proud of, by the way, and then descend down the other side into Nubra Valley, fertile with wheat, barley, peas, mustard and a variety of fruits and nuts, including blood apples, walnuts and apricots in this high-altitude desert.

From here, you descend into Digar Village, an isolated place filled with stupas and kind people, before heading onto your next leg of the journey in Hunder, one of the last villages visitable in this region. After exploring the sand dunes and an obligatory camel ride, you cross two sky-high passes by car en-route to the famed Pangong Tso, the glittering, bright blue lake spanning from India into China.

Of course, I work for a trekking company, so I’m a little biased as to what my favorite part of this adventure is. If you didn’t guess, it’s the part where you climb a mountain. The trail to Digar La is unreal, rising off the valley floor amongst small temples and shepherds with their herds of dzo into the barren, classic Ladakh landscape.

The best part? The entire time you climb, and the further up you climb, the more the view behind you becomes irresistible. Stok Kangri and the rest of the the Stok range towers behind you, and we were fortunate enough to get an awesome shot of the sun setting on a storm forming over Stok itself. Up and onwards, you reach the pass, and get a breathtaking view of the Karakoram Range if you find yourself on a clear day.

As we made our way to the pass on our exploration trip of this trail, we were shocked and thrilled to spot a pack of 25 wolves 200 meters below us, chasing each other up the snow valley.

Wildlife, village culture, a taste of high-altitude trekking, two legendary valleys, local cuisine and so much more- I truly cannot think of a better way to really see Ladakh for all her beauty.