Valley of Flowers History

To the people who live here, this was never a lost valley. It is the upper part of the Bhyundar valley, drained by the Pushpawati river, and Bhyundar village sits below it on the trail. Even UNESCO's description says the valley has been celebrated in Hindu mythology for much longer than by mountaineers and botanists.

Popular accounts say Bhyundar villagers called the valley Nandan Kanan, the garden of the god Indra, and believed it was the playground of fairies. Another tradition ties the area to the Ramayana: Hanuman is said to have searched these slopes for the sanjeevani herb that revived Lakshmana, and the Lakshman temple on the shore of Hemkund lake marks where Lakshmana is believed to have meditated. These stories come from local tradition and travel writing rather than written records, so read them as folklore.

The valley was also a working landscape. Herders grazed livestock in its meadows until 1982, and the 2005 IUCN evaluation records that local people know 45 of its plants as medicines, and that Brahma Kamal is collected as an offering to the goddess Nanda Devi on auspicious days. The idea of an untouched valley waiting to be found is an outsider's story.

On 21 June 1931, a British expedition led by Frank Smythe made the first ascent of Kamet (7,756 m), at the time the highest summit anyone had reached. In early July, on the way back, Smythe, Eric Shipton and R. L. Holdsworth crossed the Bhyundar Khal pass into the valley. Smythe later called it the loveliest valley any of them had ever seen.

The popular version says they were lost. A 2014 Outlook Traveller feature describes them being chased down the pass by a blinding blizzard into colour and warmth below. Either way, they were not the first outsiders. A 1989 article in the Himalayan Journal records the first crossing of the Bhyundar Khal by Bruce, Mumm and Longstaff in 1907.

Smythe came back in the monsoon of 1937, this time for the plants. He spent about six weeks in the valley with four Tibetan companions, exploring, climbing and collecting flowers and seeds. In 1938 Hodder and Stoughton published his account, The Valley of Flowers, and the name stuck. The same Himalayan Journal article says it was on this 1937 visit that Smythe named the Bhyundar valley the Valley of Flowers.

Smythe was a mountaineer, not a botanist, but his book turned a grazing ground into a destination. It is still in print in India.

Two years later, Lady Joan Margaret Legge, a 54-year-old British botanist, came to the valley to collect plants. Most accounts say she was sent by the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew. Some say the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh backed the trip. On 4 July 1939, while crossing steep rocky slopes to collect specimens, she slipped and fell to her death. She was buried in the valley.

Her sister later travelled out and built a memorial over the grave, which still stands beside the visitor trail. The stone is reported to carry a verse from Psalm 121: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. In 2010, botanists described a new balsam found near the valley and named it Impatiens leggei in her honour.

The lake above Ghangaria has a history of its own. Local people knew it as Lokpal and kept a small temple to Lakshmana on its shore. In the Dasam Granth, Guru Gobind Singh describes meditating in a former life beside a lake among seven snowy peaks. In the 1930s, Sikh pilgrims led by Sant Sohan Singh, with help from Havildar Modan Singh, identified Lokpal as that place, Hemkund. A small gurdwara was built there in the mid-1930s, with sources giving 1936 or 1937, and the present building was designed from the 1960s.

Hemkund lies outside the national park, but it changed the valley's story. Pilgrims turned Ghangaria into a busy seasonal village, and the 2005 IUCN evaluation counted up to 500,000 of them passing through each summer, far more than ever visit the valley itself.

After Smythe and Legge, Indian botanists took over. The IUCN evaluation records surveys by the Botanical Survey of India in the 1950s and 1960s, and in 1987 the Survey published a botany of the park and its surroundings, which is still the standard checklist of its plants.

Their work, and concern about the effect of grazing on the flora, led the government of Uttar Pradesh, which then included this region, to declare the valley a national park on 6 September 1982, under the Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. It was the first national park in India created specifically to protect plants.

Ending grazing had an unexpected result. With no sheep and goats to keep it down, Himalayan knotweed (Polygonum polystachyum) spread over the old livestock camps and formed what the IUCN called virtual monocultures. The IUCN asked for its stands to be mapped every year by GPS while cutting trials continued. A later study of the valley's changing vegetation named knotweed as the greatest danger to its flora, and noted that the blue poppy can hardly be seen now.

Ecologist Chandra Prakash Kala, who began surveying the valley in 1993, points out the other side: knotweed grows mostly on disturbed ground such as eroded and avalanche-prone slopes, and its deep roots help hold the soil. The meadows you see are not untouched wilderness. They are a landscape that changed when people stopped using it, and one that managers are still learning to look after.

Nanda Devi National Park, next door, became a World Heritage Site in 1988. India nominated the Valley of Flowers as an extension in 2004. Two IUCN evaluators visited, Kala was asked to review the nomination independently, and on 14 July 2005 the World Heritage Committee added the valley. The combined site is called Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Parks.

UNESCO's reasons are worth reading. It praises the valley's gentle landscape, its meadows of alpine flowers and its ease of access, which complement the rugged, hard-to-reach Nanda Devi sanctuary. It also points to the flora: the valley sits where the Zanskar and Great Himalaya ranges meet and where eastern and western Himalayan plants overlap, several of its species are globally threatened, and it holds more threatened medicinal plants than other protected areas in the Indian Himalaya.

In June 2013, the floods that devastated Kedarnath struck here too. A report carried from The Hindu says the park opened on 1 June that year and closed on 16 June, after landslides and the loss of the bridge over the Pushpawati that links Ghangaria to the park. Only 487 tourists visited that season, against about 7,000 expected, and press reports describe the park reopening fully to tourists in 2016.

Visitor numbers have since grown well past the old level. Press reports of Forest Department figures give 19,436 visitors in 2024, including 330 from abroad, and 15,924 in 2025, when bad weather cut the season. By 30 July 2026, Amar Ujala reported 16,462 visitors, already more than the whole of 2025.

• National park: 6 September 1982 in the IUCN evaluation and the Key Biodiversity Areas factsheet. Wikipedia's timeline cites a 1980 government order.
• End of grazing: 1982 according to the IUCN and Kala, 1983 according to UNESCO's summary.
• The name: most accounts date it to the 1931 crossing. The Himalayan Journal says Smythe named the valley on his 1937 visit. His book used the name in 1938.
• Joan Legge's sponsor: Kew in most sources, Edinburgh in some.
• The first gurdwara at Hemkund: 1936 in some sources, 1937 in others.
• Altitude: Wikipedia gives 3,352 to 3,658 m for the valley. The IUCN gives about 3,200 to 6,708 m for the whole park, peaks included.

ValleyOfFlowers.in is an independent guide. This article is a research summary, not a first-hand trip report. We compared official and press sources, trek operators' pages and public Reddit threads, and where they disagree we say so. Prices and rules change each season, so confirm with the Uttarakhand Forest Department or the operator before you pay.

• UNESCO World Heritage Centre: Nanda Devi and Valley of Flowers National Parks
• IUCN (2005): World Heritage evaluation of the Valley of Flowers National Park
• Kala, C. P.: How Valley of Flowers got World Heritage Site tag (Down To Earth)
• Kapadia, H. (1989): In Famous Footsteps, Himalayan Journal 45
• Outlook Traveller (2014): Where the wild flowers are
• Speaking Tiger: The Valley of Flowers by Frank Smythe
• Wikipedia: Kamet
• Wikipedia: Lady Joan Legge
• Wikipedia: Gurdwara Hemkund Sahib
• Wikipedia: Valley of Flowers National Park
• Wadhwa, Rao and Hajra (1987): Botany of the Valley of Flowers National Park and its Environs, Bulletin of the Botanical Survey of India 29
• Vanishing plant wealth of the Valley of Flowers (Journal of Phytology)
• Key Biodiversity Areas: Valley of Flowers National Park factsheet
• Vagabond Images (2013), citing The Hindu: Valley of Flowers National Park to remain closed this year
• The Quint (2016): Valley of Flowers open to tourists three years after the Kedarnath deluge
• ETV Bharat (2024): Valley of Flowers closed for visitors ahead of winter
• Amar Ujala (2026): 16,462 tourists in two months (Hindi)
• Reddit thread linked above (r/SoloTravel_India)

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