The Valley of Flowers is a high meadow in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand, in northern India, at around 3,500 metres, under snow for most of the year and trekked into for the few monsoon weeks when some 500 flowering species open together across its floor. The valley was unknown to the outside world until 1931, when the British mountaineer Frank Smythe wandered into it lost after a climb and found it in bloom, and his book named it; the meadow runs for about eight kilometres along the Pushpawati river between walls of snow peaks, and for a few weeks from late July into August it is blue with poppies, pink with balsam, purple with geraniums, and the mix turns over so fast that a week changes the valley. The Brahma Kamal, the state flower of Uttarakhand, opens toward dusk rather than in daylight and flowers just once a year here, in the monsoon, on the high slopes.
The valley is walked to. From the roadhead at Govindghat a trail climbs for a day to the village of Ghangaria, shared with Sikh pilgrims on their way to the shrine of Hemkund higher up, and from Ghangaria the last stony kilometres climb through the Bhyundar gorge, a corridor narrow enough to hold shadow most of the morning with waterfalls coming down the rock on both sides, before the walls open and the meadow spreads out ahead; the glacial Pushpawati is crossed on stones, and the day is spent walking up the valley among the flowers and back to Ghangaria before dark, since no one may stay overnight. About seven hundred metres off the main path a single headstone stands out in the meadow, the grave of Joan Margaret Legge, a botanist who fell to her death here in 1939 collecting plants. Local tradition ties the valley to the Ramayana as the place where Hanuman searched for the healing herb that would revive Lakshmana. The Valley of Flowers is a garden under snow for ten months, and for the other two it is the reason people walk into the rain.