HISTORY'S MAJOR SNOWFALL

Every time there is a snowfall, the media chases the weatherman asking about the dates when it snowed more last time. Even elders are routinely saying that it is snowing much less than the past. An English naturalist, geologist and writer, Richard Lydekker (1849 – 1915), has recorded the last major snowfall of Kashmir almost 140 years ago. He was appointed for a geological survey of Kashmir and Ladakh in 1874. The snowfall, he has recorded, was so huge that most of the wildlife perished

- Richard Lydekker

Among the inhabitants of the Kashmir Himalaya, the winter and spring of 1877-78 will long be memorable on account of the enormous quantity of snow, which then fell on their mountains and valleys, and still more on account of the grievous famine, which followed this excessive snowfall. So excessive indeed was the snowfall, that no tradition or record exists even among the oldest inhabitants of anything approaching to such a fall. I have therefore thought that a short account of this abnormal snowfall, and of the destruction inflicted by it on the indigenous animal life, might be thought not unworthy of a place in the records of the Asiatic Society, and have accordingly put together the following notes:

Early in the month of October 1877, snow commenced to fall in the valley and mountains of Kashmir, and from that time up to May 1878, there seems to have been an almost incessant snow-fall on the higher mountains and valleys; the inhabitants have indeed informed me that in places it frequently snowed without intermission for upwards of ten days at a time.

It is extremely difficult to obtain from the natives any correct estimate to the amount of snow, which fell in any place; but at Dras, which has an elevation of about 10,000 feet, I estimated the snowfall from the native account as having been from 80 to 40 feet thick on the level.