What is The Snow Leopard about?

Peter Matthiessen's National Book Award-winning account of a two-month trek into the Dolpo region of Nepal in 1973 is several things at once: a naturalist's field journal, a spiritual autobiography, and a meditation on grief. Matthiessen traveled with the field biologist George Schaller, who was studying the Himalayan blue sheep (bharal) and hoped to observe the rare snow leopard. Matthiessen was a practicing Zen Buddhist whose wife, Deborah Love, had died of cancer the previous year. The journey was also, clearly, an attempt to find a way through loss.

The outer narrative follows the trek itself: the ascent from lowland Nepal into the high Himalayan plateau, the grinding physical difficulty, the encounters with Sherpa guides and Buddhist monks, the wildlife observations, and the arrival at the Crystal Mountain and the monastery of Shey Gompa. Matthiessen's naturalist training is evident throughout — descriptions of birds, mammals, and landscapes are precise and unhurried. But the outer journey is always in conversation with the inner one.

Matthiessen weaves his Zen practice and his grief into the trekking narrative in a way that resists easy resolution. He is often irritable, petty, and resistant to the equanimity his practice aims at. He misses his young son at home. He wants very much to see the snow leopard and is not sure whether wanting is itself the problem. The book's central spiritual question — whether presence and acceptance are achievable or simply idealized — is never answered, and Matthiessen is honest enough not to pretend otherwise.

The snow leopard, famously, may or may not be seen. Matthiessen's account of the possible sighting is characteristically oblique. By the end the ambiguity feels right: the book is less about achieving a goal than about what it means to move through the world with attention, through grief, through altitude, through uncertain faith. The writing is among the finest in American nature writing of the twentieth century, and the combination of natural history and personal reckoning gives it staying power beyond either genre alone.