The Snow Leopard

I'm Thomas Waterhouse.

My guests, Terri Stiasny and John Everard, will discuss the day's big stories, and we'll also hear from the author of the new book, The Ghost of the Mountains: Unraveling the Secrets of the Snow Leopard.

Stay tuned.

All that and much more coming up right here on The Monocle Daily.

Okay.

Terry Steers-Rhi and John Everard, thank you very much.

Finally, on today's show, the snow leopard is famously difficult as a creature to observe in the wild, but someone who has not only seen this creature but also seen it repeatedly is the scientist Kulu Siriwanichchhun.

He has made a, uh, the snow leopard, sorry, his life's work.

confluences.

It started basically in college when I read his book, his first book that won the National Book Award called The Snow Leopard, which a lot of people still know to this day.

I mean, it won the award back in the 1970s.

But I just went to a new meditation group the other night that I'd never been to, and nobody knew who I was.

And this woman at the end you know everybody sort of talks at the end after meditation and what they're doing this woman she held up a copy of the snow leopard and said i'm reading this amazing book i just discovered and it's so wonderful and you should all read it and and i said well funny you mentioned that because that was my teacher for 14 years and so i know anybody wants to talk to me about i know the book well but anyway so i read that book in college

you never saw a snow leopard or something never quite caught it something about that

Yes, I mean, the snow leopard was both...

He went on a trip to Nepal, to the Himalayas, and it was soon after his wife had passed away at a very young age of cancer, and he was distraught, and he was looking for some search for meaning.