Phuchung Lachenpa is most at home in the high mountain valleys of India’s eastern Himalaya, which towers over his hometown of Lachen in Sikkim. A yak herder and trekking guide, he is intimately familiar with the local mountains and the Khangchendzonga Biosphere Reserve, which protects the eastern half of the world’s third-highest mountain. Today, he wanders these mountains as a citizen scientist, documenting the elusive snow leopard for the USAID-funded WWF Asia High Mountains Project.

After being trained by WWF in July 2015, Phuchung and five other local citizen scientists began the challenging work of setting up camera traps in remote Himalayan valleys. By periodically moving a set of 22 camera traps, their aim was to survey nearly 198,000 acres of potential snow leopard range in northeast Sikkim to establish the first baseline count for the local snow leopard population there.

Results were immediate. In August 2015, Phuchung went to retrieve a camera trap in a high valley near sacred Gurudongmar Lake and was rewarded with the first photos ever taken of a snow leopard in North Sikkim District.