At a breathtaking altitude of 16,500ft, pristine waters of the Himalayas lay frozen to their depths for most part of the year. Come summer though, the dangerous torrents are unleashed from their icy shackles to reveal a riverbed of bones, flanked by a shore of skeletal remains camouflaged by nude shades of the rugged slope. This is Roopkund or the Skeleton Lake in Uttarakhand, India—straight out of figments of your wildest imagination, into true accounts of history.

View of Roopkund from Junargali, some 200 metres above. Photo: Soham Sarkar/Flickr