This wasn’t a solo expedition - I was with my husband Marley and a small team - but it was fairly tough nonetheless. A month in Tajikistan’s High Pamirs - the third highest ecosystem on earth after the Himalaya and Karakorum ranges - in the icy grip of winter, searching for that most elusive of big cats, the snow leopard.

A landlocked, mountainous country bordering China and Afghanistan, for decades Tajikistan lay at the eastern limit of the Soviet empire. But in 1991, when the USSR disintegrated, the country slid into a five-year civil war that cost 100,000 lives and forced a million more from their homes. In its wake the country’s rare mountain wildlife was hunted to near extinction. In recent years, however, a network of grass-roots initiatives have reversed this decline. This was a journey to find out more about this story, and to meet some of the remarkable people working to conserve Tajikistan’s wildlife.

Temperatures reached - 44. We were trapped by avalanches. We scrambled across the sliding shoulder of a mountain in the wake of an earthquake. Taliban patrols watched us from the other bank of the Pyanj. And for three weeks we searched, and searched, and searched; waiting, watching, hoping; the mountains awash with possibility.

Then, on our final day, there it was, padding down a scree field a few hundred metres away. Big paws. That long, swinging tail. Effortless grace. My hands shook, my heart thundered. After three weeks of searching, it was like seeing a spirit materialise. For twenty minutes it sashayed across a snowfield, occasionally pausing to look back at us. Then, like a ghost, it was gone.

Tajikistan is a country I hold very dear, and I feel immensely privileged to have seen, actually seen with my own eyes, a snow leopard there. May leopards survive in those mountains for many millennia to come.

To listen to and read some of the stories I told about this journey (for BBC Radio 4, The Guardian and BBC Wildlife) head over to my Journalism and Broadcasting pages.