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Beginning researchers are often encouraged to address multiple geographic and temporal scales in the projects they undertake.  Proposals that reflect these emphases are frequently rewarded with competitive funding. Yet multi-sited research adds to restraints on project design, causing students to think twice about studies that focus in-depth on localized knowledge or practice. While young scholars are capable of rising to the ‘multi-site’ challenge, such research has significant costs in terms of time, energy, finances, and findings. Drawing from a project on the cultural politics of development and climate change in the Indian Himalayas, this article addresses the theoretical influences and institutional gate-keeping that forced the author to enlarge her study from a fifty kilometer radius to a five hundred kilometer range. After being critiqued by a committee member who termed her initial project ‘traditional’ and a funding agency whose rejection letter stated that multi-site studies ‘contribute more to science’, the author examines what was gained and lost in her attempts to enlarge the scope of a project that originally focused on Himalayan women’s knowledge of, and responses to, hydroelectric projects in an environmentally fragile region. Although analytical insights were fostered by looking at a wider range of perspectives and practices in relation to development, it took longer to understand the politics of place that influence the localized behavior in which she was most interested. The researcher’s frequent movement from the plains to the mountains and from the urban center of New Delhi to rural Himalayan villages also delayed the trust building process that is crucial to ethnographic work. The experience, while fruitful, draws out reflections on the virtues of researching at multiple scales and the value of an in-depth grasp of embedding in place