A family ski adventure in the Himalayas
Kashmir Valley’s white-toothed mountains, deep green valleys offer a mysterious beauty
Last winter, as I was riding in a car with my family through the Kashmir Valley, the driver’s phone rang. He listened carefully before frowning. “What’s going on?” I asked. “Man killed in avalanche.” “Who?” “A Russian, skier, went by helicopter.” “Where?” I asked. “Where else?” The driver shrugged. “Gulmarg.” Gulmarg. That’s exactly where I was taking my family for a ski trip. Gulmarg is Kashmir’s underdog ski resort, tucked in the snowy Himalayas, a place of magnificent skiing and no frills. Few foreigners visit and as we drew closer, I began to wonder if this was such a great idea. After we passed another military checkpoint, the driver nodded to me.
“You see that spot?” he said, pointing into the woods. “We saw a bear there last week.”
My wife, Courtenay, who was sitting in the back, tapped me on the shoulder.
“Why can’t we go skiing in Austria like everybody else?”
I laughed.
“No,” she said. “I’m serious.” Floating through a forest I had always dreamed of skiing in Kashmir. That name alone conjures up adventure: whitetoothed mountains and deep green valleys, wide open slopes and tough highland people. Draped in a mysterious beauty, Kashmir is one of those places most of us have heard of but know little about. And I had a personal agenda. My children are among that strange breed of Americans who have never lived in the United States. They were born in Kenya, raised (so far) in Africa and India, products of the tropics who go to school all year round in shorts, and I wanted them to experience snow.
So one weekend about a year ago, while we were sitting around our apartment in New Delhi, I suggested a trip to Kashmir’s winter wonderland.
“Are you kidding?” Courtenay said. “Isn’t there an active conflict up there?”
“I wouldn’t necessarily call it a conflict,” I said. “What would you call it then?” “A dispute, maybe?” I’m an average skier, trained on the snowy pimples of the Midwest, with a few lucky trips to Vail and the Alps.
But I love skiing, and the thought of plunging down the Himalayas, the world’s tallest mountains, fired me up. I soon learned that Kashmir’s ski spot, Gulmarg, is huge (about seven times the size of Jackson Hole), with some runs so long they take all day to ski.
I also learned that Gulmarg is cheap, never crowded and blessed with perfect high-altitude, inland snow.
But before getting more excited, I needed to check out the safety of the area. This was a family trip, after all, and my wife was right: Kashmir is contested territory, torn between India and Pakistan. It’s a long story, flaring up in the 1940s, when the British divided the subcontinent into Hindu-dominated India and Muslim-dominated Pakistan. The people of Kashmir fell in between, religiously and geographically. They were ruled by a Hindu maharaja, although the population was mostly Muslim. And their area, with its fertile orchards, deliciously cool climate and legendary scenery, lies right between what is now India and Pakistan.
After the British left, India and Pakistan fought three wars over Kashmir, and today the conflict has settled into a thorny standoff,.
I was obsessed with getting us there but had no idea how to pull this off. As luck would have it, right when Courtenay and I were haggling over the trip, we were invited to a dinner party in New Delhi where I was seated near a charming, fit-looking Indian with a bald head and handlebar moustache. His name was Akshay Kumar, and he was a former champion skier. He had skied Gulmarg countless times and he and his wife, Dilshad Master, run an adventure tour company, Mercury Himalayan Explorations.
When I asked him if Gulmarg was safe, he said: “Very. I’m tak- ing some families up there in a couple of weekends. Want to come?” I now had the necessary cover. I cover South Asia for the New York Times, and I was working on a story in Kashmir that same week on the life and times of a young militant named Sameer Tiger. Like many others, Sameer Tiger had been pulled into the insurgency by a mix of anger, naïveté and lack of economic opportunity.
And, like many others, he went down in a hail of bullets, cornered by security forces. I had spent weeks researching him and was familiar with flying in and out of Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city. I also knew that where the militants conducted their attacks tended to be in southern Kashmir, miles away from Gulmarg. ‘Like ice, Daddy, like ice’ As I waited at the Srinagar airport for my family, I was giddy with excitement.
It had just snowed, and the trees were delicately coated, the roads wet and shiny. When I picked everyone up, Asa, our seven-year-old, pointed to a lumpy bag tied to the taxi’s roof and asked, just as I knew he would, “What’s that?”
I untied the bag and told him to put his hands in. “Ooh, that’s cold,” he said, turning over his first clump of snow. “Like ice, Daddy, like ice.”
It’s about an hour-and-a-half drive from Srinagar to Gulmarg, and Courtenay was quiet the entire way. I did not blame her. The U.S. government warns citizens to stay away, although I feel that’s overblown. I’ve been to Kashmir now more than half a dozen times, and I’ve never heard a single gunshot.
With evening approaching, we left the city on a smooth highway running west. The long shadows of minarets fell across the road. The men in the villages we passed were bundled up in heavy woollen cloaks called pherans. When we stopped to buy water, I noticed one man with a large round bulge under his pheran. When I asked him what it was, he lifted up his cloak to reveal a small pot of burning coal he was cradling to keep himself warm.
We crossed a river. This is when the driver’s phone rang, and after we heard about the deadly avalanche and then the bear in these same woods, the car fell silent. Selfie sticks and samovars The mood brightened when we pulled into the Khyber hotel, Gulmarg’s fanciest. It was a supersize ski chalet, and its green pointed roofs were dusted with snow. The kids’ eyes were peeled for bears. But as soon as we stepped into the lobby, with its dark, gleaming wood and fine carpets, I spotted what I really wanted to see: children. Packs of them. Clearly this was a family destination, and in the Khyber’s downstairs rec room, Asa and our other son, Apollo, 9, instantly bonded with their Indian comrades over foosball and air hockey.
The next morning, we mustered outside in the hotel’s portico, waiting for our skis to be delivered. I thought we’d just slap them on and slide the couple of hundred yards to the base of the slopes, but no, a Jeep dispatched as part of Akshay’s operation zoomed up with three men inside. Kashmiris are some of the warmest, most hospitable people, and before we climbed into the Jeep, the men greeted us with big hugs. When we climbed out, they insisted on putting on our skis. I had one guy on my left, another on my right and a third young man kneeling in the snow at my feet.
The sky was a flawless blue, the air peppermint fresh. It wasn’t even that cold — maybe -1 degrees celsius. Kashmir rarely gets bitterly cold; Gulmarg lies at the same latitude as Atlanta. All around us, the white teeth of the Himalayas gleamed, and from nearby chimneys I smelled wood smoke. It was the most romantic alpine scene I had ever entered, and part of it was the scale.
Akshay arranged for my sons to take lessons with a Kashmiri skier named Ishfaq. He told them to call him Eeesh. We waved to Eeesh and the two roly-poly shadows beneath him as they tramped off to the bunny hill.
Courtenay and I hired our own guide, Wali. Wali was in his late 40s with curly grey hair and orange mirrored shades. He wore no hat. He had been working on these slopes since he was eight years old, beginning as a sled wallah. He had never been to school.
Gulmarg’s slopes cover everything from green to double black diamond, but few are marked. Part of the mountain is groomed, but advanced skiers love the ungroomed, backcountry skiing. The gondola reaches around 3,962 metres, one of the highest in the world. Some skiers hike up even higher or take helicopters to virgin spots. Gulmarg’s vertical drop, a measure of the altitude from where you start to where you finish, can be as much as 1,828 metres. With good snow, some runs stretch more than six kilometres. They can take the better part of a day and end in the woods, near some old temples. Paradise on Earth For lunch, we met up with our children at Hotel Highlands Park on the slopes. Again, this was not a Western imitation. We didn’t thump along in our ski boots in a packed cafeteria, pushing a tray along a track for a cup of cocoa and a hamburger. We sat down at a proper table in a proper restaurant and polished off a feast: naan bread, curried vegetables, fresh yogurt and an exquisite lamb dish of tender meat hammered flat and rolled into a baseball-size meatball. The hotel felt like a hunting lodge; deer heads and bearskin rugs hung on the walls.
After lunch, I watched my sons ski. Eeesh had taught them well. Asa turned back and forth, carving large S’s and ending with a confident snowplow. Apollo was less orthodox. He shot down the bunny hill like a bullet.
The next morning was sadly our last. I persuaded Wali to take me higher on the mountain.
The views were breathtaking. It was so bright, so clear, so still. I just wanted to stay up there and stare at the jagged white mountains and etch those images into my brain.