Influx of visitors drives usually busy season at one of Asia’s largest resorts

By Sameer Yasir

GULMARG, Kashmir — As a soft snowfall blanketed everything around her, Nihad Ashraf Khan, a college student who had been cooped up for months because of the pandemic, ran up to her attic and grabbed for her skis, poles, boots and goggles — and headed immediately for the Himalayas.

After driving 30 miles from her house in Srinagar, Kashmir’s biggest city, Khan reached a scrappy ski town tucked deep into the folds of the world’s highest mountain chain. And she was hardly alone: A steady stream of skiers, music blasting from their cars, were racing to make it to the slopes while the snow was still fresh.

“I wanted to throw away my mask and wear my skis,” said Khan, an avid downhill skier. “There was only one place on my mind: Gulmarg.”

Every year, Gulmarg, one of Asia’s largest and highest ski resorts, attracts thousands of skiers, drawn by perfect powder, cheap hotels, breathtaking views and the feeling of an island of peace inside an often restive territory.

The more experienced skiers prefer the resort’s wilder slopes, running miles through sunlit cedar trees. The luckiest skiers — or the unluckiest ones, depending on how you feel about wildlife — may run into a snow leopard or a brown bear on the way down.

While other ski slopes around the world have suffered because of the coronavirus, Gulmarg is having one of its busiest seasons ever. By mid-March, the resort had already drawn 160,000 people, nearly 10 times more than last year and far more than any other season for at least three decades.

I was born a few miles north of Gulmarg, and during my childhood in the early 1990s, I would trek miles with friends through knee-deep snow in long, black gumboots to watch foreign skiers — the vast majority of the visitors then — spill down slopes and race through the trees.

Back then, Gulmarg was both a glittering winter playground and a window to another, wider world. Every foreign tourist was known as an “angrez” — an Urdu word often used for foreigners — and we would line up in our pherans — heavy woolen cloaks — to watch them ski.