I was texting a friend the other day, he works on sustainable development in Pakistan. Members of his staff had recently had their homes shelled during the most recent flareup of violence between India and Pakistan. This prompted me to go back through some old photos, videos, and memories of my own time in the region. First in Indian controlled Kashmir and later traveling to Manali during the winter of 2009-2010.  

Skiing can be a very frivolous undertaking, a fact of which I am keenly aware. Here we are spending thousands of dollars on a recreational pursuit. The contrast is stark here in America (the richest country on earth) where a recent survey from the New York Federal Reserve shows just 62.7% of Americans can come up with $2000 for an emergency. That contrast grows exponentially when traveling in a country like India where the average per-capita income is just under $2000. 

When I think of the good that has come from my pursuit of this frivolous sport it has been the ways that I have allowed the experiences to open my mind to the natural world as well as my fellow humans. I continue to come up short in working to find solutions to these problems, but at the very least I am less blind to them.

The Author Before Embarking on his Journey

I grew up in New Hampshire and went to college in Vermont, let's just say there was not a lot of diversity in my young life. Spending all my free time hanging out with skiers certainly didn't help with that. School was over though and it was time for a big adventure. My best friend Sam Lozier had the idea of going on an extended ski trip somewhere truly unique and interesting. Where better than India? It also helps that travel in India is very affordable, enticing when you're fresh out of college. Gulmarg in Indian Controlled Kashmir is home to a ski area with the highest chairlift on earth topping out at 13,057', that seemed like a good place to start. 

Horse carts and the smell of wood smoke on the road to Gulmarg

It's important to note that while India controls this part of Kashmir,  the folks we met were very eager for us to understand that they were first and foremost Kashmiri. The history of the region is fascinating and in recently memory rather violent. The Kashmiri people were caught in the middle during the English Partition of India and Pakistan and now find themselves a majority muslim region ruled by Hindu majority India. Violence along the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between India and Pakistan seems to always be simmering occasionally boiling over into full scale conflict. 

Traversing under the DMZ fence

It's probably also worth pointing out that my love of documenting my adventures has been around for quite some time. Starting with a goofy high school project with Ben Peters I had been making short ski videos. MSP's Ski Movie 3: The Front Line had a huge impact on me when it came out and I had worked to emulate it. I had been putting my hand to various forms of media, photo, video, and even a very early POV camera. The following videos are a result of that passion. I really enjoy looking back at these. I defiantly made some bad videos at times, but I'm quite proud of the videos I made in India. I was shooting everything on a Canon 7D DSLR so I could easily toggle back and forth between photos and videos. We also had a few GoPros floating around for some POV footage. Having the camera was critical though since it also allowed me to take stills which over time became my true passion. I always enjoyed tie video work, but the reality is that to do a good job you need TONS of time to edit and my life just got too busy with other things. 

The first short covers the time just after our arrival. It was a lean winter and hadn't snowed since November (we had arrived in January). The region is relatively arid so time turned the early snow into deep facets. No matter, we were stoked and exploring. The gondola a "master piece" of 1980's french technology was a bit temperamental. Even when it was running our fat skis didn't fit into skinny the ski holders so we would just bring them into the cabin and let the door close on them. Coming from America India's lax approach to liability was a real contrast, while hopping on a bus comes with lots of risks not present at home, in a strange way I've never felt as free as I did there. 

The only time I felt truly lied to

Gulmarg, high in the mountains is the strange combination of a resort town and a military base. Much busier with Indian tourists in the summer, it is rather laid back in the winter. There were a few hundred foreigners there to ski, some there for a one week party blitz/ski holiday, others there to ski bum the entire season. We posted up in a hotel just downhill from the gondola base with a backcountry glade called monkey hill right behind. The power was on at least 2/3 of the time and when it went out they were kind enough to run a generator inside the building for us. We got to decide between power and carbon monoxide poisoning. Sometimes the sound of monkeys kept us up at night, I still don't know if they were playing, fighting, or mating. 

A Kashmiri lineman hard at work getting the power back on, no PPE anywhere in sight

There were so many things that were intense about the experience. Everything from the intensive military presence when we arrived, the smell of thousands of homes cooking and heating with wood fires, the craziness of the roads, and even the food that never seemed to sit quite right in my bowels. The skiing felt like the easy part, it was everything else that was hard. 

After exploring the limited non-skiing offerings Gulmarg had we started to venture out and explore Srinagar (the main city of the region). Dal Lake in Srinagar is such a fascinating place, one minute you are in a shop looking at the most beautiful wood carvings you have ever seen, the next you are in a houseboat looking down the toilet and just seeing the lake down there. I this is the point when I realized that the trip was about a lot more than skiing. Some of our gulmarg skier friends seemed uninterested in this part of the region's offerings, but luckily Sam and a few other fellow travelers were just as excited as I was to do this kind of exploring. 

Dawn breaks at The white Hazratbal Mosque on Dal Lake

Winter made a return and we got a mega storm of about 3 meters of fresh snow (on top of those facets) hit. Here was another awakening for a boy on his way to becoming a young man. The ski area employed two western snow safety professionals and they did a great job keeping an avalanche forecast up to date for the skiers. I forget the exact forecast but it was basically EXTREME: "stay the fuck away from the alpine, shit's gonna go historically big." Ok, we were skiing the glade behind the hotel and hanging out in hazy hotel rooms, no problem there. Then we come to learn that the Indian military had been training near tree-line and a slide had come through and opened up a whole new path through the mature forest right into a group of soldiers, something like 20 dead. Here we were smoking hash and watching pirated copies of "The Wire" while men died just a mile or two away. What was so special about us that didn't apply to them? 

Massive Indian military presence in Kashmir, the soldiers were always friendly to us

As if the avalanche situation didn't provide enough cognitive dissonance we also enjoyed a very strangely elevated place as western tourists, something I have never experienced since. The Kashmiris had some "issues" with India and the massive military presence, so large protests were quite common. Those same Kashmiris also deeply valued tourism as a critical piece if their region's economy. That meant the Kashmiris went out of their way to make sure we stayed safe. Then on the other side the Indian military didn't want anything bad to happen to us either. I have such a visceral memory of being ushered through the middle of a rather heated protest, burning tires, Kashmiris throwing rocks and the Indian military busting out the batons and shields ready to give as good as they got. Both sides ushered our cab through the melee without a scratch and we went on our merry way drinking cheap whiskey all the while, how strange... 

Sam and our houseboat host on Dal Lake

One thing I learned: don't take good infrastructure for granted

It's easy to see why many folks avoid travel to regions like this and others if they do visit places like this make quick moves to get from the airport to the safety of a high end hotel. I also think I need to acknowledge some privilege here, being a white dude certainly helped me feel safe and made it much easier to navigate these experiences. We met some amazing female travelers both western and Indian, but it was a whole different ballgame for them. Folks kept asking us why we weren't married yet and that was about the worst it got. There were plenty of times we retreated to the hotel room, I spent hours and hours editing the videos here. We really did make an effort to see the place blemishes and all though. 

A trash and effluent filled river with a stray dog nursing a puppy

I write this sitting in a warm comfortable house looking over at my two dogs Rainer and Litza, two of the greatest joys of my life. They each have health insurance and we're constantly worrying about their happiness. Here were dogs that must eek out a survival off the garbage left behind by a people who don't have a lot to begin with. They routinely die in the street, suffering long slow deaths from easily preventable conditions like malnutrition or injury. How do some organisms get so lucky and others so unlucky? Why did I get so lucky? 

​“Fear is for people who don't get out very much.” ― Rick Steves
"If you're twenty-two, physically fit, hungry to learn and be better, I urge you to travel – as far and as widely as possible. Sleep on floors if you have to. Find out how other people live and eat and cook. Learn from them — wherever you go." ― Anthony Bourdain

The Gulmarg Crew