Russ Juskalian for The New York Times
A skier in a backcountry section of the Gulmarg area. More Photos »
On a frigid night in Gulmarg, a Himalayan outpost deep in Kashmir, a friend and I sipped sweet tea and warmed ourselves next to a wood stove while a local ski guide named Javed stood in front of us, roaring like a bear. "Baah! Baah!" he shouted, his hands outstretched like claws. "I thought it was going to kill us," Javed said of the Asiatic black bear he had encountered a few days before while skiing in the backcountry.
Which reminded him of the time he skied off a natural jump in the forest and nearly landed on a snow leopard. "Where did that happen?" I asked.
"Babareshi," said Mushtaq, another guide. "The place we skied today."
Jon and I had come to Gulmarg in the Jammu and Kashmir region of northern India for a reason that, given the area's militant history and lack of reliable infrastructure, might sound a bit absurd: to go skiing. We came for perfect powder, an absence of crowds and serene, stunning Himalayan beauty — as seen from the world's highest-altitude gondola-serviced ski runs. Those runs top out, dizzyingly, at more than 13,000 feet.
That some peripheral risk might be involved was a given. Just miles from the disputed Line of Control, which divides India from Pakistan, this part of the Kashmir Valley remains heavily militarized. Abbottabad, the town where Osama bin Laden was killed, is less than 80 miles west as the crow flies. The State Department's current India page recommends avoiding travel to most of Jammu and Kashmir "because of the potential for terrorist incidents, as well as violent public unrest." While we were visiting, local newspapers included an advertisement from government officials advising people to build nuclear bunkers, just in case.
But apparently all this doesn't stop travelers. According to a 2012 news report in The Economic Times, more than one million Indian, and some 27,000 foreign, tourists visited Kashmir last year. German, French and Australian accents made up the bulk of what I heard on the gondola. Like many travelers before us, we encountered friendly people and an otherworldly landscape of lakes and snow-swept peaks.
To get to Gulmarg we flew to Srinagar, the summer capital of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, and spent our first night on a 100-foot houseboat with carved cedar interiors on Nagin Lake. Srinagar, it seemed, had declined from a grander time. Huge dilapidated wooden houses stood between storefronts painted in fading reds, yellows and blues. Women in bright head scarves and men in wool ponchos known as faren trudged through mud and slush carrying small baskets filled with hot coals known as kangir, which they cradled under an outer layer to stay warm. In an area where the majority of the population is Muslim, the clothing appeared less about modesty than fending off subzero temperatures.
A few hours before sunset, we hired a shikara, a small, flat-bottom boat, for a tour of the area. With his paddle, the young captain guided the vessel across the water and through a maze of canals and raised beds where residents had built gardens. Patchy clouds drifted overhead, and solitary shikaras sat motionless in the lake as hundreds of eagles swooped gracefully above the water. A ring of snow-covered mountains leapt from the lake's mirror surface.
We disembarked in the hamlet of Hazratbal, where a mosque of the same name is said to hold a sacred hair from the Prophet Muhammad. The town was reeling with religious festivalgoers. A street vendor handed us a deep-fried lotus root. Another prepared mutton kebabs. A third vendor, a tailor, sold Jon a plaid faren. A young boy walked with us until he was distracted by something better: a snowball fight. Then, suddenly, there was a spectacular display as the setting sun painted the snowy faces of the mountains across the lake in pinks, purples and blues. It was a panoramic horizon-to-heavens canvas.
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