Kashmir Part 1

On the plane, the seat-back monitor’s topographical map of the flight course depicted the Kashmir Valley as a green, oval-shaped hole in the middle of white mountain graphics. As the captain announced our descent into Srinagar, The Himalaya were in view on the plane’s right.

When I say they were on the plane’s right I mean that looking down I could see where the mosaic of snow-covered rice paddies ramped up to snowcapped, awesomely pointy peaks. But that is looking down. Looking out, level with the plane at ~25,000 feet, Nun Kun, one of the world's tallest mountains perched prominently over other giants above the clouds in the distance.

At the plane’s left, the same rice paddy fields disappeared into a thick mist that veiled the Karakoram Himalaya, Pakistan, the world’s second tallest peak – K2, and our destination – Gulmarg Town, where there is a gondola lift that takes riders above 14,000 feet.

I first heard about Gulmarg at a party in Delhi where I met Mike, our “tour guide” for the trip. (Mike, strangely enough lives in my same little neighborhood in Delhi and grew up in, get this, in Cleveland Park, DC. Crazy coincidence. DC, what.) Mike has been working on launching a guided package tour to bring foreign tourists to Gulmarg. As his second group, we were his guinea pigs.

The Srinagar airport has more MIGs than commercial planes. It is entirely camouflaged and military vehicles greet the planes. A statistic that floats around is that Kashmir is the second most militarized place in the world, after Iraq. There are 650,000 Indian troops in Kashmir and indeed, they are everywhere, including in the middle of snow-dumped mountainsides.

From the airport we drove an hour into the mountains to a town called Tangmarg. This is a true way-station where the foothills meet the mountains and the pavement yields to snowpath. Here we left Mike’s comfy Toyotas, checked in at a military checkpoint, and drank some chai while Mike did all the necessary shouting and waving and stirring things up in order to get some jeeps.

Almost all of the cars that you see above Tangmarg are Tata (that’s the biggest Indian car manufacturer) SUVs that look something like a 90s Jeep Cherokee but boxier. These cars are cars, not jeeps. They do not have four wheel drive even though many of the ones in the Gulmarg area have major "4X4" decals on the back windshields. Let me tell you, these things are about as well suited for a snowy road as a Mazda Miata. And that’s before 15 locals and all their children and possessions get loaded into them.

The road from Tangmarg, and all the roads in the Gulmarg area are either unpaved or primary pavement only, so plowing in the way we Americans think of plowing is simply not possible. And there is A LOT OF SNOW.

Instead of plowing, the government of Jammu and Kashmir/The Indian Military has employed a three-pronged approach. First there is a giant, awesome, all-terrain snowblower. This looks something like a cross between an old fashion John Deer grain harvester and a vehicle from one of the older Star Wars movies. This behemoth is responsible for cutting a path after the deep snows. Secondly there is a plow. The plow is mounted to the front of a heroic antique truck. I think it must be soviet, but who knows. It is rad, but from what I saw, largely unable to have much effect the road conditions. The third prong in the snow clearing offense is a couple groups of local fellows. These guys are damn effective. They walk the roads with pickaxes and break up the thick sheets of ice that form on the roads from the snow left by the first two modes of attack. Like I said, these guys are damn effective but there are only a few of them for what I wold guess to be around 100 Km of roadway. So every once in a while you come across a patch of lovely cleared road where the guys have been working. The other 90% of the time, you are in a two-wheel-drive, weighed down Tata on what is effectively a snowy ice-road with big snowbank walls on either side. We crashed. A lot. And we pushed stuck vehicles, whether our own or ones that were stuck in our path, a lot.

Also worth noting: the snow clearing crews make lovely phallic statues out of the broken up ice.

So back to Tangmarg: we rounded up some “jeeps,” got the requisite chains put onto the rear wheels and headed up into the mist that still covered the mountains ahead. The ride to Gulmarg was beautiful, complete with beat-heavy hindi music, very few cars, and an untouched snowy forest all around. Every once in a while, we passed a military truck, another jeep or one of the AMAZING local buses that just flat out don’t belong on these "roads."

The feeling of careening around these mountain snowroads is a lot like snowboarding when you are really pushing the line between in- and out- of control.

None of the things we wanted to get accomplished in the first day happened. In fact not even the jeep ride went at all according to plan because we couldn't make it up the road to the hotel we were staying in and so ended up walking it for the last 250 yards. The owner of the rental shop was MIA and our avalanche safety equipment was nowhere to be found. No problem. The sun was going down, the living room in the hotel was cozy and filling up with a full cast interesting characters and it was snowing, which I learned meant that the lift would not open early. (I later learned that a) the lift never opens early or on time for that matter; b) the lift often doesn’t open at all; and c) who the hell cares about the lift when you can ride DOWN from the base of the lift in amazing conditions!)

The first night, I struck up some pretty great conversations with folks in the living room and watched my group get completely trashed on cocktails of low oxygen levels and beer labeled “consumption by non Indian Military is strictly prohibited and punishable by law.” I wimped-out from the party completely, worried about altitude sickness and overwhelmed with antsy anticipation for the next day’s tracks.

To be continued…