Snow-covered slopes of Gulmarg with the Gondola cable car line running up the mountain
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Gulmarg

"The gondola ride where I watched Kashmir's meadows turn to glacier in fourteen minutes flat."

Kashmir's ski town, riding one of the world's highest cable cars up to alpine snow in winter and a meadow thick with wildflowers come summer.

Pierre Words & photographs

Gulmarg means “meadow of flowers” in Kashmiri, and the name only tells half the story, because for a good chunk of the year the meadow is buried under snow deep enough to have made this one of India’s few legitimate ski destinations. I came in February, arriving by shared taxi from Srinagar through a landscape of snow-heavy pine forest and Kashmiri villages with smoke curling from every chimney, and the town itself, when it appeared, was a scatter of chalets and gear-rental shacks clustered around the base of the Gondola, the cable car system that is the real reason most people make the trip.

Riding the Gondola to the glacier

The Gulmarg Gondola runs in two stages, and the second stage climbs to Kongdoori and then on to Apharwat Peak at over 4,000 metres, making it one of the highest cable car systems in the world. I rode it up on a clear morning, the cabin swinging gently as it passed over pine forest that thinned into bare rock and then into a wall of unbroken white, skiers and snowboarders below tracing lines down slopes I would not have attempted on my best day. At the top, the air was thin and sharp enough to hurt, and the view opened onto the Kashmir valley on one side and a chain of Himalayan peaks, some in Pakistan-administered territory, on the other — a vantage point that made the region’s contested geography feel suddenly, uncomfortably visible rather than abstract.

The Gulmarg Gondola cable car climbing above snow-covered slopes toward Apharwat Peak

I came back to Gulmarg again in June, out of curiosity, and barely recognized it. The same slopes I’d seen buried in snow were now a rolling green meadow scattered with wildflowers, ringed by pine forest, with local families and a handful of golfers using the world’s highest green golf course, laid out at over 2,600 metres by the British in the 19th century. Horses for hire stood saddled near the meadow’s edge, and I took one up toward Khilanmarg, a smaller meadow above Gulmarg proper, where the guide, a young Kashmiri named Aadil, pointed out that most tourists only ever see one version of this place — winter’s ski slopes or summer’s flowers — and rarely believe you when you tell them about the other.

Wildflowers covering the green meadow of Gulmarg in summer with pine forest behind

When to go: December to March for skiing and the snow-covered Gondola views; April to June for the meadow in bloom and far fewer crowds than the winter season brings.