Yusmarg

A guesthouse owner in Srinagar mentioned Yusmarg almost as an afterthought — “if you want Gulmarg without the crowds, go there instead” — and that offhand comment is the entire reason I ended up on a barely-paved road climbing through walnut orchards and apple villages for two hours before the trees opened onto a meadow so wide and so empty that I actually asked the driver if we’d taken a wrong turn. We hadn’t. This was it, and there were maybe a dozen other visitors scattered across a meadow that could have absorbed a thousand.

The name translates loosely to meadow of Jesus, and the local legend — which I heard three slightly different versions of over one afternoon — holds that Jesus passed through or rested here on a journey through Kashmir, a story that threads through several spots in the valley and that scholars treat with more skepticism than the shepherds who repeat it. Whatever the truth of the legend, the name has stuck for generations, and it gives an otherwise unnamed meadow a strange, quiet gravity.

What Gulmarg used to be

Yusmarg sits at a lower altitude than Gulmarg, ringed by dense pine and deodar forest rather than ski infrastructure, and it has almost none of the built-up tourism apparatus — no gondola, no chair lifts, no rows of souvenir stalls. What it has instead are pony treks up to Nilnag Lake, a small alpine lake tucked in the forest about two hours’ walk or ride away, and grazing families who move their sheep and cattle up here for the summer exactly as they likely have for generations. I walked up alone, no guide, following a trail that a shepherd boy pointed me toward with a wave of his stick, and the lake when I reached it was flat, cold, and completely silent except for wind moving through the deodars.

I sat on the meadow’s edge for most of an afternoon watching a family of shepherds set up their summer camp — a low black tent, a fire pit, dogs that ignored me entirely — and it was one of those rare travel moments in India where nothing was performed for an audience. Nobody was selling anything, nobody asked where I was from. A boy of about ten brought me a cup of salted Kashmiri pink tea without being asked, sat with me while I drank it, and left again to help move the sheep. I have visited plenty of famous meadows in Kashmir since, but that half hour with strangers who had no interest in me as a tourist is the one I’ve kept coming back to.

When to go: May through September, when the meadow is green and the roads up are clear of snow. Go on a weekday if you can — Srinagar day-trippers do come out on weekends, and part of Yusmarg’s appeal is exactly how few people share it with you.