2/16/10-2/20/10
Gulmarg


Due to moderate stormy conditions the upper stage of the gondola hasn’t been open for the last few days. We expected this and focused our riding elsewhere. There are a few options you can make when the alpine isn’t accessible. Due to the recent storm, there is adequate snow cover down to three little towns that surround Gulmarg. Tangmarg is the biggest town complete with bakery, restaurants, and small markets. We’ve skied here a few times. Barbereshi sits to the skier’s left (it’s a way of describing direction: it’s to the left while looking down a mountain) of Tangmarg and has possibly the most interesting terrain I’ve seen here. Though the total vertical is a bit shorter (about 800 vertical feet) it is steep, loosely-spaced forest with little valleys and bumps and snow-covered river beds that provide an exciting ride.




From the beginning, “Barbareshi Runs” as we like to call it are exciting. On the top we skin along a completely snow-covered resemblance of a roadway with a steep, chunky cliff about 40-feet tall to our left, which looks like a big wavy curtain. It was created from digging into the hillside to make the road. It is mostly covered with snow except for the occasional rock outcropping or a large tree’s roots overhanging the cliff. Although there are plenty of terrain features to satisfy the most daring, it all levels out nicely to a flat, powder plateau of a road. This can give the illusion of safety. As we were walking along to our drop in point, we come across a beautiful pillow line about four-feet wide consisting of a five, then a ten-foot air. Wes immediately veers left and starts skinning up to the take off point. Matt and Amet volunteered to shoot video and stills of the event. I was feeling some “Kodak Courage” and decided to also drop off a cliff area into a steep powder landing. It’s interesting how that works. When a camera is rolling, you tend to go a little bigger.

The skin up the steep face was a bit sketchy due to the soft snow which we kept sliding back on. At the top of the cliff, the road all of a sudden looked a lot farther down than I was expecting. The steep rollover above the cliff also completely blocked my view of where I was planning on landing. Wes dropped first, airing onto a little patch of flat snow sitting on top of a rock about five-feet down. The snow was harder than he expected and immediately his knees were slamming into his chin and he goes airborne again over the ten-foot drop, rotating slowly out of control. Luckily, the landing at the bottom is soft and he plops down in a funny way. He’s alright. It was a good crash caught on tape.

I take my best guess as to where I should jump off this white ledge. About fifteen feet from the lip I point straight down and gain speed. The road quickly comes into view below and I can see the guys starring straight up at me. I focus back to my board and see the top of a small tree sitting below the lip. I Gotta jump over it. The ground drops away and behind me as the wind begins to rush past my ears faster and faster. I remember reading a quote in a snowboarding magazine when I was in fifth grade. It read: “You may only catch air for a few seconds, but your soul could take weeks to land.”

How true.

I didn’t land it clean at all, but the light powder cushioned my backside as I landed in a big explosion of snow. The rest of the way down it’s fast and mostly steep all the way to a plowed road where you can rent a taxi back up.

There is another small village called Drang that sits on the skier’s right of Tangmarg. Matt, Amet, Alan, and I decided to do a “Drang Run” the other day. We started out by skinning up Monkey Hill and dropping straight down to the valley 400 meters below. I couldn’t help but feel a bit of lingering resentment of the place. This was, after all, the same valley that two-weeks prior we had run out of snow and had to climb down rocks and ice and I thought I was going to die. So from here we again donned our skins and started straight up the opposing hill. No one ever goes here. No skier, that is. Halfway up the mountain we stumbled across two Kashmiri men walking the other direction, big smiles on their faces.


It was a beautiful skin through the woods. We could hear or see no one. The trees were starting to shed a little snow from their branches and every now and then a big “whump” would grab my attention as chunks of snow would sink deep into the snow around the base of the tree, followed by a shower of super-light snow crystals.

About 800-feet up from the valley floor we start to smell smoke. There couldn’t be a hut way up here, could there? We followed our noses and ended up at tree that had fallen over, the inside of it gutted and smoldering. The heat from the burning trunk had melted snow about half the way up the trunk. The top part of the tree looked like the rest of the forest floor; a thick, fluffy layer of snow doing it’s best to obscure what kind of shape lay below. This tree had been hit by lightning before the big storm and started burning. As the snow-load increased and the inside burned away, it fell over and continued to burn for at least six days.

We continued on a couple hundred more feet. These distances are in vertical feet, by the way, so one hundred feet up is at best a 140-foot long skin track (assuming traveling straight up a constant thirty-degree incline) but is usually closer to around 250 feet in length. It took well over an hour to summit about one-thousand vertical feet.

We emerged on top the ridge with larger open areas and a few leafless hardwoods interspersed between the pine and spruce. The pitch was a fun 25-30 degrees and rolling terrain and plenty of snow-covered stumps to catch a little bit of air on. Soon we were back near the burning tree and a very dramatic rollover that ended up in a good 45-degree sustained tree-run that stretched out below us for a good 800 feet. Awesome run. Caught the whole thing on the GoPro. The snow got heavier and wetter as we neared the bottom and soon we crossed a large open field and hit the edges of Drang town.

Kids were sledding down little hills on small, single-track sleds and laughing contagiously. This little village has no roads in or out (at least no one to plow them clear of the snow) and instead a deeply rutted foot trail cuts its way in-between the small, organic-looking houses and their adjacent outhouses.

There was enough slope on the trail that it would carry me somewhere between a walk and jog pace. I didn’t even have to turn; the sides of the footpath did all the directing work for me. I had in one hand the GoPro video camera and in my other had was my still camera, and I was using both as I glided down “Main Street” in this little faring village. It was like being on a little roller coaster ride through some Disney Land theme park ride where you got a glimpse at some foreign landscape. It was all surreal. I passed two small kids who took an interest in me and gave them a ride on my snowboard. One was sitting on the nose, one was sitting on the tail as we slid down the trail.

Soon I could see a bunch of kids standing in the footpath holding their hands up, signaling me to stop. “Chocolate? Chocolate!” they all shouted in at first a somewhat cute and convincing manner. I had bought all types of candy to give to these kids before I left Maui and had so far managed to keep them stashed deep down inside my snowboard bag, abstaining from eating them myself. I had done such a good job at keeping the thought of candy out of my mind that I had totally forgot to bring any with me. I felt like a jerk. I tried to break it to the Drang kids lightly, but they then started shouting, “Rupees! You give rupees! Ten rupees!”

Woah, woah, woah… these innocent little kids soon went from cute to curt. They started grabbing at my pockets and trying to work their little hands deep into them. These little guys were totally working the system. I had to practically push them away from me, and keep on checking my pockets to see if they had taken my radio or camera gear. Now I wish I had brought chocolate just to throw to the side of the path, distracting the kids, so I could just pass by.

From the bottom of Drang I crossed over a long official-looking footbridge that would have made a civil engineer wince. Although made of concrete and steel, the design was such that the cadence of my step resonated through the bridge and caused it to bob up and down a good eight inches in the middle! I laughed at this and stopped in the middle and jumped up and down, flexing the bridge well over a foot in amplitude.


The last three days have made the entire trip worth it.

A high pressure system has moved in and provided clear blue skies. The mountain has absolutely transformed. Places that were completely bare two weeks ago now have long open bowls full of powder.

Again we got up early and caught the first gondola up to the mid station and began our wait for the upper stage of the gondola to open. Ski patrol still needed to do some avalanche control work before they could open the mountain. Since it looked doubtful at best whether they’d open later that day, many people decided to take advantage of the new snow and skin out from the mid station to do a Drang run. Wes and I were still sore from the previous day and decided to stick it out. Frankly, I wasn’t willing to miss the opening of the gondola. Here was 3,000 feet of completely untouched deep powder with perfect sunshine illuminating every ridge and valley and the thought of missing the opportunity of having first tracks was just unbearable. Wes and I knew it would be a few hours at least until they opened the top if at all, so we decided to skin over to the paper trees. We crossed over a large flat area on the way to the bottom of the trees. A gently rolling white desert completely surrounded us. Our skin track, lazily zig-zagging left and right was the only distinct contrast to the white plain.

It was a peaceful skin up and I got into a good rhythm.
I kept on getting sidetracked by the beautiful landscape surrounding me and the complete silence that seemed to quiet my thoughts. Soon we made it above the treeline and the skin track got quite steep. A fall here would definitely result in a long roll down.

An hour later and I’m standing on top of about 1,000 feet of blower powder covering a steep bowl in between two stands of paper trees. The ridge top was narrow and dropped off abruptly on three sides of me. Wes dropped first and screamed down through the trees on his way to a small cliff (of course). He soon disappeared into a cloud of powder fifty-feet long that was trailing his every move. The snow was incredibly light.

Now I’m all alone. It was a strange feeling being completely alone. I couldn’t help but stop and stand still for a few minutes, soaking in the vast landscape below. No one would be dropping in on me, there was no rush. I took a couple pictures then strapped in. A few deep breaths to calm my heart rate down, and then I point the nose of my board downhill.

I haven’t felt this kind of snow before. I accelerated so quickly, yet was still in total control. I couldn’t really feel the snow underneath my board, it just seemed to float. I could see my shadow in front of me on the virgin snow. With every turn it would vanish behind the shadow of my powder cloud.

Fifty-seconds later I’m back down, standing on the flats looking up at the best run of my life. It may seem like more hassle than it’s worth- climbing up a mountain for an hour and a half for a thrill that’s less than a minute long- and sometimes it is, but it’s the entire process that I’ve learned to enjoy. The hard work I put in to earn my turns just makes the reward that much sweeter.

All of a sudden, we hear the distinct sound of a bomb going off. Ski patrol has finally gotten the explosives they need and have started their control work. The gondola just might open sometime soon.



Wes and I traverse back to the midstation. The crowd hanging around is much smaller than usual due to many people doing Drang runs and no one is really standing in line. People are mostly enjoying the sunshine down on the ground and are milling about. I head straight to the front of the line, still in awe of the incredible run I just had. A Kashmiri gondola worker approaches me and does the typical overly-friendly introduction and small talk. We’ve all grown a bit tired of these brief interactions and limp handshakes and have started pretending that we just don’t understand, like we speak Russian or something. But I could see in this guy’s eyes that he was sincere and just wanted to know who I was and where I was from. His name is Rashid and he’s been working on the gondola for twelve years. We get to talking a little about whether the gondola will open or not today and I jokingly say, “you put me on first gondola, yes?” He puts his hand out to shake on it and agrees in a very serious manner. This could have been a blood oath for all he was concerned.

People are now starting to crowd towards the loading area and the tension is getting stronger whether or not we’ll all be able to ski the perfect powder in this unbelievable weather. Rashid comes near and nods to me, signaling that I may board the first gondola.

The ride up seemed to take twice as long. Apparently there was complete pandemonium when they started loading the gondola, complete with fistfights and dirty line cutting. Four people in a gondola is a typical load and there isn’t much room to spare. A few gondolas had seven people crammed in, totally overloading the weight limit. I’m glad I was in front of all this, drooling at the hillside passing below me.

As I neared the top I couldn’t help but appreciate the mechanical engineering that transported me 3,000 feet up in a matter of minutes. It would have taken me close to three hours of lung-bursting work to get there on my own power. An hour ago I had just praised the rewards of hard work, but how quickly I forgot all about that. It seemed too good to be true- to have all this powder with none of the work.

Warm, afternoon light illuminated each ridge top and cast large shadows into the valleys. It was a blur rushing out of the gondola and getting strapped in. I didn’t take a moment to soak in the beauty this time. There were 6 more people arriving behind me every thirty-seconds and we were all hungry for the same thing.

Now I know why they say this place is like heli-skiing without the helicopter



It's been so nice to have sunny weather again, although the white valley surrounding is is blindingly bright. the internet and the phone have been hard to find lately for some reason. Right now I'm in the little Gulmarg town amidst some little shops and restaurants sitting on the snow, thinking about lunch.

More to come soon
-Riley