10-Day Gulmarg Backcountry Ski Package

The lifts in Gulmarg are extraordinary, and they also define a boundary. Beyond it there are valleys, aspects and faces where you can spend an entire day and see one set of tracks: yours, going up. That's what this package is for.

This is not a harder version of the freeride trip. It's a different sport. You'll spend more of the day climbing than descending, you'll ski fewer runs and remember more of them, and you'll be further from help than most skiers ever get, which is why the safety architecture on this trip is the most detailed thing on this page.

How this differs from our freeride packages

What's included

Travel and stay

• Airport pick-up and drop: Srinagar (SXR)
• 3-star or 4-star hotel with breakfast and dinner, free Wi-Fi, dedicated ski room, 24/7 hot water
• Daily transport hotel to trailhead to hotel
• Remote route transport: vehicle pick-up from valley exits including Babareshi, Drung and Tangmarg
• Local SIM card, one per group

Lifts, used as a tool rather than the point: all ski lift passes, Gondola Phase 1 and Phase 2, chairlift and drag lift passes, so we can use mechanical lift on the days when the objective is better reached that way, or when a group needs a lighter day.

Equipment

• Touring ski setup including skins: the primary tool of this trip
• Complete powder ski equipment for lift-served or road-accessed days
• ABS-style avalanche airbag backpack and backpack
• Avalanche safety gear: three-antenna digital transceiver, metal-bladed shovel, 240 cm+ probe
• Helmet, goggles, gloves, ski pants and jacket
• Experienced backcountry skiers are strongly advised to bring their own boots, skis and transceiver, familiar gear is faster, more comfortable and safer on a ten-day touring trip.

Guiding, safety and communication

• Professional backcountry ski guide: certified through AIARE, Avalanche Canada and the Kashmir Avalanche Association
• Avalanche safety training and daily practice: full companion-rescue curriculum, daily snow pits, ECT, Rutschblock, recorded profiles
• Walkie-talkies for every group, with a fixed channel plan and check-in protocol
• Emergency medical support, evacuation planning and a printed emergency contact card

Where you'll tour

Route choice is made daily against snowpack, weather and group condition. Over ten days the terrain typically includes:

• Khilanmarg: the high meadow above Gulmarg, the natural first tour and the gateway to Apharwat's flanks
• Apharwat's remote aspects, away from the lift-served bowls, where the good snow survives longest
• Long valley descents finishing at road level near Drung, Babareshi and Tangmarg, with a vehicle waiting
• Forested touring for storm days, when the high terrain is out and the trees are the whole answer

How the ten days run

Day 1, Arrival and fitting. Transfer from Srinagar, hotel, equipment fitting and a touring setup check. Transceivers issued; first search drill the same day.

Day 2, Skills and assessment day. The full companion-rescue block: trailhead protocol, signal-coarse-fine-pinpoint, probing patterns, strategic shovelling, timed scenarios including a multiple burial. Skinning technique, kick turns, transitions and pacing. Your first full snow profile, layers, hand hardness, grain forms, temperature gradient, plus ECT and Rutschblock, recorded.

Days 3–4, First tours, moderate. Shorter ascents at moderate altitude while you acclimatise and your guide reads the group's real pace. Khilanmarg and the nearer objectives. Daily pit work continues.

Day 5, Flex. Rest, a lift-served powder day, or a full tour if a storm has just cleared. Placed by conditions.

Days 6–8, The main tours. Longer days, bigger ascents, remote aspects, valley exits with vehicle pick-up. This is where the trip's best descents usually happen, the snowpack has a history you've been tracking for a week, and the group moves as a unit.

Day 9, Objective day. The biggest tour the conditions and the group support, with an early start and a hard turnaround time set before departure.

Day 10, Ski out, and debrief. A final tour or a lift-served powder day depending on legs and weather, then a proper debrief: what the snowpack did over ten days, what you learned to read, and what you'd be ready to attempt next. Airport transfer the following morning.

Not included

Airfare to Srinagar, lunch (we advise on trail food), personal expenses, travel insurance covering off-piste skiing, ski touring, search and rescue and helicopter evacuation (mandatory), personal touring boots and skis if you prefer your own, ski clothing unless added on. GST where applicable

Avalanche safety: what we actually do, every day

Every Gulmarg Snowkings freeride and backcountry package includes avalanche safety training and daily practice. Not a waiver and a briefing, actual drills, actual snow pits, actual test scores written down. Our guiding team is certified through AIARE, Avalanche Canada and the Kashmir Avalanche Association, and we have guided in Gulmarg since 2006 with zero avalanche accidents among our guided clients.

Here is exactly what that means on the ground.

Before you ski: the morning routine

Forecast and observation review. We read the day's avalanche advisory for Gulmarg alongside our own observations from the previous days, what the wind did overnight, how much new snow fell and at what temperature, what we saw and felt in yesterday's pits. A forecast is an input, not an instruction. In a range where the forecasting network is thinner than in the Alps or North America, your guide's own recent field data matters more, not less.

Weather. Kashmir's snow arrives with Western Disturbances, storm systems tracking in from the west that can drop a metre in 48 hours and then leave days of clear, cold, high-pressure weather behind them. What matters for the day's plan is not just how much fell, but how fast, at what temperature, and with how much wind, because wind loading is what turns new snow into a slab on a specific set of aspects.

The plan, and the alternative plan. We choose terrain to match the hazard, aspect and elevation, then we agree what we'd do instead if conditions aren't what the forecast suggested. Groups that only have Plan A tend to ski Plan A regardless of what they find.

The trailhead transceiver check

Every day, before anyone moves, without exception.

• Each person's transceiver is switched to transmit and worn under an outer layer against the body, not in a pack.
• The guide switches to search and confirms every unit's signal individually at range, then confirms the group's units all receive the guide's signal.
• Batteries are checked; anything under roughly 60% gets replaced before the day, not during it.
• Phones, radios, cameras and heated gear are kept at least 20 cm from a transmitting transceiver, and at least 50 cm from one in search mode. Modern electronics interfere with 457 kHz signals badly enough to cost minutes in a real search, and minutes are the whole ballgame.

Companion rescue: the drills we run

We practise these on your trip, on real snow, on a clock, because avalanche rescue is a skill that decays fast and reads much easier on paper than it performs with adrenaline and a shovel.

1. Beacon search. All modern transceivers are three-antenna digital units broadcasting on the international 457 kHz standard. We run the full sequence:

• Signal search: covering the debris in strips sized to your transceiver's range, moving fast.
• Coarse search: following the flux line, letting the unit's directional arrows lead you in, staying with the same signal rather than chasing the number.
• Fine search: at around 3 m, get low and slow, then bracket in two axes to find the lowest reading, keeping the transceiver flat and close to the snow.
• Pinpoint: a 10 cm grid over the lowest reading to nail the spot before the probe comes out.
• Multiple burials: signal suppression and marking/flagging, plus the three-circle and micro-strip methods for units that don't mark cleanly.

2. Probing. From the pinpoint, a spiral pattern outward at 25 cm spacing, probing perpendicular to the slope surface rather than straight down, a buried person lies along the slope, not along gravity. You learn what a body feels like through a probe compared with ground, ice or a rock. On a positive strike, the probe stays in the snow. It is your only reference point once digging starts.

3. Strategic shovelling. This is where most amateur rescues are lost, and where almost nobody trains. We teach the conveyor method:

• Start digging downhill of the probe, at a distance of roughly 1.5 times the burial depth, not on top of the strike.
• Cut a platform and move snow downhill and sideways, never lifting it up and over.
• In a group, dig in a V formation with a lead digger and paddlers behind, and rotate the lead every couple of minutes, shovelling in avalanche debris at altitude exhausts people faster than they expect.
• Approach the buried person from the side to reach the airway first.

4. The clock. Avalanche survival research consistently shows a steep drop-off: the great majority of completely buried people who are recovered within about ten minutes survive, and survival falls sharply after roughly fifteen to twenty minutes, primarily to asphyxia. That is the entire reason companion rescue exists, organised rescue cannot arrive inside that window, and in Gulmarg's out-of-bounds terrain it certainly cannot. Your group is the rescue. We train you to be a functional part of it, and we run timed scenarios until the sequence is automatic.

Snowpack assessment: the pits and the tests

We dig. Frequently. A snow pit takes twenty minutes and tells you things no forecast can, because it tells you about this slope.

The full profile. On a representative slope, same aspect and elevation as the terrain we're considering, in a safe location, we cut a clean pit wall and record:

• Layer boundaries, top to bottom
• Hand hardness of each layer on the standard scale: fist, four-finger, one-finger, pencil, knife
• Grain form and size: precipitation particles, decomposing forms, rounded grains, faceted crystals, depth hoar, surface hoar, melt forms, crusts, read with a loupe on a crystal card
• Temperature profile at 10 cm intervals, because a strong temperature gradient through the pack is what grows the faceted, sugary grains that become persistent weak layers
• Where the weak layers are, how deep, and whether they are gaining or losing strength since we last looked

Gulmarg's snowpack regularly develops exactly this problem: a shallow early-season base that facets under a strong gradient, then gets loaded by heavy Western Disturbance storms. Persistent slab problems of that kind are the ones that catch experienced people, because they don't announce themselves in the way a fresh storm slab does.

Compression Test (CT). A 30 × 30 cm isolated column, loaded with ten taps from the wrist, ten from the elbow, ten from the shoulder. It tells us where a layer fails and how easily, CTE, CTM, CTH by loading step. Quick, useful for finding the layer worth interrogating properly.

Extended Column Test (ECT). Our primary propagation test. A column 90 cm across the slope by 30 cm upslope, isolated to below the layer of interest, loaded with the same 10/10/10 tapping sequence applied at one end. What we're watching is not just whether a layer fails, but whether the fracture propagates across the full column, because propagation is what turns a failure into a slab avalanche. Results are recorded as ECTP (propagated across the whole column, at tap number n) or ECTN (fractured but did not propagate), or ECTX (no fracture). An ECTP at a low tap number is a hard stop on that aspect and elevation, whatever anyone's plan for the day was.

Rutschblock test (RB). A larger, skier-scale test: a block roughly 2 m across by 1.5 m upslope, isolated on all sides, then loaded in a standard seven-step sequence by a skier, approaching gently, stepping on, flexing, then one, two and three progressively harder jumps. The score, RB1 through RB7, tells you how much load the slab takes before it releases, and we record the release type as well: whole block, partial, or edges only. Because the load is applied by an actual skier over an actual skier-sized area, the Rutschblock is the test that speaks most directly to the question "what happens if one of us skis onto this?"

Propagation Saw Test (PST), where a specific persistent layer needs interrogating, a 100 cm × 30 cm column cut with a saw along the weak layer, recorded as the cut length at which the fracture self-propagates, e.g. PST 30/100 (End).

No single test is a green light. We treat test results as one line of evidence alongside recent avalanche activity, whumpfing and shooting cracks, wind and temperature history, and how the snow feels underfoot. Where the evidence disagrees, we default to the more conservative reading. You will see the results. We show you the pit, walk you through the layers, and explain what the score changed about the plan, because it makes you a better skier for the rest of your life, and because a client who understands why we turned around doesn't feel short-changed by it.

Terrain, and the discipline of using it

Most avalanche safety is terrain choice, not rescue skill. On every guided day:

• Slope angle is measured, not estimated. Most slab avalanches release on slopes between roughly 30 and 45 degrees. People are consistently bad at eyeballing this, so we use an inclinometer.
• Terrain traps: gullies, benches, trees, rocks, creek beds, get identified out loud, because they turn a small slide into a fatal one by increasing burial depth.
• One at a time through any suspect slope, with the group watching from a safe island, and a regroup point agreed before anyone drops.
• Spacing on the skin track and on traverses, so a single slide cannot take the whole group.
• Islands of safety identified before we commit, not after.
• Human factors get named directly: familiarity with a run, wanting the fresh line, not wanting to be the one who says stop, and the pull of a plan already made. These heuristic traps have a documented role in avalanche accidents involving experienced groups, and the countermeasure is a group culture where anyone can call a halt without needing to justify it.

Your gear, and what it means

Included on every freeride and backcountry package: a three-antenna digital avalanche transceiver, a metal-bladed avalanche shovel, and a 240 cm+ probe, and on our packages, an ABS-style airbag backpack. An airbag improves your odds by helping keep you at the surface through inverse segregation; it does nothing for trauma, terrain traps or a burial in a gully, and it is not a licence to ski terrain you'd otherwise avoid. We'll show you how to deploy it, how to repack it, and we'll be blunt about what it doesn't do.

If you want the training to go further, ask us about a dedicated avalanche course alongside your ski days, we can build one into any of these packages.

Communications and emergency response

In Gulmarg's off-piste terrain there is no patrol closing slopes, no avalanche control, and no fast organised rescue. The plan has to exist before the day starts. Here is ours.

On the mountain: radios

Every group carries VHF walkie-talkies, guide, tail guide where the group size calls for it, and clients on longer or more committing days. We run a fixed channel plan with call signs, radio checks at the trailhead and at every regroup, and a discipline about keeping the channel clear.

Radios matter more here than in most ski destinations for a simple reason: mobile coverage in the terrain we ski is unreliable to non-existent. Gulmarg village and the Gondola base generally have signal. Kongdoori is patchy. The back side of Apharwat, the descents toward Drung and Babareshi, and most of the touring terrain have none at all. A radio that reaches your guide is worth more than a phone that reaches nothing.

Phones: the SIM card, and why it's in the package

International roaming does not work reliably in Jammu & Kashmir. Foreign SIM cards, and in many cases prepaid SIMs issued elsewhere in India, will not register on the network here. Visitors discover this at the airport, and it is one of the most common practical problems on a Kashmir trip.

Every group on our packages is issued a local SIM card (one per group) so that at least one working Indian number travels with you, for the guide to reach you, for you to reach our base office, and for hospital or airline calls if something changes.

We'll also tell you which network performs best in Gulmarg on arrival, since that changes, and help you get a personal SIM if you want one, the paperwork requires your passport, visa and a photo, and it is much easier done with someone who has done it before.

Check-in protocol

• Every group's plan for the day: objective, terrain, route, expected return, is left with our base office before departure.
• Scheduled radio or phone check-ins at agreed times.
• A hard turnaround time for every objective, set before we leave, and honoured.
• If a group misses a check-in by an agreed margin, the response starts. It does not wait until dark.

If something goes wrong

Our escalation sequence, in order:

1. The group is the first response. Companion rescue for a burial; on-scene first aid for trauma. Your guide carries a first aid kit, a rescue sled or improvised-sled kit and repair equipment.
2. Guide to base by radio, with location, casualty count, injury type and access route. Our base office activates from there so the guide can stay with the casualty.
3. Ski patrol and gondola control for anything inside or adjacent to the lift-served area, including using the lift system for evacuation where that's the fastest route down.
4. Road evacuation to Srinagar. Gulmarg's own medical facility is small and suitable for minor injuries only; anything serious goes to a hospital in Srinagar, roughly 50–52 km and 1.5–2 hours away in winter conditions. We keep a vehicle and driver reachable for the length of your trip.
5. Helicopter evacuation, where weather, daylight and the casualty's condition make it the right call. Heli evacuation in Kashmir is not a phone call away and it is not free, it depends on conditions and availability, and your insurer will need to authorise it. This is precisely why our insurance requirement is not boilerplate.

Emergency contacts we carry, and give you

Every client gets a printed contact card at the start of the trip. It includes:

• Gulmarg Snowkings base office / 24-hour trip line: +91-9596300570
• Your guide's direct mobile and radio call sign
• India's national emergency number: 112 (ambulance services also on 102/108 where operational)
• Your own insurer's 24-hour assistance number and policy number: we ask you for these at registration and carry a copy
• Your emergency contact at home, with time zone noted

We collect your next of kin, insurance details, blood group and any medical conditions or medications at registration, and we carry them with the group. If you'd rather not share something, tell us, but know that the person who benefits from us having it is you.

Insurance: a hard requirement, not a suggestion

You will not be able to join a freeride or backcountry package without insurance that explicitly covers:

• Off-piste and out-of-bounds skiing, including skiing outside patrolled areas, most standard ski policies exclude exactly this
• Ski touring and skinning, for the backcountry packages
• Search and rescue costs
• Helicopter evacuation and repatriation
• Altitudes to at least 4,210 m, the summit of Mount Apharwat

Send us your policy details before you travel and we'll read them. We've seen enough policies that quietly exclude "skiing away from marked runs" that we'd rather check than assume.

Why skiing skill is the smallest part of this job

Anyone selling backcountry skiing can ski. That is the entry requirement, not the qualification. What actually keeps a group safe in remote Kashmir is a much longer list, and we think you should be able to see it before you hand your fortnight and your safety to someone.

Snow science, applied daily. Reading a snowpack, running and interpreting stability tests, tracking how a persistent weak layer is evolving across a season rather than a day, and knowing which aspects and elevations that layer is hiding on. Our team's training runs through AIARE, Avalanche Canada and the Kashmir Avalanche Association.

Weather interpretation for this specific range. Western Disturbance timing, how much a storm will actually deliver at 3,500 m versus what a general forecast says for the valley, wind direction and what it will load, and the temperature swings that change snow quality between morning and afternoon on the same aspect.

Terrain and route selection. Knowing not just the good lines but the safe approach to them, the escape options, the terrain traps, and where a slope's angle changes out of sight from below. This is knowledge accumulated over seasons, on specific slopes, which is why local guiding experience is not interchangeable with guiding experience elsewhere.

Navigation and whiteout craft. Map, compass, altimeter and GPS, and the judgement to know when visibility means the objective is off. Gulmarg's high terrain loses all definition in flat light, and the ability to get a group down featureless snow safely is a real, trainable skill.

Rescue and medicine. Companion rescue leadership, casualty management, improvised sleds and evacuation, and coordinating with patrol, road and helicopter resources.

Group management. Reading fatigue before the client reports it, pacing a skin track so nobody blows up, knowing which client will over-commit and which will freeze, and having the standing to say the day ends here. The hardest part of the job is turning a paying group around, which is why we'd rather you know in advance that we will.

Local knowledge that has nothing to do with snow. Which road to Tangmarg is open after a storm. Which village to arrange a pick-up from and who to speak to. How to move respectfully through communities we ski above. Where the checkpoints are and what they need. When a route is unwise for reasons that aren't avalanche-related. This is the part that cannot be imported, and it is the reason we are a Kashmiri company staffed by people from these valleys rather than a foreign operator running a season here.

Language. Kashmiri, Urdu, Hindi and English across the team, which matters at a road block, a hospital admissions desk, or a village door at dusk.

Registration and accountability. We are registered with J&K Tourism as a ski school and backcountry guiding operator under permit no. JKAT00005678. You can check it. We think you should, and you should ask every other operator you're considering for theirs.

Two decades in one place. Gulmarg Snowkings was founded in 2006 by Shafat Ahmad Tantray and Bashir Ahmad Mir. In that time we've guided over 2,500 skiers from more than 40 countries, with zero avalanche accidents among our guided clients. That record is not luck, and it is not a promise about the future, it's the outcome of the process described on this page, applied on days when it would have been easier and more profitable to ski the objective anyway.

Before you book: is this trip for you?

Skiing level

Freeride packages: you should be a confident parallel skier who can descend any groomed run in control and has some experience of ungroomed, variable snow, crud, wind-affected snow, breakable crust, not only perfect powder. You do not need previous off-piste experience; you do need to be past the point where steep or unfamiliar snow makes you tentative. Powder is a skill, and we'll teach it.

Backcountry packages: everything above, plus the ability to ski well when tired, at the end of a long climb, on whatever the snow has become by mid-afternoon. Previous ski touring experience is helpful but not mandatory, we'll teach skinning, kick turns and transitions. Previous avalanche training is strongly recommended.

If you're not sure where you sit, tell us honestly what you've skied and where. We will tell you honestly which package fits, including if the answer is "not this year", an over-sold client is a hazard to their whole group.

Fitness

Freeride: good general fitness. Days involve 4–8 descents with short traverses and boot-packs of up to about 45 minutes.

Backcountry: you should be able to climb 800–1,200 vertical metres carrying a 8–12 kg pack, at altitude, on consecutive days. A useful benchmark: three hours of steady uphill hiking without needing a long recovery. Train the uphill before you come; the descent will look after itself.

Altitude

You sleep in Gulmarg at approximately 2,650 m and ski up to the Gondola's top station at approximately 3,980 m, with Mount Apharwat's summit at around 4,210 m. Because the sleeping elevation is moderate, serious altitude illness is uncommon here, but the daily swing is significant, and on the first two days most people notice reduced stamina, disturbed sleep and a shorter breath than usual.

What helps: arrive a day early if you can, go easy on alcohol for the first 48 hours, drink considerably more water than you think you need, and let us set the pace early. Our longer itineraries are built with the first days lower and easier for exactly this reason. Tell your guide immediately about persistent headache, nausea or unusual breathlessness, it is not something to push through.

What we provide, and what you bring

We provide the technical safety kit and skis: transceiver, shovel, probe, ABS-style airbag backpack, powder ski setup, touring setup with skins, helmet, goggles, gloves, ski pants and jacket, and a backpack.

Experienced freeriders and backcountry skiers are strongly encouraged to bring their own boots and skis. Boots especially, a fortnight of touring in unfamiliar boots is a fortnight of blisters, and personal touring gear you've already dialled in will outperform anything from a rental fleet. Bring your own transceiver too if you own one; you'll search faster with the unit whose interface is in your muscle memory.

You bring: thermal base layers, mid layers, spare gloves, a warm hat, buff, sunglasses, high-factor sunscreen and lip protection, personal medication, a headtorch, a water bottle or bladder that won't freeze, and any personal snacks.