IT'S not just the altitude that hijacks my breath as I alight from the world's highest gondola: the majestic Himalayan scene stretching across the horizon is equally complicit. From 4124m, Kashmir looks like a haven of peace and tranquillity, but appearances are sometimes deceptive.

I am standing on the summit of India's Mount Apharwat, gazing over precipitous valleys and jagged peaks into Pakistan, 5km to the west. The two Kashmirs are divided by a no man's land straddled by the dubiously titled Line of Control, an often violent de facto border in existence for almost 60 years.

The sweeping view was made possible by the completion of Gulmarg's second-phase gondola in May last year. The ski lift now climbs to 3980m, beginning about 1330m below in Gulmarg, a village resort tucked neatly at the nape of the Pir Panjal mountain range.

My feet are strapped to narrow planks of precisely calibrated wood and fibreglass. Taking my cue from Nanga Parbat, towering above dozens of 6000m peaks to the north, I turn my back on Pakistan and drop back over the ridgeline, beginning a 4.5km descent into Gulmarg.

Hopes of arcing gracefully across the silken slopes evaporate as my skis are rapidly engulfed by diaphanous powder snow; it's like nothing I've experienced while skiing elsewhere. At least it makes for a soft landing as I lurch and tumble.

The residents of Gulmarg have long cast an eye to the heavens, seeking answers to their problems. Thus far, the gods – for Hindus it might be Brahma the creator; for Muslims, Allah – have supplied few solutions. They still hope, however, that salvation may yet descend from on high, via a more terrestrial incarnation: powder snow.

Travelling by Jeep along the 56km of road that connects Srinagar, the capital of Indian Kashmir, with Gulmarg, takes between two and three hours, depending on the flow of traffic and the mood of Indian soldiers manning checkpoints that dot the city and roads leading west towards Pakistan.

We pass through quaint villages, book-ended by vacant machinegun nests and rows of poplar trees. Groups of Kashmiris gather around steaming cauldrons of masala chai, peeking curiously from within their traditional ferins (ankle-grazing woollen ponchos) at our passing Jeep.

In summer, the surrounding fields glow green and gold, padded with crops of rice and mustard flower. Winter dumps snow and ice, churning the ground to a muddy slush and covering the countryside in an eerie patina reminiscent of the Somme battlefields.

The last 14km climb is punctuated by frequent stops. Drivers alight to arbitrate the passage of buses, Jeeps and trucks along the single-lane road. Exchanging their glowing kangris – earthenware pots with burning charcoal encased in wicker baskets – for cigarettes, they gesticulate and shout over one another for 10 minutes before deciding the only solution is to reverse the cavalcade 100m back down the road.

We are travelling on Indian time but the good humour of these hardy mountain dwellers sends a thaw through the cold traffic. I ask my escort from the Srinagar tourist office if he likes to ski.

"I used to," Sikander Malik chuckles ruefully. "Before I got shot."

As I ruminate on the appropriateness of asking Malik if he was shot while on skis, we plough over the lip of a hill and headlong into the set of a Brothers Grimm fairytale. We pull up in front of a gingerbread lodge that looks on to undulating crests of white lining the basin around which Gulmarg is constructed.

Intricately carved wooden tourist hotels and wind-hollowed huts perch on either side of the bowl, buttressed by towering conifers offering sanctuary to capricious bandar (monkeys) rattling snow from the branches.

Hibernating black bears, I am told, are slumbering in caves beneath the white blanket, embroidered with the tracks of foxes, deer and snow leopards. A sweep of the hand across the delicate mantle of snow, piled up to 3m, reveals a dry, feather-light consistency.

Gulum Mohmad Dar, Gulmarg's tourism manager, tells me: "It is only January. In February we have twice as much."

An army truck swings around a bend offering passers-by a ride back to their lodge, while further on, armed sentries loll about. Occasional bursts of gunfire bounce across the basin as military exercises are performed somewhere out of sight, curious perversions in this otherwise pristine wilderness.

Seemingly unmoved by the poorly camouflaged military presence, skiers and boarders crunch past, jubilant after their final runs of the day.

Glancing at their flushed faces, I wonder if they perceive any imminent danger from militants or errant soldiers as they plunge down into the surrounding valleys. I suspect that I would be laughed off the mountain at the suggestion.

"There are army blokes everywhere, but they don't seem to do a lot," says Lachlan Lynch, a snowboarder from Sydney who has returned for his second season.

Sultan Yusuf Shah named Gulmarg – "meadow of flowers" – in the 16th century, starting a summer migration to escape the stifling heat of the Haryana and Punjab plains below. This was a ritual that was embraced in the 19th century by British Raj officials, who brought with them the fashionable pursuits of golf and skiing.

Gulmarg has long been a favourite with honeymooning Indians. In summer, they flock to ride horses, hike mountain trails and play 18 holes on the world's highest natural golf course. In winter, there are sleigh rides and ice-skating at night beneath a canopy of stars. But this winter, international skiers and boarders have been trickling into Gulmarg, inspired by news of the gondola's opening and rumours of dry powder that never ices over and mountain terrain as spectacular and expansive as the Back Bowls of Vail.

"My group has skied off peaks in Russia, Norway, Lebanon and Sicily," says John Faulkner, an Australian guide based in Verbier, France, who is accompanying 17 skiers from Britain, France and Italy. "And they're coming off the mountain here saying they've had possibly the best runs of their life."

KASHMIR SET FOR TOURISM REVIVAL
IT was the retreat of the British in 1947 that shattered Kashmir's famous tranquillity. Rather than expend their human capital in the north, the British had installed a Hindu maharaja in 1846 to govern the collection of remote and disparate communities that made up Jammu and Kashmir.
Partition created the Muslim majority state of Pakistan, but the question of Jammu and Kashmir (also a Muslim majority state) was left to the incumbent maharaja. While he dallied over allegiances, a mass of Pathan tribesmen from northwest Pakistan began making raids over the border. The ensuing conflict left India with a two-thirds stake in Kashmir and forced the creation of a ceasefire line, the Line of Control.
Hostilities erupted again in 1965 and 1971, and although adventurous hippies poured through Kashmir in the intervening years, by 1989 the streets of the capital, Srinagar, were burning again. That conflict simmered for nearly 15 years, claiming about 80,000 lives. At the height of tensions in 1999, both sides made presentations of nuclear bravado.
A dialogue between India and Pakistan began in 2004. Its continuation and significant confidence-building gestures, such as the introduction last year of a bus service linking the two capitals of Kashmir, Srinagar and Muzaffarabad, has greatly encouraged the return of tourists.
Katie Hamann

Rarely have foreigners been the target of terrorist activities in Kashmir – with one grisly exception. In 1995, six trekkers were snatched from a trail by guerillas. One American man was fortunate to escape his captors and a brutal death; the remains of his Norwegian companion were later found. He had been decapitated. The bodies of the other four have never been discovered.

Speak to any of the professionals who gather at the altar of Mount Apharwat and you soon learn that the most immediate threat to skiers comes not from war or terrorism but from avalanches. Several of them have witnessed enormous falls of ice and snow roaring down the mountain, some with slide paths of up to 4km.

For the past two years, Ido Neiger, an Israeli-Canadian, has spearheaded Mission Gulmarg, a project assisting locals in promoting the skiing potential of the region. He returned this season, his fourth, with 850kg of second-hand equipment (donated by the Whistler Mountain Authority) and 16 international volunteers, including a couple from Mount Hotham in Victoria who are spending the season training the Gulmarg mountain rescue team.

When Neiger arrived for the first time six years ago with a friend from Scotland, the pair were the only tourists on the mountain. They ended up staying the season.

"The attendants from the gondola used to come to our room to wake us, to see if we wanted to go up that day ... otherwise they could go home," he recalls.

Mohmad Yaseen Khan has been waiting a long time for a season like this. With his childhood friend Abdul Hamid Dar, he opened the Kashmir Alpine Ski Shop in 1989, two months before the conflict turned serious and 500,000 Indian troops were deployed along the border, scattering their few brave skiing customers.

Sixteen years later, it seems the pair's entrepreneurial streak may finally be rewarded. "It has been my dream to see more foreigners here," Yaseen says. In his workshop, he seals the slashed underbelly of a snowboard using an electric iron. "Gulmarg is a piece of heaven. We don't have fighting, we don't have terrorists. You can go wherever you want, night and day."

As the sun slips behind Apharwat and into Pakistan and apres-ski activities begin at the Highland Park Hotel, it's obvious this is a message the Kashmir tourism authorities are carefully cultivating, hopeful the heavens will deliver equal bounties of snow and peace.