About Us
We are a ski and snowboard school based in Gulmarg, run by people who were born within sight of the mountain they guide on.
Every instructor and guide here comes from Gulmarg or Tangmarg. Not one of us arrived for a season and stayed. We learned to ski on this snow as children, worked our way up through the industry here, and now teach and guide on Mt. Apharwat, which rises to 4,200 metres above the village.
How it started
Gulmarg Ski Guides was founded in 2013 by Shafat Ahmad Tantray.
Shafat grew up in Babareshi, a village below Gulmarg that gets much the same snowfall. He was four or five when he first stood on skis, and they were wooden ones his father had made by hand. There was no ski school for a boy from Babareshi at the time, so he did what most local skiers did and started working as a porter. Instruction jobs were scarce, formal training was hard to reach, and the connections that opened doors in the industry were not available to people from the villages.
He learned anyway. His first professional instruction came from John Hiron, who taught him the advanced technique he had no way of picking up on his own. He completed AIARE Level 1 and Level 2 avalanche safety training, then repeated the training with Avalanche Canada, and has kept it current through the Kashmir Avalanche Association.
In the 2010 and 2011 season he was booked directly by a group of Australian and Irish skiers, several of them with more than thirty years of skiing and backcountry experience behind them. That trip is where the guiding career properly began. He now guides somewhere between 100 and 150 people through Gulmarg's backcountry every season.
The school was built on a fairly plain idea: bring proper instruction, real mountain safety and international guiding standards to Gulmarg, and make it possible for local skiers to build a career out of the sport instead of carrying other people's gear.
What grew from it
The first few seasons. More international visitors meant we needed more instructors. We hired for patience and local knowledge as much as for skiing ability, because plenty of excellent skiers make poor teachers and the difference shows on day one of a beginner's course.
2016 to 2019. Our senior guides completed internationally recognised avalanche training through Avalanche Canada, alongside ongoing education with the Kashmir Avalanche Association. Avalanche safety stopped being something a couple of people on the team knew about and became the base requirement for guiding here.
Today. A professional ski and snowboard school running since 2013, with more than fifteen instructors. Guests from over forty countries. Thousands of lessons taught, hundreds of guests guided each winter, and 30 to 50 people a season introduced to proper backcountry skiing, most of them Indians discovering that world class terrain sits inside their own country.
Our training
Every instructor on the team is chosen for professionalism, patience and knowledge of this specific mountain. Senior guides hold training from:
- AIARE avalanche safety
- Avalanche Canada
- Kashmir Avalanche Association
- Wilderness mountain safety training
Every backcountry trip goes out with professional avalanche safety equipment. That means an avalanche beacon, probe and shovel for each person, and an avalanche backpack where the terrain calls for it.
None of that is decoration. Gulmarg's off piste is avalanche country with limited patrol infrastructure, and the snowpack changes through the season. Reading it correctly is the job.
How we teach
People learn at different speeds and pushing them past that pace does not work. It just produces skiers with bad habits and a bad memory of the week.
So we do it this way:
- Safety comes before speed, always.
- Beginners stay on terrain that suits them until they are genuinely ready, not until the schedule says they should be.
- Instructor to student ratios stay small, and most of our courses are one to one.
- Every lesson gets shaped around the person in front of the instructor.
- Backcountry trips are led by experienced local guides with avalanche training, without exception.
- We do not trade safety for a summit photo or a clip worth posting.
That last one matters more than it sounds. There is real commercial pressure in this industry to deliver the dramatic day, and turning a group around when conditions are wrong costs money. We turn them around.
The people
You can read the full profiles on our guides page, but the short version is this. Some of our instructors have been teaching for close to thirty years and have put well over a hundred beginners a season on skis. Some are known around the village by nickname rather than surname. One is requested by name so often by nervous first timers that it has become his speciality. Another works so naturally with children that the team calls him the child specialist.
Between them they cover first lessons, family groups, technical coaching, freeride and backcountry guiding.
Why it matters that we are local
A guide who has skied one mountain for twenty five years knows things that cannot be transferred in a training course. Which aspect holds snow three days after a storm. Which slope loads badly in a particular wind. Where the flat sections are that ruin a snowboarder's afternoon. When the light is going to go and the sensible move is down.
That knowledge is the actual product here. The lift passes, the transport and the hotel are logistics we handle so you do not have to.
What we run
Everything we offer sits in one of three groups, on skis or on a board. Trips run from three days up to a fortnight, and all of them cover airport transfers, hotel, equipment, lift passes and daily transport to the slopes.
Beginner courses, 3 to 10 days. Private one to one instruction on the gentle slopes in Gulmarg itself, at around 2650m. Three days tells you whether the sport is for you. Seven days is where it starts to click and most guests finish on blue runs. Ten days aims at leaving here an intermediate rather than a beginner who had a good week. Nobody is put in a group class with strangers.
Freeride packages, 5 to 10 days. Lift accessed off piste using Phase 1 and Phase 2 of the Gondola, for skiers and riders already confident on piste. There is no fixed itinerary. Your guide reads the snowpack each morning and picks terrain to match, which is the only sensible way to run a week in avalanche country. Beacon, shovel, probe and backpack come with the trip.
Backcountry touring, 7 or 14 days. Skins on, Gondola behind you, into Babareshi, Drung and Tosamaidan with vehicle transport, a snow science kit and walkie talkies. Longer days and fewer descents than a lift trip, on snow almost nobody else is riding. You need existing touring experience for these.
Snowboarders get the same three tiers, with splitboards on the touring trips. Full details for every package sit on the skiing and snowboarding pages.
Skiing with us
Whether it is your first morning in ski boots or you are looking for untracked snow high on Apharwat, the aim does not change. We want you leaving Gulmarg a better skier than you arrived, still in one piece, with the sort of week you tell people about.
That, and Kashmiri hospitality, which you will get whether you ask for it or not.
