“Some roads are built.

Some are borrowed.

And some like the Chadar are permitted for a short season, under strict conditions: humility, patience, and the good sense to turn back.”

 

The Vow After the Finish Line

The finish line of the Ladakh Marathon in 2014 wasn’t tape or triumph. It was breath thin, bright, disbelieving and then the dull ache of everything catching up: lungs, legs, memory. After hours of counting steps, I stood somewhere between exhaustion and euphoria and heard a different kind of race called out in quiet conversations around me.

“Have you done the Chadar?”

“Next January.”

“Not for the faint-hearted.”

“You walk on the Zanskar itself.”

The words hung in that alpine air like a dare and a blessing. I’d seen the Zanskar before, all summer muscle and silt, storming out of a canyon to meet the Indus at Nimmu two rivers folding into each other with theatrical authority. But to walk the Zanskar? To step onto its spine when winter pinned it down into glass?

I told myself, almost without knowing I’d said it: I’ll come back. January. I’ll come back for the river when it pretends to be a road.

The vow was simple, almost naive. A promise made on spent legs and borrowed breath. But that’s how most pilgrimages begin an overheard rumor, a stubborn yes, and a date with a piece of land that does not care for your plans.

 

Leh in January: Where Cold Is a Language

I returned as promised. January 2015. Leh wore winter like a principle: roofs soft with snow, alleys narrowed by ice, windows confessing breath ghosts at dawn. The air bit not just the nose and fingers but the idea of hurry itself; nothing moved quickly without consequence. Woolen caps carried conversations; the sun looked thin but focused; the moon at night had a sound to it frost crackling, dogs rearranging themselves into tighter shapes, prayer flags rattling the valley awake.

Acclimatization was not a suggestion. It was the curriculum. Two days walking slow through bazaar lanes where apples were wrapped like secrets, where the man at the stove flicked dough into the air and landed it as bread with the confidence of a minor god. Two more days walking up to Shanti Stupa and down again, counting the stairs in the rhythm of survival: in for four, out for six; don’t be brave, be wise.

Permits came stamped after the usual Ladakhi bureaucracy respectful, unhurried. Chilling to Zangla and back. Twenty-one days, give or take, to allow for weather, broken ice, bodies that vote against ambition. The outfitter, a man whose face had been carefully edited by the wind, told me what he tells everyone: “Carry less than you think. Pay more than you planned. Walk like the river is watching.”

We gathered our small caravan: a guide who could read ice by tone, not color; four porters from Nyerak with hands that put tents up quietly; a cook whose soup and tea would add years to my life; and me, a stubborn pilgrim with caution taped over old bravado. The river would decide what we were.

Kit check: down jacket, base layers, wool, wool, wool; gumboots that reached the knee (crampons, I was warned, are arrogance here gumboots and technique are the local law); liner gloves inside mitts; a balaclava that made me look like regret; two walking sticks I would learn to use as extensions of sense; a sleeping bag rated for cold I hoped not to meet; dry sacks; a notebook; respect.

 

The Road to the Edge: Leh to Chilling

The drive from Leh to Chilling would have been a pilgrimage by itself if the day hadn’t been so busy rehearsing fate. Past Magnetic Hill and the confluence where Indus and Zanskar hold their annual arguments, past villages that had retreated into smoke and shawls, we traced the Zanskar’s winter course black water where the current refused to kneel, white shelves where the cold had persuaded surface into certainty.

At Tilat Do, where slope meets river and logic stops being helpful, the road said: leave me; learn a new grammar. We unloaded silence, rope, sacks of food, kerosene, blue tarps that had seen too much wind, and fears with various stage names. The porters smiled in that Ladakhi way that is support and skepticism at once.

The river, meanwhile, looked the other way. It was busy inventing itself.

“Gumboots,” Dorje, our lead, said with a nod. “Strap the pride somewhere safe.”

I stepped down onto ice that didn’t crack. It sang a long, low, glassy hum from somewhere deep, as if the river were an old instrument being tuned under our weight. I froze, and the ice did not. It held like a promise that came with footnotes.

“The first step on the Chadar is not a step. It is an agreement.”

 

Learning to Walk on a Verb

You don’t stride on the Chadar. You slide. You place your foot flat, weight distributed as politely as possible, toe turned outward slightly, heel shy, the rubber of the gumboot conferring with friction. You lean into your sticks not like crutches but as interrogators ask, then go. The ice offers answers in small dialects: brittle, singing, glassy, grainy, “kachcha”(young, untrustworthy), “pakka” (well-set, reliable-ish). You learn to hear them.

By noon, walking felt less like a circus act and more like choreography. The river threw lessons: a patch that looked matte and held like tempered glass; a patch that gleamed like invitation and shattered into slush; a side shelf where ice overlapped in layers (a stack of winter’s drafts), safer than center; a bend where the current had gnawed at the underbelly so gently that the top looked perfect and the bottom wrote you into a different story. Dorje would listen, tap, nod, choose, and we would follow single file, sticks down, breath short, mouths shut.

Our first camp was a river cave where someone had taught boulders to behave like walls. Blue tarp for a roof, rolled mat for the floor, and fire fire as center. The cook boiled water as if this was the true reason humans had learned to stand upright. Thukpa unfurled the body’s gratitude; salty butter tea rewired my city-trained tongue and warmed my second thoughts into submission.

Night on the Chadar introduced itself with ceremony. Temperature fell like fact; sound simplified: river breathing under glass, wood settling into decisions, the occasional crack-shot of ice adjusting its architecture after a day of negotiations. I lay in the sleeping bag, then in it inside a liner, then that inside a thought of warmth, and listened to the bedrock of the valley speak in grammar older than silence.

 

Ethics at the Edge (A First Interlude)

It’s easy to talk about the Chadar like an adventure. Harder to remember that for Zanskaris, the winter river is not a dare. It is a road to school, hospitals, markets when the regular roads surrender to snow. We were visitors on a working highway made of ice.

Our choices mattered more than our heroics. We carried kerosene and resisted “just a little more wood,” because shrub and willow along the river do not quickly forgive shortcuts. We packed out everything, including the kinds of things you’d rather not carry. We paid porters fair wages, argued to pay more when a storm added days, and checked their gear the way we checked ours. No tourist story is worth a frostbitten hand.

We kept our cameras away from people who did not ask to be kept, and from moments the river would prefer we keep in the heart. We listened. We ate last. We learned where not to step, what not to show, when not to push.

The Chadar would teach us risk. But first it taught us ethics who this road really belongs to.

 

Day 3–5: The River’s Curriculum (Tilat Do to Tibb Cave)

Days became study, not conquest. We moved when the sun’s pewter edge began to soften the cold, we stopped when shadows grew teeth. Camps were caves or rock amphitheaters that cupped the smoke harmlessly toward the sky. We shared space with other caravans Zanskari families heading toward Leh with lists written in memory, one or two trekking teams learning their manners the hard way, sometimes a dog who had committed to following us as if we had asked.

At Shingra Koma, the ice thinned into question marks; Dorje led us to a bypass hugging a cliff where the worn path climbed into dry cold, boots gripping dust instead of glass. There are places where the Chadar refuses to be road and insists on being river. We let it.

By Tibb Cave, we were believers. The cave is a cathedral of necessity black walls soothed by centuries of smoke, soot that knows stories I will never deserve, drips turned to chandeliers when the frost makes art for itself. Porters taught us how to make tsampa barley flour kneaded with butter tea into a brown fist of energy you can eat with your pride tucked away. Someone produced a flute and wove wind into it. The river answered with a low string section under the ice.

I slept that night with my socks tucked under my shirt so they would not wake up as boards. I tucked a pebble into my pocket a pointless talisman and woke to it warmed by belly, as if it had been entrusted with a small ministry.

 

Nerak: The Blue Frozen Fall and the Humbling

The Nerak waterfall is less a thing and more a spell. It falls while frozen blue, glass, long stilled and still moving, because winter in Zanskar never quite fully chooses. The approach was a masterclass in humility. Ice formed jharokhas of filigree along the canyon, stone rising in rude slabs on one side, sky poured into ribbon on the other. When the waterfall first appeared half behind a bend, half behind itself I stopped in that old human way of worship: mouth open, spine forgetful.

We paid it the due of quiet. Even the cameras learned to whisper.

The river here narrowed into opinions. The Chadar grew different textures within a few meters: a young “kachcha” crust with grief underneath, a middle-aged plate that rang like confidence when tapped, a veteran sheet with a milk-glass surface and the bone sound of pakka. I stepped where Dorje pointed. I learned that trust on the Chadar is not trust in myself; it is trust in the river’s interpreter.

We stayed a day. No rush when so much needed learning. Children from Nerak brought gossip and snowballs. A grandmother came with a memory of a bad year when the ice didn’t set and they had to climb days over cliffs. We gave them biscuits and the kind of attention you give to stories that are endowments.

That night, a wind came down the canyon that had philosophy in it. It explained choice and consequence in a language I can almost speak now. I listened, then slept.

 

The Break (Risk Arrives, Ethics Answers)

On the way out of Nerak, the river changed its page. The section looked normal white-lipped, glass-eyed, a textbook curve. Dorje tapped his stick: low, hollow, a different instrument. He frowned and went first, weight distributed to kindness. Two steps, then a crack a bright note, then a deeper one. He retreated, offer palms open. “Back,” he said softly.

We stepped back. The ice broke where no foot stood like a thought collapsing under scrutiny. Black water shrugged through the wound, curious and indifferent.

“No,” he said. And then the most important word on this trail: “Wait.”

Waiting is a skill city life teaches you to despise. The Chadar makes it your best friend. We retreated to a stone shelf, unrolled time, made tea, tried not to comment on hunger. The porters conferred with the river; they see the way its mind moves. We tried a bypass that established a conversation with rock a steep ribbon of sand that pretended to be staircase, frozen mud that rehearsed betrayal. Rope came out; hands became architecture. Pride left the room.

A larger trekking group arrived behind us with the gallop of schedules. Their guide wanted to try something the river had not suggested. Dorje shook his head very slowly. The group waited too reluctantly, then humbly, then grateful.

Hours later, the Chadar had spoken to itself and decided. The break had shifted downstream, a ledge had thickened, and the words “safe enough” had meaning again. We crossed, single file, eyes where feet were, mouths half-prayer, half-instruction.

On the far side, Dorje smiled a small, private smile. “When river says ‘no,’” he said, “we say ‘tomorrow.’”

“Retreat is not surrender on the Chadar. It is etiquette.”

 

Into Zangla: The Long Quiet

Beyond Nerak, caravans thin. The canyon widens in places, then squeezes into throat again, then opens into bowls where the sky feels close enough for conversation. We met fewer trekkers, more locals: a man pulling a sledge with a sack of rice as if a lifetime depended on it (it did), a boy carrying a bundle of mail in a plastic sack like a secret (it was), a group of women walking with that particular Ladakhi patience which is more speed than anyone else knows.

At a wide place where the wind had leisure, we found a chadar that had learned to stack in steps a staircase of winter. We climbed and descended its smooth faces like diplomats.

We camped in caves and under overhangs, where soot had painted the ceiling with archive. Our cook, whose name I will always associate with garlic soup, made miracles: dal that tasted like sunlight, roti that had memorized our gratitude, sattu pressed into laddoos that stored warmth like contraband. We ate last, after the porters, not because we were noble but because learning manners is easier when you’re hungry.

At Zangla, the river conceded the presence of a kingdom quiet, wintered, with a palace that rose out of land like a carefully folded memory. We rested three days: a luxury that looked like necessity. The Zanskaris hosted us in a room full of sun and smoke. We learned a few words more. We learned to keep our gloves on even when politeness asked us to take them off. We learned that laughter arrives faster than heat.

A monk showed us a room of old manuscripts script on birch, edges like frost’s older cousin. He did not dramatize it. He said, “We keep,” and I understood devotion without the performance.

I bought nothing, because there was nothing to buy. I left stories, and they left me one: “The year of little ice, we walked above everything for days, and we learned that a human can still be small in other ways.”

 

The Middle Weeks: Routine Becomes Ritual

Twenty-one days is time enough for stubbornness to become respect. We learned the morning’s grammar: thaw your boots by the fire’s shadow, not its mouth; shake your sleeping bag like a good sentence; roll your mat as if it needs to fit into a smaller world (it does); never leave without melting enough water; check your toes as if they were children; check your pride as if it were a loaded sled.

We learned the walking’s liturgy: lead with attention; let the river choose the verbs; accept when a bypass becomes a classroom; thank the man who holds the rope; thank the woman who saw the ledge before you did; tap the ice with your stick as if asking “May I?” and hear the permission in the sound.

We learned to dry socks without burning them, to breathe through a balaclava that turned frost into lace, to distinguish the river’s moods in increments: content, negligent, awake, cranky. We learned that silence is not empty in canyons; it is complicated.

We learned to make latrine arrangements in snow with more engineering than most governments give to bridges. We learned to carry out what we brought, even when it felt like the bag of our own failures.

We learned to sleep on one side when the ground insisted, to share a joke that worked only in January at minus twenty, to keep hands moving even when conversation stopped. We learned each other’s breathing patterns; we learned to worry softly when someone went quiet.

One night, I dreamed of city rain warm, rude, uncomplicated and woke guilty, then grateful the river had not heard.

 

Risk (A Second Interlude)

Risk on the Chadar is not cinematic. It is mundane, the way a kettle is mundane until you need tea. Hypothermia doesn’t announce itself with drama; it sends a polite memo shivering that turns to stillness, fingers that argue with zippers, a mind that gets bored of math. Frostnip whispers; frostbite negotiates; both can ruin the kind of stories you were hoping to tell.

Falling through is rare if you respect what the day whispers, but it happens. That’s why you never walk in the center, why you carry a change of layers in a dry bag, why you know where the nearest fire will be, why you do not ask the river for a performance. Evacuation here is not a call and a helicopter. It is a team and a sledge and ten hours and a village that stops what it was doing.

Altitude is a quiet thief. Even though the Chadar sits lower than high passes, you still live above 3,000 meters. The oxygen account feels flush until you write a big check climbing a bypass, running to a photo, laughing too much at midnight and the debtor arrives.

Our ethics around risk were simple: the guide decides; the slowest member sets the pace; there is no shame in retreat; the schedule is literature, not law; we pay more if the days grow, and we never ask someone else to take our risk for our story.

 

The Day Retreat Became a Verb

On the return leg somewhere between Nerak and Tibb weather changed its handwriting. Men with radios at the caves had heard upstream gossip: a collapse at a narrow bend, a new lead of black water, ice sulking in chunks the size of furniture. We went forward anyway, because learning when to try is as holy as learning when to stop.

A canyon tightened and the river with it. We reached the bend. The Chadar lay there grinning in shards. Plates bobbed like arguments. The opposite shelf looked close enough for a good throw; it was a day’s work away on cliffs that loved gravity more than us.

We backed up. We waited. We brewed tea as if tea were an answer. Another caravan arrived. Then another. A child carrying a sledge sat down and began reframing his idea of later. Dorje and the other guides walked the walls with eyes left, right testing stories for truth.

“Up and around,” someone proposed. “Fifteen meters. Rope. Slow.” The kind of fifteen that brings you home and the kind that breaks you look similar from here. We tried the start: loose sand frozen with opinions, a thin slick of ice peeking like treachery, a handhold that had a sense of humor.

We returned to the river’s ear and waited some more. Refused the seduction of nearly. While we waited, the sky told a joke snow beginning like doubt, then thickening into emphasis. The world simplified into white and breath.

By dusk, we had decided to sleep where we were. We set a tarp under an overhang, built a fire so small it qualified as metaphor, ate just enough to remember why we were alive, and told each other the kind of stories that make waiting feel like work.

Morning unveiled the river in a different mood. The night’s cold had stiffened the debating plates into a thin bridge of “pakka” we could use, one by one, with humility. We crossed, learning again that retreat is sometimes a necessary prologue; it makes the next day possible.

Dorje pressed my shoulder twice when we reached the cave. “Good,” he said, and in the one word was a dictionary: patience, prudence, partnership, the refusal to mistake stubbornness for courage.

 

The Long Walk Back: Lessons Packed in Layers

Once a trail becomes familiar, it becomes more dangerous. There were places I recognized and loved, which is another way of saying places that would not hesitate to punish assumptions. I slowed more on the way back than on the way out. My steps were smaller, my pauses longer, my gratitude thicker.

At Tibb the cave breathed us in like a welcome; at Shingra the wind remembered our names; at Tilat Do the road appeared not as triumph but as translation. Our cook served a final soup in Leh that tasted of relief and conclusion. The porters collected wages and handshakes and a little extra pressed like apology into palm. Dorje and I made the awkward promises men make when feeling exceeds language: “Again.” “Yes.” “When?” “When it is time.”

 

Debrief in Leh: Ethics, Rewritten

Back in town, with cheeks learning again what indoor air feels like, I wrote a list that wasn’t gear:

• Pay fair, early, and extra when days grow. Money does not match what porters give, but it acknowledges it.
• Kerosene before wood. Driftwood sometimes is not drift; shrubs are slow to return. Fire is a loan; repay it.
• Ask before you photograph. A face is not decor. A prayer wheel is not B-roll.
• Carry out what you carry in. All of it. Yes, that too.
• Gear checks for staff are your business. We borrowed their labor; don’t make them borrow frostbite.
• When guides say wait, wait. They are the river’s grammar. You are learning the alphabet.
• Keep the Chadar a road, not an amusement. Remember who uses it when winter is savage and there is a fever in a far village, or a delivery needed that cannot wait for spring.

I also wrote a selfish line: The man who turns back today keeps the river tomorrow.

 

Why I’ll Always Call It “Borrowed”

We like to think we “do” the Chadar. The grammar is wrong. The Chadar does us. It recalibrates your stride, your ambition, your idea of warmth, your definition of success. You become someone who measures time in stove boils and shadow angles; someone who can tell ice by tone and patience by breath; someone who understands that ethics are not an appendix to adventure they are its operating system.

When people ask me now “How was the trek?” I don’t answer with distance or days. I tell them about a morning when an old woman from Nerak taught me how to hold a cup when both of us were shaking; about a boy who said mail like it was an heirloom; about a guide who read the river’s mind with two taps of a stick; about a day when we waited and the world felt like it was still moving; about a night when the cave turned our breath into braid.

And when they ask, “Wasn’t it risky?” I say, everything meaningful is. Then I tell them how risk is a place you manage with community: with rope, with tea, with cold fingers working the buckle of a stranger’s pack; how retreat is a virtue here, not a stain; how the greatest proof of courage is sometimes the warmth of hands at the end of the day, all fingers accounted for.

 

The River in the City

Back home, winter came soft. A kettle whistled a first-world whistle. Pavement shone after a shy rain. I caught myself stepping around a puddle and, for an indecent second, considered if it would hold. I laughed, then felt the old ache that is missing. The city does not sing under your feet.

Every so often on an escalator, at a traffic light, in the bored middle of a meeting I feel my heel go gentle of its own accord, my toe angle outward, my breath count practice a liturgy no one else can hear: in four, out six. Somewhere the Zanskar adjusts a plate and there is a crack like a polite warning; somewhere a kettle near Tibb teaches water to boil; somewhere Dorje taps twice and the river says come or wait or no and people listen because they wish to grow old.

I am not in a hurry to return. I am in a hurry not to forget.

“The Chadar is a loan.

You borrow a road from a river,

borrow warmth from fire,

borrow courage from voices in the dark,

borrow time from weather,

and return everything

except the lesson.”