Summer Is for Winter: A Year Inside Spiti, the Middle Land
In 2018, my brother and I rode a motorcycle out of Kota and didn't come home for 40 days.
Most of those days were spent in Spiti. Not passing through it, not ticking it off. Actually living in it. We slept in family homes in Kibber. On the way in, we stayed in Chitkul long enough to teach at the village school. And in Mud and Kaza I sat with the village panchayats, listening to elders argue about grazing land, water turns and what the valley could and couldn't afford to lose.
I went in as an architect, staring at mud walls and flat roofs. I came out with one lesson that has shaped every trip I've led since:
In the mountains, you are always preparing.
Summer is for winter. You work hard, you stay humble, you bring in a good harvest so the cold months don't break you. Every Spitian I met lived by this. Nobody said it like a slogan. They just did it, every single day.
I'm Kanupriya: architect turned travel professional, silk-route nerd and a pahadi by choice. I live in Manali now, one mountain pass away from the valley that taught me this. And this is the story I wish someone had told me before I first rode in. Not a route. A year. Because you can't understand Spiti from a map. You have to understand its calendar.
The Middle Land: A Valley With Two Doors
Spiti is often read as "the middle land", and once you've stood there it makes complete sense. Tibet lies to the east, Ladakh to the north, Lahaul to the west and Kinnaur to the south. Spiti sits right in the middle, borrowing from everyone and belonging completely to itself.
Here's what took me years to really grasp. Spiti has two doors, and the seasons decide which one is open.
The Kinnaur door, the road climbing along the Sutlej from Shimla past Sangla, Khab and Nako, stays open for most of the year. In winter it is the valley's lifeline.
The Lahaul door, over Kunzum La from Manali, opens only once the snow lets go, usually around June. It slams shut again with the first heavy autumn snow.
So Spiti spends half its year looking south towards Kinnaur and the other half looking both ways. That one fact shapes everything: what people grow, what they store, who they trade with and even how a traveller like you gets in.
And the faith runs along the same roads as the trade. Kinnaur blends Hindu temples with Buddhist gompas, and its village deities sit comfortably next to prayer wheels. Lahaul does the same at Trilokinath, where one shrine is worshipped by Hindus and Buddhists alike. Spiti in the middle stayed the most Buddhist of the three, and the reason is a man and a monastery.
Did you know? Tabo Monastery was founded in 996 AD under the kings of Guge in western Tibet, in the era of the great translator Rinchen Zangpo. Its murals have survived more than a thousand winters in a mud building. As an architect, that one still gives me goosebumps. People call it the Ajanta of the Himalayas.
Now let me walk you through the year.
Spring (April–May): The Thaw
Spring in Spiti isn't flowers. It's water.
The snow on the high slopes starts melting and the whole valley wakes up around one question: whose fields get water, and when? In April, families plough with yaks and dzos (or tractors now, in the bigger villages) and scatter seed by hand. The seed itself was stored carefully through the winter, because that seed is next year's food.
Then comes the clever part.
Did you know? Many Spitian villages share irrigation water through a turn system called chu-rey, often managed by women the village appoints, so that every household gets its fair share. No meters, no bills, just a village agreeing to be fair because there isn't enough water to be anything else.
This is where I first understood what those Mud panchayat meetings were really about. In a cold desert, conservation isn't a buzzword. It decides whether your neighbour eats.
Meanwhile the Kinnaur door is open, but Kunzum is still buried. Spiti is busy, quiet and almost entirely by itself.
Summer (June–August): Summer Is for Winter
This is when you probably picture Spiti: blue skies, green pea fields against brown mountains, prayer flags snapping in the wind. Tourists arrive and the cafés in Kaza come alive.
But look closer and every Spitian is doing one thing: getting ready for winter.
The fields. Traditionally Spiti grew barley and black peas to feed the family. Over the last few decades, green peas have quietly become the valley's cash crop. They're grown without chemical pesticides, fed with animal and human manure, and they fetch good prices in Delhi. The lower villages harvest peas by June and the higher ones by August. Barley and black peas, still grown for home, come in later.
The doors swing open. Kunzum La clears, and suddenly Spiti and Lahaul are neighbours again. Shepherds drive their flocks up to the high meadows around Chandratal, the way they have for generations. When I take summer guests over Kunzum and down to that lake, I always tell them: you're on a road that didn't exist for half of this year.
The old trade fair. Here's the bit that turns my silk-route heart into confetti.
Did you know? Long before Spiti was a "destination", a trade fair called Ladarcha (locally Jhingdui, a festive gathering of traders) was held every July on a ground near Chicham. Changpa nomads came over the Parang La from Ladakh with sheep, wool and pashmina. Khampa traders brought salt and grain from Tibet. The Pin valley brought its prized horses, and merchants from the lower hills brought sugar, cloth and oil. Spitians traded their barley and horses for all of it.
Think about that next time you walk across the Chicham bridge. You're standing over one of the old crossroads of the trans-Himalayan trade. Kibber, just across the gorge, was the last Spitian village on the route to Ladakh and Tibet. The trail climbed over the Parang La at 5,578 metres and dropped towards the Indus.
So even in summer, the busiest and most open season, everyone is thinking about December. The harvest, the trading, the money from peas and now from guests: all of it is about filling the house before the cold comes.
Autumn (September–November): Filling the House
Autumn is my favourite season to just watch Spiti, because you can see the preparation happen in front of you.
Barley comes in and gets threshed. Fodder, firewood and dried dung are hauled up and stacked along the edges of the flat roofs. If you've ever wondered why every Spitian house looks like it wears a crown of sticks, now you know. The architect in me loves it: the roof is a pantry, a store and an extra layer of insulation all at once. You can almost read how ready a family is for winter from its roofline.
The thick mud walls, small windows and flat roofs aren't a style choice either. Very little rain falls in a cold desert, so the roof doesn't need to slope. Mud holds the day's warmth into the night. Every design decision here is a survival decision, and none of it was drawn by an architect. It was drawn by winter.
And in the old days, autumn meant going south. Through the Kinnaur door, traders from Spiti, Kinnaur, Lahaul and Tibet headed down the Sutlej to Rampur Bushahr for the Lavi fair every November.
Did you know? The Lavi fair traces back to a trade treaty signed between the Raja of Bushahr and Tibet around 1679–84. Wool, pashmina, dry fruit and the hardy little Chamurthi horses (the mountain breed Spiti and its neighbours are known for) went down the valley, and salt, jaggery and rations came back up. The fair still happens every November in Rampur.
That's the Kinnaur relationship in one picture. Kinnaur wasn't just the road out. It was the market, the in-laws, the neighbour you traded with before the snow closed in. Lahaul was the summer friend over the pass. Kinnaur was the friend for all seasons.
Then the snow arrives on Kunzum, the Lahaul door closes, and Spiti turns inward.
Winter (December–March): The Season of Kitchens
This is the Spiti that changed me.
At −20°C, a Spitian home shrinks to one warm room: the kitchen. The bukhari (stove) burns the dung and wood you watched being stacked in autumn. Animals often shelter on the ground floor, and their warmth rises into the house. Butter tea is always on, there's barley flour (tsampa) in every form, and steaming bowls of thukpa come out of the stores that summer filled.
I spent evenings like this in Kibber in 2018, legs under a blanket, being handed cup after cup of butter tea by a family who had very little to spare and gave it anyway. That's where "stay humble" stopped being an idea for me and became something I'd watched people do.
Winter is also when Spiti celebrates, because the fields don't need you.
Did you know? Dechang, a winter festival in Kibber, translates roughly to fire offering. The village gathers around a bonfire with songs, dances and archery, and barley brew is offered to the earth for a good year ahead. It's about purifying the village and passing stories from one generation to the next. Its date follows the village's own calendar, so you only get it if winter lets you.
And winter is when the valley's most famous resident comes closer. As snow pushes the blue sheep down the slopes, the snow leopard follows. Around Kibber, local trackers who grew up on these cliffs read the mountain for signs. Some of them used to see the cat as a threat to their livestock. Today they're among its best protectors.
The only way in during these months is the Kinnaur door, along the Sutlej. It's slow, cold and absolutely worth it.
From Traders' Crossroads to Tourism Hub, and Still Humble
So how did a valley of barley farmers and horse traders become one of India's most searched-for road trips?
The old trade stopped first. After 1962, the Tibetan traders could no longer cross, and the Ladarcha fair at Chicham came to an abrupt end. Spiti spent the next three decades behind permits, quiet and hard to reach.
Then, slowly, the doors reopened in a new way. Permits eased in 1993. Roads improved on both sides. Ladarcha was revived as a state fair in the 1980s, but now in Kaza, every August, with stalls instead of salt caravans. Green peas brought in cash. Homestays turned the extra rooms of family homes into income. And in 2025, Spiti's cold desert landscape (Pin Valley, Kibber, Chandratal and beyond) was recognised by UNESCO as India's first Cold Desert Biosphere Reserve.
Here's what I find remarkable. Spiti traded salt for tourists and horses for homestays, and it still lives by the same calendar. The pea money and the guesthouse money are still mostly about one thing: being ready for winter. The panchayat meetings I sat in were still about water, grazing and how much the land can take. The valley got busier. It didn't get loud.
That's the Spiti I want you to meet: not the selfie at Chicham bridge (fine, take one) but the family behind the bridge, getting ready for a season you'll never see unless you come back for it.
So, Which Spiti Do You Want to Meet?
I run Spiti in two seasons, because the valley is really two different places:
Winter Spiti, through the Kinnaur door: Sangla, Nako, Tabo, Kaza, Kibber, winter kitchens, snow leopard tracking with local trackers and, if the village calendar is kind, Dechang. Woman-led, in heated stays, in Jimny 4x4s.
Summer Spiti, over the Lahaul door: Kunzum La, the high villages in their busiest, greenest season, and a night by Chandratal where the shepherds go.
Same valley, same people, two completely different chapters of the same year.
If any part of this story tugged at you, the full day-by-day plans are on Curated Experiences. Or just write to me. I'll tell you which season I think you're ready for.
See you in the middle land. — Kanupriya
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