Seven strangers, one frozen road
What a winter week in Spiti does to a group chat. Written with the people who were there.
Aanya Kapoor, 2 Mar 2026
Photo from a previous trip. Shared with consent.
Day one, nobody talked on the drive out of Shimla. By Narkanda someone had started a playlist. By Kalpa, the playlist had a name nobody will explain to outsiders.
The cold is the point
Winter Spiti is not comfortable. The water in the bottles freezes overnight, the stove needs feeding every two hours and the loo is outside. That is also why it's empty, silent and absolutely unreal. When the group lay on the Langza rooftop at minus 14 and counted satellites, nobody was checking their phone. There was no signal anyway.
What actually made it work
Dev, our trip leader, made every call about roads and weather. Aanya hosted: she ran the phone filmmaking session in Kaza and somehow got seven people to film each other without anyone feeling awkward. The homestay families did the rest, mostly by feeding us thukpa until we couldn't move.
We're sharing this with permission from everyone in it. Your group will be different people, which is sort of the whole idea.
"I came for the mountains and left with six people I now call every week."
