Kalpa · Sangla · Nako

Kinnaur begins where the forest gives up

A hundred kilometres past Rampur, the pine stops and the rock takes over. Our Red Delicious grows up here — three thousand feet higher than anything else we sell, and picked a full month later.

9,000–12,000 ft The orchards

Sutlej The river

Kinnauri The language

~100 km on

The road up

Everything green stops

From Rampur Bushahr it is about a hundred kilometres, following the Sutlej. Somewhere along it, the landscape changes its mind.

Upper Shimla is pine forest, gorges and river. Kinnaur is dry. Barren. Enormous formations of bare rock where the deodar used to be. There is no soft way to describe it — the mountain simply stops pretending to be hospitable.

And people have lived and farmed here anyway, for a very long time.

Red Delicious apples packed fresh in an Orchards Box for delivery

9,000–12,000 ft

Why the Red Delicious comes from here

The wind is what makes it hard

There are not many deodar left up here to break the wind. So the wind comes down the valley and hits the trees all day, every day.

The farmers in Kinnaur will tell you that is what does it. A tree that is pushed around all its life grows fruit that is dense, tight and firm — not soft.

They say if an apple falls off the tree here, you will not find a dent on it.

The altitude is the other half of it: nine to twelve thousand feet, cold nights, thin dry air. The fruit takes longer, works harder, and ends up denser.

It also means Kinnaur is a full month behind Upper Shimla. When Rohru has finished picking, Kinnaur is only starting — which is why the last fruit of our season, deep into October, comes from up here.

Upper Shimla

8,000–9,500 ft · picks from late July

Kinnaur

9,000–12,000 ft · one month later

And things that grow nowhere else we go

Chilgoza, shahi jeera and kagzi badam. None of them will grow in Rohru.

The Thepang

The cap everyone recognises

The flower on it is not a flower

The Kinnauri cap is called the Thepang. The green one is the classic — the one you will see most — and the green stands for the forests, the orchards, the prosperity and the beauty of the place.

On the front is what everyone calls the phool. It is not a flower. It is made from the dried seeds of the Arlu plant, or of Madar — aak. Seed heads, not petals.

One thing you will hear that is not true That the green and maroon caps mean different things — that one is for one kind of person and one for another. There is no such rule. People will tell you there is. There isn’t.

In Kinnaur, women wear the topi as well. In Upper Shimla they do not — there, a woman wears the dhattu on her head.

And the phool travels. Down in Rohru, our Nanu wears a Bushahri topi — with a Kinnauri phool pinned to it. The cap stays home. The flower does not.

The shawl

What is worn, and what is woven

You can recognise a Kinnauri shawl from across a room

It is the border that does it — the wide, intricate, patterned band that runs along the edge. Nothing else looks quite like it.

The weaving is still done. Not every day, but for the fairs, for the marriages, for the occasions that matter. Kinnaur holds onto its weaving more tightly than Rohru does.

Women wear the dhoru, the patti, the shawl — and silver.

Lower → Upper

Faith, and where it sits on the mountain

Nobody was asked to choose

In Kinnaur, the devtas are not a folk layer beneath the religion. In many villages they are the religion — they sit right at its heart.

Around them, two things arrived. Hinduism is deeply rooted in Lower and Middle Kinnaur, and it did not replace the devta traditions; it blended into them. Buddhism is especially strong in Upper Kinnaur, closer to the passes.

The higher you go, the more Buddhist it becomes. The faith follows the altitude.

So the villages have temples and monasteries both. And the devta is still carried out in procession, in front of all of it.

After the monsoon

Fulaich

The men climb the mountain to bring flowers back for the dead

After the monsoon, when the high alpine meadows above the villages come into flower, the men go up. Early in the morning, sometimes over several days, to gather them.

The flowers come back down in a procession.

They are offered to the village devta. And they are used to honour the people of the village who have died. It is a festival about nature, and it is a festival for the ancestors, and it is both of those things at once.

The devta is brought out and carried through the village with musicians. People wear the Kinnauri dress. There is the Kinnauri Nati, and singing, and a feast.

They walk up a mountain to bring flowers down for the dead — and then they dance.

Kinnaur keeps Raulane, Fulaich, Sazo, Losar, Ukhyang and Suskar.

12,000 ft

Hangrang Valley

And then it becomes a cold desert

Hangrang is not like the rest of Kinnaur. Nako sits up in it. There is almost nothing green.

This is the top of the climb.

The hardest place we go, and the warmest welcome.

Twelve thousand feet. Bare rock. A cold desert at the top of it, and a winter that arrives early and leaves late. And the people of Kinnaur are the most hospitable we know — mehman nawazi like nowhere else. Chilled, happy, enjoying every moment of it.

That is the other reason we buy our Red Delicious from up here.

Taste the Kinnaur harvest

← And a year in Upper Shimla, where the rest of our fruit grows

At Orchards Box, we specialize in delivering fresh, high-quality apples directly from our farms nestled in the picturesque hills of Shimla.

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Sharma Complex, Pujarli, Shimla, Himachal Pradesh

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