Lahaul, Sissu and Keylong

Until 2020 Lahaul was a summer place. The only way in was over the Rohtang, the pass shut around November, and most of the population moved down to Kullu for the winter and came back in May. That is not a historical curiosity — it is what everything here was shaped by.

The Atal Tunnel changed it completely. Nine kilometres under the ridge, open all year, and the valley went from six months of access to twelve.

What year-round actually means

It means you can stand in deep snow on a treeless valley floor at three thousand metres in January, having left a hotel in Manali after breakfast. There is nowhere else in Himachal that is true of.

It does not mean the road never closes. Heavy snowfall shuts the approaches for a day or two at a time and traffic is held at the portal until the ploughs have been through; the clearing is usually measured in days rather than weeks. Bus services stop during a snowfall while cars keep going. In a hard week you can be turned back, and anyone planning a winter run up here should have a day of slack and be willing not to use it.

Sissu as a day, Keylong as a stay

Most people do this as a day trip: through the tunnel, half an hour to Sissu, look at the waterfall and the lake, eat something, come back. That is a good day and it is genuinely the easiest high-mountain experience in the state.

Keylong is a different proposition — seventy kilometres, and worth a night rather than a turnaround. It is a working town rather than a viewpoint, and it puts the side valleys within reach: Trilokinath and Udaipur up the Chandra-Bhaga, the Bhaga valley towards Jispa, and the monasteries at Kardang and Shashur just above the town.

The temples people drive past

Trilokinath and Mrikula Devi at Udaipur are the two things in Lahaul that reward a detour, and both are easy to skip because neither looks like much from outside.

Trilokinath is a small white temple on a spur, worshipped as Shiva by Hindus and as Avalokiteshvara by Buddhists, with one marble image serving both. Mrikula Devi is a plain wooden shed from the outside and is covered inside with deep carved panels of a quality nobody expects in a building that size.

Altitude, briefly

Keylong is at roughly 3,080 metres and Sissu a little lower. That is high enough to notice if you have come straight up from Manali at 2,050, and not high enough to be a serious problem for most people on a day trip.

Where it does matter is if you are carrying on north. Jispa is 3,200, and the Baralacha and the road to Leh go a great deal higher. Sleeping at Keylong or Jispa before that is the whole reason those places are on the Leh itinerary.

Fuel and the practical bit

The pump most people know about is at Tandi, nine kilometres before Keylong, where a board announces the next fuel is 365 kilometres away at Karu. It is not quite the last one — Keylong’s own pump is further along the Leh road — but Tandi is the one every driver fills at, and on a run north you should too.

Coverage here is a single-network story rather than a no-signal one, so a SIM that works in Manali may be useless in Keylong while the car in front has three bars. Worth checking whose network you are on before you rely on it.