The middle land — high-altitude desert between Tibet and India
Spiti Valley is a high-altitude cold desert in Himachal Pradesh — a moonscape of wind-sculpted ochre and grey rock at 3,700–4,500m, dotted with ancient Tibetan Buddhist monasteries, whitewashed villages of flat-roofed adobe houses, and fossils of the ancient Tethys Sea pressed into roadside cliffs. The valley is accessible only in summer (June–October) via two mountain passes — the Rohtang La or the Kinnaur road — and the roads are frequently washed out. Kaza is the valley's main town; Kibber, Langza, Komic, and Hikkim are the cluster of high villages above it.
Spiti (meaning 'the middle land' in Tibetan) has been part of the Tibetan cultural sphere for over a millennium, and the valley's monasteries predate most Himalayan Buddhist institutions in India. The Tabo Monastery, founded in 996 CE, contains the oldest surviving murals in the western Himalayan tradition and is known as the 'Ajanta of the Himalayas.' The valley was absorbed into British India as part of the Punjab Hill States and later the Himachal Pradesh state, but its Tibetan character — language, dress, monastery governance, sky burial sites — remains essentially intact. The 1962 Indo-C…