Overview
The town of Drass, 60 km west of Kargil on the road to Srinagar, is located at an altitude of 3,300 m in a relatively flat and open space in the centre of a valley. It has extensive willow groves along the river. In winter it is covered with a thick blanket of snow. Drass experiences the lowest temperatures in the Ladakh valley and is said to be the second coldest inhabited place in Asia. The mercury may drop to as low as 40 degrees Celsius below freezing point, and communication with the outside world is often completely cut off. During the spring and summer, however, the valley around the township becomes very picturesque as the gently undulating hillsides turn into lush green pastures splashed with a variety of fragrant wild flowers.

Its inhabitants are mainly of the Darad stock, an Aryan race believed to have originally migrated to the high valleys of the Western Himalayas from the Central Asian steppes. They speak Shina, which, unlike the Tibetan-originated Ladakhi dialects spoken elsewhere in Ladakh region, belongs to the Indo-European linguistic family. Their ancestral sport, `horse-polo' which the Darads play with particular zeal, resembles our modern polo.

The Drass valley starts from the base of the Zoji La pass, the Himalayan gateway to Ladakh. For centuries its inhabitants are known to have negotiated this formidable pass, to transport trader's merchandise across and to help stranded travellers to traverse it, even during the most risky period in the late autumn or early spring, when the whole sector remains snow-bound and is subject to frequent snow storms. By virtue of their mastery over the pass they had established a monopoly on transportation for trading, during the heydays of the Pan-Asian trade. A hardy people, with the fortitude to tolerate the harshness of the valley's winter, the inhabitants of Drass can well be described as the guardians of Ladakh's gateway.