In March 1959, a young man crossed some of the highest mountain passes on Earth on foot, fleeing an army he had no way of fighting, and was eventually given shelter in a half-forgotten former British hill station in northern India. He's still there. This episode uses that story — the Dalai Lama's arrival in Dharamshala, and the Tibetan government-in-exile it produced — as one entry point into Himachal Pradesh, a state built almost entirely out of vertical terrain. We cover the Anglo-Gorkha War and the patchwork of princely hill kingdoms that came before it, the 1905 Kangra earthquake that killed over 20,000 people, Shimla's decades as the summer capital of the British Raj, and Dr. Y.S. Parmar's three-decade campaign for the 1971 statehood that finally united it all. We bring things up to the present with the catastrophic 2023 monsoon floods and what the government's own disaster report actually blamed them on, the state's ongoing fight with Delhi over apple import duties, dham feasts, Kangra tea, home-fermented rice beer, the Guinness World Record-holding Nati folk dance, and notable Himachalis from democracy pioneer Shyam Saran Negi to WWE's seven-foot-tall The Great Khali. Presented factually, including on the parts of this history that different governments still describe very differently.