  This article is an attempt to review 50 years of high-energy cosmic particle
physics at the Institute for Nuclear Research of the Russian Academy of
Sciences. It is written by an outsider whose scientific career, to a large
part, was formed by collaborating with INR scientists in the late 1980s and
1990s. The review covers the fields of cosmic-ray, gamma-ray and high-energy
neutrino physics. The main focus will be on INR's large infrastructures in the
Baksan Valley and at Lake Baikal. Research at these facilities is flanked by
participation in top experiments at different places around the world, recently
the Telescope Array in the USA and the LHAASO detector in China.
