Skip to main content

A Trek in the Himalayas

Maggie and I on the way to Hemkund


Trekking in the Garhwal Himalayas is both fun and adventure. Thanks to the school in Delhi where I taught for a considerable period of my life, I got opportunities to climb many a peak in the Himalayas along with groups of young students. The best was the Hemkund trek.

Hemkund is a glacial lake that lies about 15,000 feet (4572 metres) above sea level in the Himalayas. It’s a Sikh pilgrimage centre dedicated to the tenth Guru, Gobind Singh (1666-1708). There is a gurudwara on the bank of the lake. It is a two-day trek for ordinary folk who are not professional trekkers in the mountains. You climb about three-fourth of the total distance on day one. The trek starts from Joshimath, the place that was in news two years ago because of the catastrophic floods and landslides that wreaked unprecedented havoc in the mountains.

Joshimath itself is at an altitude of 6150 feet (1875 metres). Our bus carried us up to Joshimath from where we started the trek early in the morning. You keep climbing. And climbing. The whole day. With a backpack that carries the most essential things including your lunch and drinking water.

Joshimath was nothing more than a nondescript hill town in those days. It was twenty years ago that we undertook this adventure along with a fairly large group of students from the seniormost section. I don’t know how Joshimath would look like today. It must have lost all the pristine charm it possessed in those days when we visited it. A lot of buildings came up there later. Too much development which the fragile ecosystem of the Himalayas could not endure.

The Himalayas are the youngest mountain ranges in the world. Please recall your history lesson about how Gondwana shifted from the south pole a few million years ago to hit the northern continent forming the mountain ranges that we call the Himalayas today. These mountains seem to be yet to stabilise. They are highly prone to erosion even now, millions of years after their formation.

The cloudbursts of Feb 2021 wreaked untold havoc in Joshimath and nearby areas. Let me reproduce an image from Down to Earth to give you a picture of the damage caused by the rains then. 

It was not just the rains. A glacier had broken off along with its bedrock at around 5600 m above sea level from the Ronti mountain peak, causing flood and landslides in the Rishiganga and Dhauliganga rivers. The rivers changed their paths. Hundreds of houses were washed away in the swirling waters. Development extracts too heavy prices sometimes.

Twenty years ago, so much development hadn’t reached the mountains. There were rains in those days too. In fact, it was raining the whole afternoon of our trek. We all got drenched thoroughly. We shivered beneath the plastic raincoats that we bought on the way from peddlers who knew about the unpredictability of the rains in the mountains and hence did brisk business as soon as it started raining. Our shoes squelched. But climb, we did. When we reached the destination of day one, we were utterly fatigued. But we knew there was one more day to go. The steepest ascent was just waiting. The final stretch to Hemkund was really tough. But it is that arduousness which makes a trek charming and unforgettable.

This was the first trek of our life, both Maggie’s and mine. The first of such magnitude. Later, we climbed a few other peaks in the Himalayas like Gaumukh and so on. But none of them has left as many indelible imprints in our memories as Hemkund.  

Today Joshimath, the base camp of that classical trek, is sinking at the rate of 6.5 cm every year. Many buildings have been abandoned. Many are in ruins. I don’t think I would like to see the place now. Let my heart carry better memories. Of a little hill town and its cool rivers of Alaknanda and Bhagirathi, the two rivers that unite at Devaprayag forming the Ganga. I still remember watching that confluence, with one river looking reddish with its muddy waters and the other crystal clear, until they merge seamlessly into one and flow on and on quite as a symbol of all the good and the bad that make up humanity. 

Maggie with a fellow trekker in front of the Badrinath Temple

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 456: An unforgettable journey #UnforgettableJourney

 

Comments

  1. Hari Om
    Good to hold onto those first impression memories, for changes are inevitable. Whether by nature or by mankind's encroachment. YAM xx

    ReplyDelete
  2. Lucky you went there at the time when it was pristine and could make pleasant memories,

    ReplyDelete
  3. I want to use this opportunity to Thank Dr Aziegbe a Powerful Spell Caster for what he has done for me and for Helping me to get my EX Back with his Love Spell, At First I Thought it's not Going to work until I have Faith in it and it Tell's me that it's Guarantee and Truly I have seen it. Thanks again PaPa I We Advice you People who need Love Spell to contract Dr Aziegbe a Powerful Spell Caster now contact him on WhatsApp +2349035465208 and also email: DRAZIEGBE1SPELLHOME@GMAIL.COM
    https://www.facebook.com/GRANDPA.AZIEGBE/

    ReplyDelete
  4. Sad what's happening to the environment everywhere. I especially loved that line of the two rivers merging. "symbol of all the good and the bad that make up humanity" So apt.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I was told that one of those rivers - I forget which - is always muddy and the other clear. Quite a sight it was then. Wonder whether that has changed now.

      Delete
  5. Joey Vimsante PoetJuly 10, 2025 at 8:43 PM

    It must be amazing to go to the Himalyas. I have only climbed Ben Nevis, Snowdon, Scaffel Pike and a few other smaller mountains.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

Akbar the Brutal

When I was in school, I was taught that Akbar was a great emperor. ‘Akbar the Great’ was the title of the lesson on him. That was how the emperor was described in history in those days. Now the grade 8 history textbook calls that same man Akbar the Brutal . A lot of efforts are being made to rewrite India’s history. All Muslims are evil in that new history. In fact, everyone except Hindus stands the chance of being accused of much evil. It is sheer coincidence that I started reading Manu S Pillai’s new book, Gods, Guns and Missionaries , soon after reading newspaper reports about the alleged brutality of the Mughals. In the very first chapter, Pillai presents Akbar as a serious spiritual seeker as well as advocate of religious tolerance. Pillai’s knowledge of history is vast if the 218 pages of Notes in the book are any indication. Chapter 1, titled ‘Monsters and Missionaries’, starts with three Jesuit missionaries led by Rodolfo Acquaviva visiting Akbar on a personal invitatio...

The Parish Ghost

Illustration by Copilot Designer Fiction Father Joseph woke up hearing two sounds. One was his wall clock striking the midnight hour. The other was totally unfamiliar, esoteric. Like the faint sigh of someone too weary to knock at heaven’s door. Father Joseph thought it was the wind. Until the scent of jasmine, oddly out of season, began to haunt his bedroom in the presbytery which was just a few score metres from the parish cemetery. “Is someone there?” Father Joseph asked without getting up. He was more than a bit scared. He never liked this presbytery which was too close to the cemetery. But he had to endure it until his next transfer. “Yes, father,” an unearthly voice answered. From too close, not outside the room. “Pathrose.” “Pathrose who?” A family name was mentioned in answer. “But that family…” Father Joseph’s voice quivered, “no one of that family is alive as far as I know.” “You’re right,” Pathrose said. “We perished because we were too poor to survive what our...