It’s the day of our trek…Gangotri to Gaumukh, the source of the river Ganga!! According to Hindu belief there was once a King Bhagiratha (Lord Rama's ancestor) performed a really long, arduous penance to bring Ganga to Earth from the heavens. He did this so that Ganga could cleanse his ancestors of some of their sins. Ganga finally blesses him and flows down... Gaumukh is the place where the river Bhagirathi starts. The Gangotri-Gaumukh trek is about 18km in length, starting at a height of ~3000m finishing at ~ 4000m.
My cousin Murali Podila and I were doing this trek and Mahender Panwar was our guide on the trek to Gaumukh and back. An experienced mountaineer, Mahi, is certified at the Nehru Institute of Mountaineering. He has also climbed quite a few peaks around the area such as Mt. Sudarshan (6500m) and done this trek a few times as well. Mahender joined us at Uttarkashi itself.
Our bags packed, checked re-checked by our expert inspection committee (mother,father and aunt) for key items, we were ready to go! Setting off early from Uttarkashi was critical as we had a 100km drive (i.e. 4hrs drive) to get to Gangotri before our trek begins. We skipped breakfast and we started by 630am.
The road from Uttarkashi to Gangotri is very beautiful (the drive was a crawl though). :-) Just as with the rest of uttarakhand, an early morning drive along the mountains of Dev-Bhoomi presents a beautiful sunrise, clouds amongst green mountains and shepherds tending to goats. The last one especially is really nice viewing because you turn around a bend and suddenly the road in front of you is filled with around 30-40 goats, a shephard and a sheep dog.
Along the way, we passed the impressive Maneri Dam and the Yogmata Foundation. The Yogmata foundation is an ashram being built by the ubiquitous “Pilot” Baba. Since we didn’t have much time, we decided to check this place out on our way back.
We had a quick lunch in a really small restaurant “Hotel Aanchal” at Dharali. This is, in reality, a very small shack but one that is clean and well-maintained. An interesting thing about the place is the old pictures of Gangotri taken by a British photographer in the late 1800s. Lunch these days essentially is Aloo Parantha…on this occasion we stuffed ourselves knowing it was going to be a long day ahead.
This trek is rated as a moderate hike by most accounts. Starting right behind the Gangotri temple, the trek’s key points are Deboghat (@4km), Cheerwasa (@9km), Bhojwasa (@14km) and finally Gaumukh at around the 18km marker. One of my key recommendations is to stay at Gangotri the night before and then plan the hike the next morning. This helps in the acclimatization process and helps prevent high-altitude sickness symptoms. Since we stayed in Uttarkashi the day of our hike, we didn’t really get a chance to fully acclimatize. Tapovan (4km further up and @ 4400m) is another highlight of this trip. However, due to lack of time, we decided not to do it on this trip.
Only about 150 people are permitted to enter the park each day. The process for getting the permit is as follows:
- Write a letter addressed to the Deputy Director requesting a permit for specific dates and including passport info etc and fax/mail it to Garhwal MVN Uttarkashi Office.
- Permits are not mailed but have to be picked up personally at Uttarkashi itself. A real pain!
- The cost of a permit is about Rs 350 for two days!! This permit cost does not include any lodging costs.
At the checkpost, we showed our permits for the 2 days and had our bags inspected. It seems like the park authorities are taking the plastic and polythene invasion seriously. We had to declare the no.of plastic equipment we were carrying and also put in a refundable deposit (Rs100) for that. Quite impressive! The authorities should definitely also consider increasing the cost of the permit.
The trail is for the most part open to the sun and there are very few portions that are shaded (some in the beginning and some later in the cheerwasa part of the trek). The trail is not a “well-paved” one in the conventional sense of a trail. It is quite a rocky, about 5-6ft wide and with boulders that are quite uneven in size. We walked pretty much hugging a huge mountain on our left and a steep drop on the right with the Bhagirathi flowing down below.
Our first stop was at a stream in a place called Deboghat. It was around 130pm and the sun was really beating down on upon us. We stopped there for about 10 min. The stream water was really cool and refreshing! We ate our first energy bars and I already thought the UK bars are better than the American ones that I brought along. As per our unspoken agreement, I got the UK bars while Murali P settled for the American ones...Fair deal! :-P
At Deboghat, we met a group of trekkers from Israel and a guy from Italy. They had started an hour before us and were, like us, heading for Gaumukh. We also saw a family of 4 (parents + 2 kids) from Karnataka who decided they had trekked enough and turned back. We had to cross 4 such wooden planks a.k.a “lakdi-ka-pul” (like shown below) a few times along the way to get across streams.
As we headed towards Cheerwasa, we started seeing signs of the “Cheer” (or Pine) trees. Seeing pine cones reminded me of the redwood pine tree at home in San Jose.
Hauling a 25lb backpack in this terrain is very different from doing the same in the bay area. My showpiece practice trek on the Black Mountain Trail doesn’t feel much like a good practice trek anymore. The oxygen levels here are low and this means that you are putting much more effort in lugging your slob around. On top of that, it was getting really hot. I was really glad I brought along a hat and walking sticks …they really helped!
I began grumbling about the people who rated this trek as moderate. Mahi(our guide), on the other hand, seemed to agree with that rating. It seemed like he was going on a stroll in some park in his chappals. Grrr :-)
We were greeted at Cheerwasa around 315pm by a welcome sign (on a boulder), a metal shack and lots of Cheer trees. Cheerwasa is the mid-point between Gangotri and Gaumukh. Our destination for the day, Bhojwasa was another 5km away. There were folks in the shack who were making chai but we prefered the clean water stream flowing down the mountain and some more bars. We chatted briefly with one of the 2 guides of the Israeli trekkers. He was complaining that they were running really late and the israeli team was walking slowly. Turns out this guide was planning on dropping them at Bhojwasa and then return to Gangotri the same day, i.e. 28 km !!
After about 20 minutes or so, we headed out for Bhojwasa. This part of the leg was really beautiful as we started getting glimpses of the snowcapped mountains Bhagirathi I, II and also Mt. Shivling. We were also surrounded by huge mountains (some bare, some green).
Along the way, we met some ISRO scientists from Ahmedabad. One of them was looking a little pale and had to sit down due to persistent shortness of breath. We sat with them for a few minutes and then moved on ahead.
About mid-way through this portion of the hike, I started experiencing a mild but persistent headache while Murali P started feeling shortness of breath. Worrying that these were symptoms of the High-altitude sickness that we were warned about, we took our Diamox tablets and continued onward.The sun was setting ; it was also getting very windy. It was really interesting how quickly the weather changed from being really hot to being chilly.
Some excitement in this portion of the trek came in the form of a ½ km stretch where there had been recent landslides. There were explicit instructions to go across as fast as possible and all the while watching out for any falling rock. Was a really interesting experience scooting across this section.:)
There were a lot of “Bhoj” or Birch trees down the valley below (hence the name Bhojwasa) and we were hoping that this meant Bhojwasa was around the corner. Finally, after what seemed like eternity, we saw Bhojwasa. In ancient times, Bhoj was used as the “paper” for official royal communication or for writing literature(poetry/prose..).
Bhojwasa, sitting at 3700m, has just a few tenements..a GMVN resthouse (where we were booked), Lal baba Ashram and a very small army presence. We finally reached the rest house at around 6pm i.e we covered only 14km in 6.5 hrs!!! Visibility was going down rapidly and it was good that we arrived before sunset.
The rest house was essentially a dorm with absolutely bare minimum essentials available in the name of facilitiles. We were really tired and on top of that my headache had only increased. As Murali P would put it, we “couldn’t be bothered” to make food so we ate some Maggi and Dal roti at the GMVN restaurant. Mahi stayed at the Lal baba ashram. Maggi was good! Apparently a search party was sent out to go and locate the ISRO scientists and they finally came in at 830pm or so.
In our dorm room, we met a French-German couple. They were on a 3–month trip to India . This was their first leg and were planning on visiting Rajasthan, Goa, Pondicherry and Andamans later on in their trip.They had just seen Gaumukh earlier in the day and were planning on heading back to Gangotri the next morning. We taught them some basic Hindi words and just chatted on for a bit. We also met a couple of Irish girls and their dad from Cork. The girls had been in India for 11 months, just hanging out in various cities in S.India and Mumbai. They told us that they earned good money by doing the role of the extras in quite a few unreleased Bollywood songs. Apparently, they were also in one of the songs of Kambakht Ishq, need to verify ;). We took another round of Diamox tablet and tried crashing early at 930pm. We had 22km to cover the next day.
Sept 23, 2009
I slept really bad due to my headache and finally got up at 4am. Murali P seemed to have adjusted better to the conditions than I did and slept well. At this point, I will stop to say this…I wish we had stayed overnight at Gangotri to help us acclimatize better(our itinerary was tight). At around 3000m altitude, every 500m height climb is a big deal. Again, I strongly recommend this approach to anyone else planning this or any other trek at these altitudes. We met a few people who either had nausea or shortness of breath or both.
We had an early breakfast of Bread-toast and Chai and headed out at around 7am for Gaumukh. It was really windy and cold but the views were just amazing! We saw Bhagirathi I,II and Shivling from up really close. The Gaumukh glacier is considered the mouth of the river Ganga even though it is actually the mouth of the river Bhagirathi. Ganga is formed much further down at Dev prayag where the Bhagirathi and Alaknanda rivers merge. It took us about 2 hrs to get to the actual Gaumukh glacier. It was a rocky path way from Bhojwasa to Gaumukh.
There was a small makeshift temple about ¾ km from the mouth of the glacier. It was really nice seeing this commemoration of a river that bears the responsibility for nurturing so much life and means so much to over 1.5 Billion people of the sub-continent!! R.E.S.P.E.C.T. After paying obeisance and seeking blessings at the temple, we went up the final 100 meters or so to the vista point for the glacier. To keep the glacier from being ruined and also to prevent any damage of falling rock, there is a minimum 500m distance to be maintained from the actual mouth of the glacier.The Gangotri glacier, source of the Ganga, is one of the largest in the Himalayas with an estimated volume of over 27 cubic kilometers.The glacier is about 30 kilometres long (19 miles) and 2 to 4 km (1 to 2 mi) wide. Even the parts that look like rocks, sand etc are actually glacier underneath. There is a really good article by Gyan Marwah that talks about the retreat of the ganga. You can read it here.
Unfortunately, just as in other parts of the world, the effects of Global Warming have left the glacier retreating rapidly (apparently by a km in 3 yrs). The river flowing out of the glacier was so clear and …cold! We hung around near the glacier for about another ½ hr or so, filled a bottle full of “Gangajal” for the folks back home and then headed back to Bhojwasa. My headache symptoms were much better at this point.
We reached Bhojwasa at 11am and finally used our stove to make some Maggi. It was just great! The plan was to quickly have some lunch and leave latest by 1230pm or so back to Gangotri. We chatted with a couple from Dehradun at Bhojwasa GMVN resthouse. The lady was sad because she started getting severe symptoms of shortness of breath and they were returning on a mule directly from Bhojwasa without going to Gaumukh. It was the right thing to do given that losing altitude quickly is the recommendation in such situations. I took her email id and promised to mail her some pictures of the glacier.
Our return journey was essentially a re-tracing of the same path in reverse that we did the previous day. We enjoyed watching the beautiful surroundings as we climbed back down. We stopped at some vantage points along the way. We also saw lots of mountain goat along the way.
By the time we got to Deboghat, it was around 3pm and we were dead tired. I actually fell asleep for about 20 minutes right by the stream. We checked out of the national park at the checkpost, picked up our deposit and finally reached the Gangotri temple at 4:15pm. This was about 45 min ahead of schedule, so we hung around, went to the temple and generally waited for the family to come pick us up. We also chatted with a few ITV news reporters doing a documentary on global warming and its impact on the Himalayas and the rapidly retreating Gangotri Glacier. They were doing a Gaumukh trek the next day and also an Everest base camp II trek later in the year.
Our 36km trek was complete, a satisfying feeling and also relief!! The family was very excited and happy to see us as were we. We bid farewell to Mahi, performed the evening Aarti on the Bhagirathi and headed onwards to Harsil.
In closing, I would highlight a few key points:
- Train for endurance and (if possible) high-altitude trekking.
- Acclimatize, acclimatize, acclimatize!! Stay in Gangotri the night before the trek.
- Definitely keep a guide…very useful especially if you are not used to high altitude trekking. The route is pretty clear but you might struggle with baggage. But you have to get used to the guide walking fast and being way ahead of you, even if he’s carrying your luggage!
- If you have time, stay another day in Bhojwasa and go upto Tapovan (4km further up from Gaumukh)
- Regarding medicines, carry Diamox for altitude sickness in addition to other typical medicines like nausea/fever/sinus headache etc. Carry lots of electrolyte, energy bars.
- For meals, the GMVN restaurant at Bhojwasa is pretty decent and it is possible to skip carrying heavy food especially if you are not staying in Tapovan.
- There are 3 or 4 clear streams along the way where you can fill up on clean drinking water. Just as with food, water was not much of an issue. Also, you can buy mineral water bottles at the GMVN restaurant in bhojwasa.
