KedarKantha - Trek, Twists, and Transformation
A story about how you transform from being a lazy potato to a first time trekker and then join 16 other strange and equally unlucky people to embark on a journey that will teach the lessons they will live with and how, unknowingly, an unknown bond they will make during the adversaries they faced together.
At IIT Kanpur, we have many things to do apart from the study, but only a few of us are doing many things, and the rest of us are doing only one thing. Since most of us here are not engaged in anything except studies, we term it as dedication. But once in a while, the life of those few enlightened beings touches a sleeping soul, and the world gets changed, silently. The only thing any club at IITK requires is the spirit to join and carry on, but then the souls of most are dwindling somewhere else. Like other engineering students, I moved from my home in 2010 for pursuing a mechanical engineering degree to a college located in the wild and spiritual mountains of Jammu.
In a typical middle-class family, everybody is enlightened about the perks of having a healthy lifestyle, but nobody ever did anything consistently. But then, things turn upside down when an Indian kid moves to the hostel. I was amazed that fellow degree candidates were doing Fourier Analysis with a back-to-back 3-pointer at the basketball court. And then and there something changed in me, and for the next four years, people in my batch knew me as someone who practices staying fit, no matter what the medium is.
Sometimes my close friend found me running in the campus stadium all alone or sweating in newly opened campus gymnasium (2013) after regular classes. But with all this zeal and vigour, still, after nine years I never achieved running 5 kilometres in a go.
I pushed myself with the onset of 2018 and forcibly did 5k after training in IITK gymnasium for three months. But it made me go through various muscle injury as I was missing supervision. So, I paused in 2018 after forcing myself to that run. The pause taught me that you were allowed to take it, but you should not have taken it.
The Club, The Adventure & The Adventure Club @ IITK
The calendar was changing, and I was somewhere in the middle of doing what I was doing daily. Suddenly an e-mail popped-up in the mailbox reminding me of something I promised to myself when I was doing the mandatory course-work at IITK. I got this e-mail a year earlier too, but at that point in time, I was not able to manage to attend the club activities.
The e-mail was from a club named Adventure Sports Club which takes few deserving candidates from the IITK junta to the mountains to loose themselves a little bit. Now, the twist with this club is very subtle. They don't differentiate you on your gender. And they don't seek candidates who already fulfil all the necessary criteria to visit mountains. Instead, they prefer those people who have never experienced this before and are willing to bite the bullet to feel the chill of visiting these serene places with nature in its purest form.
The e-mail has a short introduction about the club by the coordinators and what they were seeking to accomplish through this communication. In the most facile words, they informed that only those who can attend 90% of the pre-defined 40-morning conditioning sessions would become eligible to go on any trek. There were four different treks as usual chosen for this iteration of the club activity. The assignment of potential trekkers for a particular trek is based on the performance in 5k, 8k and 10k run. The adventure club will conduct these running activities on clinically chosen dates during the conditioning camp. I was reading this e-mail in the first week of chilling January, and the timing of the conditioning camp was 0530 hrs to get the attendance marked. The tale of conditioning camp is too long to tell but in summary, the 40 sessions of the conditioning camp made me run 5k, 8k and 10k without stopping during the runs. Since I was doing these activities for such a long stretch, for the very first time, the timings or the performance were not so remarkable, and thus I was assigned to an “easy trek” in Uttarakhand which is named, The Kedarkantha Trek.
Kedarkantha is a mythological Himalayan peak full of mysteries, which is important since Mahabharata. Kedarkantha means the throat of Shiva. It is believed that this is the actual place where Lord Shiva resides until he moved to Kedarnath. It is the second most haunted peaks as per the locals and visitors with multiple sightings of ghosts. At the summit, one can witness the other Himalayan peaks like Swargarohini, Black Peak, and Bandarpoonch.
Behind the scenes
As they say, the fun is not on the summit, but it is on the journey to reach it. But our real fun had already been started from the conditioning camps. We thought the real adventure would begin when we begin the trek, but to our surprise, someone must have written our tale to the summit in a completely different mood and now after the conditioning camps were completed we started preparing to live what has already been written.
Let me first take you to behind the scenes adventure of those few coordinators who were sweating it out day and night along with their studies to make this a pleasant experience. As I have told you there are four different treks on which teams of around 15 students from any ongoing course will take part. The complete planning of journey from IITK campus to the summit and our safe return has been planned by the club coordinators. They try their level best to remove all the uncertainties in the journey, but then all uncertainties can never get estimated.
The Kedar Kantha peak was comparatively of low altitude (12,500 feet), and thus the coordinators have planned the white water river rafting too since Rishikesh is a halting point before starting the trek. The club also provides rucksack, eatables required during the trek and a session of advice from those who have gone to the treks earlier. This session of knowledge transfer was intentionally kept just before the day when we need to leave the campus, as per the tradition, so that we must not forget the most important thing during the trek, i.e., "Do not litter and harm the nature in the mountains" & “How to reach back safely ( alive! :D )”. During the session, the coordinators of the club choose a trek leader and two doctors for each trekking team from the students assigned in each trek. The assigned doctors will get a session where they were taught which medicine should be given to a team member during a particular symptom. Then the medicines are distributed proportionately as per the difficulty of the trek. Since Kedarkantha was an easy trek, our essential medicines will get arranged by the trekking agency, and the guide from the agency will provide them to the trek leader once we start the trek.
The trek leader assigned by the coordinators will coordinate with the agency trek-guide, the club coordinators and the trekking team. The trek leader can be anybody who has a prior trek experience through the club, has attended the conditioning camp regularly, and is willing to go on the trek for which he/she was chosen as the trek leader. The list of must-have during any kind of the trek was already circulated during the conditioning camps, and the coordinators will only provide the rucksack once they have verified that you have all the things to get back to the campus alive! The session saw the moon rising far away from the horizon, and we all met with our trek mates for the very first time (as a trek mate) in this knowledge-transfer session only. The Kedarkantha trek was assigned to 17 members, including the trek leaders who will live and travel together for the next seven days.
We all went to our respective rooms, packed our bags(as advised by the coordinators) and tried to take a sound sleep by putting the excitement below the pillow.
And it begins...
As per the itinerary, the night on which we need to embark on our journey has arrived, and we all were asked to gather at New SAC by the trek leader from where we travelled to railway station by an auto-rickshaw. These auto-rickshaws can carry eight people on full load, and we were 17. The numbers have had an exciting role to play in our whole journey, and it started from here itself. We booked two auto-rickshaws and stuffed 17 people with an average of 10 kg rucksack of each member in these two vehicles. The reader must oil their imaginary powers because a kind of adventure has already started with the journey to reach Kanpur Railway station in prime time traffic of Kanpur city on the roads maintained by the Kanpur authority. And none of us saw this adventure coming our way. But then this is just a starting of the epic we are going to fill life in, that was already written with 17 characters in it.
In a situation similar to yours, we were also wondering who are these 16 other people I am going on the trek with. Each person in the vehicle came to know the seven others a little bit, but still, we needed a formal introduction. And this formal introduction was planned by the Angels in an adventurous way (since we are on an adventure trip). As soon as we arrived on the Kanpur railway station, the news broke out between us that the booked railway tickets were not all got confirmed till now and we need to share the seats and talk to ticket collector to take the penalty and provide the seats. Out of 17 tickets, only five were confirmed. This information made most of us furious to the extent that we all came to know the name of our trek leader as everybody was reaching out to him and asking what is the plan ahead? We boarded the train and grabbed our five booked seats, and then this was the moment where people started coming up with the strategies on how to arrange few more seats as we got to know the train is tightly packed, and there is no way we are going to get seats to sleep even after paying the penalty to the ticket collector (we need to give the penalty, anyway). The train left the Kanpur Central, and everybody exchanged the information about themselves by a short, sweet and quick introduction. The other 16 with trek guides and a friend in the wild are shown below.
After knowing the identities and grabbing the available space to sit(which wasn't adequate), we found that the interstitial gaps between one another are negligible. Thus we utilized this opportunity to play cards, sing songs and enjoy the gust of cold and speedy wind coming from the windows of the train. The train, Sangam Express, was not that mainstream too for the destination we were heading. This is one of the few trains whose Train Number gets modified in the midst of the journey, which effectively means standing at a station for an hour or two.
Rishikesh
With all these new information and experiences in the train coach, we finally reached Haridwar instead of Dehradun, late, with some of our eatables, provided by the club for the trek, already finished. From the railway station, we were headed for the Rishikesh with the trek-guide who took us for an evening stroll in the streets of Rishikesh. As per the itinerary, we were meant to have an 8-hour long road journey of 220km to Sankri, but since the train was late, we were informed about the minor modification in the plan. We will head to Sankri early in the next day. We attended Ganga aarti at Parmarth Niketan Ashram and had our dinner. The trek-guide initiated the pre-trek session with a not-so-necessary philosophical touch. He also checked the oxygen level of each one of us and departed with a strict promise that only those will continue the journey ahead whom he can see in the car, at 0600hrs, parked outside, tomorrow morning.
We all discussed a little bit about the philosophy he shared regarding the need to let everyone visit mountains and how he can tell about anyone by just looking at him/her for few moments after he stormed off from the room, laughed and then surrendered ourselves to the bed.
The morning routine was usual as we were taught in the conditioning camps, and thus it wasn't a problem to be ready at around 0530hrs. But to our amazement, the clock ticks to 0600hrs, and we were missing a philosophical trek-guide. There was no sign of him at 0700 hrs, 0800 hrs and so on. We started ringing the bells to everybody who can throw some light on these new adventurous developments, but to our surprise, even the personnel from the trekking agency could not locate or contact this guy. At around 1330hrs, the coordinators from the club stepped in and arranged the white water rafting for that day. This event was scheduled after the trek, but as I mentioned, the fun is not what's in the schedule. We had an amazing experience in currents of Ganga as most of us had no prior experience of rafting. Except some of us, including me, everybody jumped from the famous Maggi Point, that too, multiple times. After concluding the photo session and a quick tea at a nearby shop, we were back in the streets of Rishikesh for the dinner and shopping. We were assured that the cabs would escort us tomorrow morning for Sankri to initiate the trek. And still, there was no information about this mysterious character, the trek-guide.
Sankri
And again, we were ready at around 0530hrs which is our usual time for warming up at the conditioning camp. But today, a minibus and a safari were waiting for us to embark the journey into the mountains with a road trip of around 8 hours. And I was accommodated in the car with four others and guess what, our driver was way more relaxed than that of the minibus. We started with a few melodious notes, and soon enough we switched to rock and almost played the best of our offline playlist at least once. It was already communicated to us that we don't have any kind of connectivity from Sankri as it is deep into the hills where only BSNL has reached. BSNL has a very few customer-base in wireless connectivity (and massive in fibre) as compared to other network providers, and we get to know this fact when we found out that only one person has a BSNL sim. But this was not an issue as we have already informed our families that we will get out of reach soon. We arrived at Sankri after witnessing sunshine, rivers, rain and vomit of a few fellow trekkers. We were already excited enough for the journey ahead, but the near Zero temperatures of this place were perfectly superimposing the additional chills. The hotel we stayed in was so well furnished at this remote location that everybody was in awe of it. And just touching the walls with your bare hands can make the surface wet, was the additional feature due to the weather conditions. The hotel staff informed us that the place was witnessing an unusual weather condition for some days recently and even the location of the tents in the trek is very dynamic considering the heavy snows. "Heavy Snow" was all we heard at that time and I, personally, thanked all the lords for rewarding us with snow.
One of the trek-guide took us for acclimatization, where we had few snacks before dinner. The dinner was perfectly designed for the trekkers, and even the intake quantity was suggested by the guides. From this point onward, these lives that travelled to this remote location are the responsibility of these guides, and they were really good at their work. We had dinner in batches and soon after that the guides briefed about the previous plan, the modifications due to that spooky character (trek-guide from Rishikesh) and some more modifications due to weather conditions. The equation was as follows:
- Due to late arrival of Sangam Express at Haridwar (we changed our plan from Dehradun to Haridwar due to late train) we couldn't travel to Sankri on the very first day.
- The next day was partially devastated by the missing trek guide which was then utilized by white water river rafting.
- On day 3, we finally reached to Sankri. We were left with three precious days out of which we need to keep aside the last day because we need to catch a train at 1400 hrs hours from Haridwar which can only be done after getting a taste of one more road trip of around 10 hours.
Thus, with only two days for the trek and with almost all first-timers, the trek guide announced that either we need to step up our game of trekking in already harsh weather or they need to trim down the trek to catch that train on time. The original plan was to trek to the peak and reach back to Sankri in 4 days with a to-and-fro distance of 20 km. And the modified plan was to accomplish this feat in the next 48 hours as we don't want to let the guide trim down our trek.
Remember that the view from the summit makes one forget a painful trek, all it asks is to choose the view you will love beforehand.
We decided the plan for the next two days and got the final instruction to lie down early to charge our batteries. But we have had a good proportion of young blood and frustrated psyche within our group, and thus we decided to play a game which wasn't known to many of us. After multiple rounds of this engaging game named, "MAFIA", with few warnings to make less noise by the Hotel authorities, we slept.
Juda-ka-talab
The trek officially started with a shining sun, clear sky, cool wind, snow-capped mountains (still at a distance far away but clearly visible) and a stick in our hand. The stick was the most critical thing in this description because when the rest of things fades, the stick will stick with you!!
At this remotest location, the dinner menu had been divided by starters, main course and sweets at the end with the facility to get a bottle filled with extremely hot water. We had a buffet by placing all eatable on a single square table. While dinner was being served, we were welcomed by a much-awaited snowfall that was mixed with our food to make it much more tastier. The mercury was dipping fastly at 2030 hrs, and we were asked to get into our tents. Each tent accommodates three people and ladies had a big tent that accommodates all of them. We played a little with our night photography skills to capture the snow, the moon, the trees outside the tents and the faces of fellow beings inside the tent. Finally, we lied down after the briefing about the next day in which we need to cover 16 km in total to reach back to the hotel at Sankri with an instruction to wake up at 0200 hrs and leave by 0400 hrs. I thought that sleeping with three layers of clothes inside a woollen sleeping bag would be enough to stay alive. But we all were greeted with hailstorms, thundering clouds and snowfall throughout the night. The tents were all covered by the snow, and we slept on the snow that night.
A storm at the peak
Everybody was getting ready in the morning for the actual trek with a little known information about the need of spikes on hilly terrain with snow, and moreover, the co-guides forgot to bring the spikes of the right leg for every one of us. This was something we were not caring about at that moment and was courageous enough to initiate the trek with only spikes in one leg. With a little lunch in my backpack, two bottles of water and the excitement to reach the peak, we chanted those three magical words, "Har Har Mahadev", and initiated ascending towards the peak. Torches were in our hand because the blue hour was still around 1.5 hours ahead of us. As we started trekking, almost everyone got the idea of how hard it will going to be as the steepness and abundance of snow were deterring us enough to move backwards. Also, the grip required to ascend a bit easily was not available as we have started missing a spike in one of our legs. But moving in the snow during the dark with torchlight was heavenly. We kept moving in the deep, milk white, feathery snow. Few of us started feeling the exertion as all our water bottles were emptied during the 5Km stretch and three of us decided to travel back to our camp along-with two co-guides. We were left with one guide and our trek leader only.
It is easier to believe that you found yourself in the mountains than to understand that you got manufactured anew by them.
After moving a kilometre ahead, we were greeted by a group of trekkers who had subscribed a commercial trekking agency. The guide shared some little chat with their trek leader and informed us that this group had halted their journey midway due to harsh weather condition at the summit and thus suggested all of us to decide to get back to the camp from here itself. We were not inclined with that decision as we were trained with 5, 8 & 10 km race at IITK for getting to the peak in any unforeseen developments of this trek. And thus we urged politely to the guide to lead our way to the summit as we all were highly motivated to do so. He, after a few minutes looking towards the peak, instructed us to take the chocolates and snacks as we are going to have more of this snow at higher altitudes now. We kept moving for an hour after which we halted again to take our lunch. The peak was very near, and our group sighted a few people nearby who were descending the mountains. They offered us some water, which, to our amazement, was hot. This was so soothing for all of us as we all equally drenched our throats with few drops of that warm water. All the pain and sweat was nothing at this moment to what was ahead of us, the peak of Kedarkantha, all snowy with the last leg of deep inclination to chart. We helped each other from here collectively and at last around 0730hrs, we reached at the peak.
Everybody was dancing except for the trek guide as he was busy listening to the winds and talking to the mountains. That mystical character caught everyone's attention with his raised voice soon after reaching the peak. He asked all of us to get a group photograph and start descending as soon as possible. We were interested enough to walk a little on the peak although the kind of view from the peak we imagined was not delivered due to very low visibility by constant snowfall.
The trek-guide informed our trek leader about a possible snow storm at or near the peak and thus instructed to get ready for descending as soon as possible. We all were electrified with this development and started moving down after a few customary photographs and a video which clearly captured the escalating snowfall at the peak. It was only 5 minutes from the moment we started descending, and the snowstorm actually reached us. The visibility dropped down to approximately 2 meters. The winds were flowing at an extremely high speed. The trek guide came running to everybody in the deep snow and asked to get in a queue with each other's hand tightly clamped. The condition at this moment was worsened to such an extent that we can't see all the members of the queue and the wind was not looking to get back to its peaceful pace any time soon. These winds were mixed with snow, and thus it was hitting to our faces like multiple syringes at each instant. We had gloves on our hands, and by now they had stopped playing any role of theirs because I have started feeling syringes on my hands too. I tried to get off the glove from the left hand with the stick still intact in my right hand but as soon as a part of the glove got removed from the hand I was amazed to see that the colour of my hand started to change very rapidly with a feeling of acute chillness. I instantly dropped the idea of experimenting during a snowstorm and started rubbing the left hand inside the pocket of my jacket and kept rotating the use of stick from right to left hand. The stick was the only thing between the struggle of those winds and gravity below our legs that was preventing us from a possible, unintended take-off. The storm kept on increasing its intensity, and thus the guide asked us to start descending forward with extreme safety. We are now moving in the knee-deep snow-packed mountain peak with approximately zero visibility, heavy snowy winds on an unknown trail with a steep descent.
Only after the trail gets lost, You will find yourself.
At this moment, it automatically struck to my mind that everybody was kind of fearful, but no one showed anxiety, maybe to let the group stay positive. We all were getting fueled by this random weather surprise for which nobody was prepared for or maybe this is what the organizers of the conditioning camp in Adventure club were preparing us for, i.e., to be ready for any adversity. And I still think that not only me but each one of us must have thanked Club organizers for their gruesome training regime and to our Gods.
After few minutes, we found a little outward-pointing hill that has a kind of shed which saved us from the collective effect of snow and winds to some extent. And we all laughed out, very loud, but there was no one else except us to hear that.
Maybe the mountains were enjoying our company in this harsh weather and winds were testing our commitment to live.
We stayed there for a bit until the winds tamed a little and then started descending again. While descending, we followed a route which had a very sharp turn from where the adjacent mountains and the steepness were very clear. The storm was tragic, but it made these mountains an exceptional scenic beauty.
The Descent
Due to heavy winds, the sky was getting clearer rapidly, and the rays of the sun on these snow-capped mountains and the trees was a scene from heaven. A technical thing about descending in snow-packed mountains with hidden trails is that it is very slippery and thus getting spikes below your shoes is of paramount importance to get the required grip. But we had spikes in one leg only, and this is making our descent longer as per the calculation of the guide. The next best thing was yet to happen when the guide announced that due to our tight schedule we need to descend very rapidly to reach the hotel at Sankri in time from where we will move to the next hotel in a nearby city. And the only way to descend rapidly is to SLIDE!!. Yes, while hearing this, the heart skipped multiple beats.
The idea of sliding on hilly terrain was very exciting to hear but also very frightening too as the chance of getting an injury increases exponentially. Initially, I skipped two short slides, but then I was forced to slide on the ice as there was no way I could have walked down that huge distance which others were covering by sliding happily. And this is the best thing I have ever done in my entire life to date. I started analyzing my slides after the first one, and the fun part was to regulate your momentum and give direction to yourself with your spikes. Although we were doing this on the eve of Holi (a very important Hindu Festival) but actually I was reliving the memories of my childhood Diwali mela where we had multiple "Jhula". The exact feelings are not possible to explain until someone do all this on their own. We finally reached the hotel at Sankri from where we were picked up by vehicles that took us to a different hotel. We spent the night while discussing what happened to us in the last two days. We also had network connectivity and thus reached out to our families and assured them of our safety. The next day, early morning, we started our road trip back to Haridwar railway station, but this time the drivers were not such crazy, and we were also juiced out. Thus mostly everybody was interested in taking quick snaps and peaceful naps. After reaching the railway station, we divided ourselves into two groups, and I stuck with the one which was yearning for one more visit to the Ganges as the Ghats were at walking distance from the railway station.
We boarded the train with a confirmed ticket for all, but everybody wanted to stick with the group, and thus we played MAFIA again for almost the whole of the journey. I learnt a few card games too. We were back in the campus at early hours, but actually, we all were still somewhere in those mountains, laughing, posing, eating, playing, discussing, gossiping around a borrowed bonfire, together.
P.S: Few honourable mentions without whose presence and dedicated efforts none of this could have ever been possible.
- Mahesh Singh Bisht - Research scholar and Conditioning Camp Trainer
- Prateek - Undergraduate and Adventure Club Secretary
- Manish Dindor - Undergraduate and Adventure Club Coordinator [UG]
- Rahul - Research Scholar and Adventure Club Coordinator [PG]
These were the people with whom we get in direct touch from the very first day of the training camps. There are many others that have played a significant role in organizing these treks, whom I have not mentioned here and do not know but whose efforts I genuinely like to appreciate. I would also like to acknowledge the seniors of my department (IME) who kept my tempo high during conditioning and helped me in arranging all the necessary items for the trek.
At the end, I would like to thank the guide who was with us during the storm. He told us afterwards that the storm like this was not seen in a decade of his regular trekking at this mountain and thus he was kind of spell bounded too at that moment, but he was happy that everybody of our group had high spirits and nobody yielded to the unforeseen circumstances.
For those who have received an e-mail from the adventure club in their mailbox and want to know more about, please visit their official facebook page & instagram page.
We all are still somewhere in those mountains, laughing, posing, eating, playing, discussing, gossiping around a borrowed bonfire, together.