Valley of flowers

Aug. 6th most awaited date right from beginning of the year.......why ?? we have been planning a trip to valley of flowers and Himkund

The gangs came together at Delhi on 6th Aug. This is where we met the whole team for the first time to board the train to Haridwar, from where our journey into the Himalayas was to start.


Haridwar to Joshimath

We reached Haridwar at 6:30 AM, The gang had about 1 Hour to refresh themselves, we sorted out our luggage and dumped the extra things into a dump sack and boarded the bus which was to take us on our Journey till joshimath, The journey from Haridwar to Joshimath is about 252 KM from Haridwar at an Altitude of 2519 Mtr. Highlight of the journey was breakfast at Monal hotel and here we discovered the difficulty of managing and ordering the breakfast for varied crowd :o), I am sure Vatsa and Sunand (btw. They were our from Karnataka Mountainering Association, if I can I would like to call them leaders of the team ) might have got a feeling of what they are into :0)

After the breakfast ice slowly started to melt between the team members and gave way to some games.





The journey from Haridwar to Joshimath was a preview of things to come, Mountains and River would not stop following us, we could see Alaknanda river flowing in her full force taking with her various river she meets on the way ( Prayag ), Prayag is a place where two rivers meet, we were lucky to see Four Prayags on the way, Nanda Prayag, Rudra Prayag, Karna Prayag and Dev Prayag the one we could not see is Vishnu Prayag.



We stopped for lunch ( It was 4:00 PM, Still I would Prefer to call it lunch J) at Pipalkoti, the lush wheat farms with a huge mountain backdrop was a sight we could not resist capturing in our cameras.

Witnessing few landslides, going through pathala Ganga we reached Joshimath at about 8:00 PM, we had booked the rooms GMVN (Gharwal Mandal Vikas Nigam), the team was glad enough to retire soon after dinner.

Joshimath to Govindghat

Joshimath to Govindgath is 22 KM by road, this whole stretch carries oneway traffic and the first gate opens from Joshimath side at 6:30 AM, we wanted to get thru the first batch from Joshimath. It was 5:00 AM when the team got up, packed and prepared to leave.

At this point of time I guess it is apt to give a overview of the team, member of the team were mixed collection of students in there 3rd Sem. B.E to people who were of 50+ years old. It was a great experience to see them trek at their age, we could really draw inspiration from these ladies trekking at age of 50+ years, at the same time we appreciated the kind of exposure the college students were getting.

Traveling along the river alaknanda was exciting till we stopped in middle, reason ?? a landslide. We left the bus there and started walking towards govnidghat, soon the road was cleared and the bus caught up with us. We reached Govindghat by 9:00 AM now over attitude was about 1828 Mtr.

Govindghat to Ghangaria

The luxuries of bus was over, we have reached the point from where the trek begins, our next destination was Ghangaria (3200 Mtr.) which is about 13 KM trek along the river alaknanda from Govindghat.