Recently few of my college friends started watsapp group of all my classmates. Usually I don't check Watsapp, but now I tend to check it at least once in 2 hrs. During the weekend, lot of friends were at home and hence we recollected some of the college days memories. Chamunda trek is one of the great memories from old days. We did this trek 13 years back and now we were discussing about having a get together on one of the treks in Himachal. This post is inspired by this discussion and sharing details around reaching the base, planning the trek, details around the terrains and other relevant trips. If you love mountains, clouds, snow, pleasant weather; this post is for you.
We took bus to hit Chamunda and stayed in one of the low budget hotel. Plan was start our trek early in morning. Some of my friends from Palampur had arranged the stuff which are required for staying around the old Chamunda temple. There is no road, hence you need to trek till the end and don't expect anything on the top. So we had to carry a stove, groceries, some snacks and drinks. We packed all this stuff in smaller bags so that everyone could carry some part.
This whole trek takes almost a day to reach top. Instead of starting early in the morning, we planned to have breakfast at the base and then start our journey. Everyone was super excited about the trek. With time, we figured out the heavier bags and the ones with little weight. Some of us were smart to avoid the heavier bags and the others were concerned about helping each other :). With time, some of us were not even in state of carrying anything. We had packed lunch with us. We took lunch break when most of us looked tired and wanted to eat something.
After lunch everybody wanted to reach the top, but after concurring a mountain you could see a new series of mountains to trek. These moments of trek are very torturous but they make your trek very special. Harder the trek, most memorable it would be :)
This trek exposed us to brilliant views of Kangra valley on one side and huge mountain ranges trying to kiss the sky.
As we reached the top, the weather suddenly changed. I don't have many photographs from this trek and all these photographs are from different treks but terrains are quite similar and that's why I used these.
The top is surrounded by snow covered hills. There is a small structure, where we put our stuff and came out to enjoy the place. After few minutes it was dark all around and stars started welcoming us on the top. Before dark, we had brought some water cooking.
It was difficult to cook at such high altitude and the task was more difficult because there was no light. We enjoyed half cooked food with pickle and some pooris, which we were carrying with us.
It always remains as a special trek for us and few of our friends also met black bear on this trek, when they went bringing water. It was a baby black bear.
Hopefully we plan this trek again and bring you back some of the photographs from Chamunda trek and glaciers of Chamba.
If you liked this post and found it helpful, I would request you to follow these things when traveling -
- Manage your waste well and don’t litter
- Use dustbins. Tell us if you went to a place and found it hard to locate a dustbin.
- Avoid bottle waters in hills. Usually you get clean water in hills and water bottles create lot of mess in our ecosystem.
- Say big no to plastic and avoid those unhealthy snacks packed in plastic bags. Rather buy fruits.
- Don't play loud blaring music in forests of jungle camps. You are a guest in that ecosystem and disturbing the locals (humans and animals) is not polite
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