Mcleod Ganj Part 2 ( Beyond Mcleod ) 

Day 1 - You should try and start early from Mcleod main square , you can either take a cab / auto which costs your about 100-200 INR till Gallu Devi temple, which is often considered the starting point of trek . OR you can start walking right from Mcelod main centre, which will add another 6 km to your walk . If you ain't a pro , I recommend to take an auto and save your energy for the real trek.

So I was accompanied with one of my friend from India , and we started the trek at about 11 am . I am a veryyyy slow hiker / trekker / even walker ! It takes about 3 hours on an average to reach Triund top from the base point covering a distance of 6 km . First 5 km are still fine , the last 1 km stretch is the real test of your endurance. There are about a dozen small chai and maggie vendors on the way to give you enough pit stops . But prefer not to take too many stops as it kills the rhythm and only makes you a slower snail .

September is the final session of monsoon rains in the hills before the onset of winter , and that is exactly when I was there. By 1 pm , we could see heavy clouds above us and chilly wind, we knew we are damned ! Within minutes it started raining ,although it stopped after 15 minutes, it left the trail wet and harder to walk now . At about 5 pm , after 6 hours , 3 chai stops , 1 rain stop , 5 give-ups and a zillion awe-times to the beauty of the nature, we both reached one of my fav spots- Triund .

Since it was off -season ,we were lucky to not be surrounded by dozen other trekkers. To our surprise we only had one family from Australia there to accompany us . A cool family of mother, father and a daughter on their South-Asian tour, having the final leg in India before flying back to kangroo land . Chilly night, raging thunder , and on-off rainfalls, we 5 people kept ourselves warm with bonfire and some rum !

So we left, and started ahead for Lahesh caves, a ridge area came after about 200 metres from Snow line, where suddenly we were engulfed in clouds, so much so that the visibility reduced to zero metres . We warned each other to stay where ever we were till the clouds clear , because one wrong step and we could have slipped from a mountain which is at about 15,000 feet ! After 15 difficult minutes , the clouds started to reduce, and we started questioning our decision of moving ahead or not . We surely could not go back to the snow line cafe !! So either Lahesh Caves or back to triund .

After 10 minutes of thinking , we agreed to move back down , as the weather was getting worse and we were all alone in the trek it seemed ! And after 30 minutes we realised how good our decision was, as we started hearing crazy loud noises from the region of lahesh cave route. As we investigated further , we realised , there was a major land slide happening on that side of the mountain . We thanked Lord for making us return back as we could have been a part of the land slide had we continued.