Grahan Trek ~ Frisson of Excitement #NearDeathExperience #HillsOverBeaches

Hills have a special place in my heart. I've never failed to mention this anywhere may it be my captions, blog articles, or the hashtags I use for my posts.
So I went for a trek to Grahan in the month of January. That time it was all snow in the mountains especially at the higher altitudes like Grahan where it was -16 degree Celsius.
My friends and I had started the trek at 4 in the evening because this is when we reached Kasol from Delhi. Grahan is a 14 km trek from Kasol. When we had enquired whether we should start the trek so late from the local people, every person had advised us to stay the night in Kasol and start the trek the next morning. But there we were, "trekking enthusiasts" unaware of the risk, who started with the trek late in the evening on one of the coldest days in the Valley. Initially everything was going smooth. But with time the trek started getting challenging. The first thing that got us panicky was a river crossing. It had gotten dark and the crossing was a mere log of tree on the flowing river underneath, which had hard ice on it which was obviously slippery. But slow and steadily we got over that hurdle.

It got difficult with time also because we were a group of people and it was difficult to trek together. But it was still going great with all the members encouraging each other. Some people did lose it and started getting all panicky but still they moved on and on. Then it got really scary when one of us got an ankle twist, and he refused to walk. We were in midway that time, to go back wasn't even an option. Luckily we had a first aid, by which we managed to give him a bandage, moov and a painkiller. It was relieving for everyone when he started to walk.

The path wasn't so easy after crossing the mid way and it was obviously dark which made it worse for us. If we had miscalculated our any step we were surely felling from the valley. Our every step had to be very calculated as it was just snow underneath us. But this was still okay, and we kept moving on. The shocking thing was it was all of ours first trek to Grahan, none of us had ever visited or trekked down to Grahan. And we couldn't choose a better time for the first time😂 So none of us knew the exact way, and obviously we found no one trekking to the same place at that time. And then the worst thing happened to us, our torch batteries started to go down. 1,2,3 and at the end all went off. Luckily some of our phone batteries were there, but on that we couldn't rely for a long time. This is when our morals got low, we started getting really scared if we were going to make it or no. In mountains you can never trust the animals. On our midway, a local guy had told us about one sheep that was hunted by a bear the day before. And guess what? We found footprints of a bear. Coming back to our few light sources, that started to go down one by one we started losing our confidence. Some suggested to stay, some suggested to head back, some thought they are going to die while some kept encouraging to keep moving until we find a place to stay. We just had one phone that was on by this time, and there was a steep climb that we had to make, we could only rely on our luck and obviously some techniques for that and we somehow managed to climb it one by one. Our only ray of hope for finding a village was an electrical line which one of us located. We kept following that. With only one torch and a group of 7 people, we finally located a few lights gleaming at a distance. A sigh of relief for all of us, we kept moving on to that direction and finally when we started to call for help, one guy, saviour in our eyes came to us. There it was Grahan Village!
The most adventurous trip I've had!
Scariest yet the most fun of them all Parvati Valley trips.