Hutridurga Trek

Trekking on a Sunday is sometimes a good bet I guess and this time it was Hutridurga. The folks to take the trek had assembled near Santala Silk, the official Bus Depot for BTC. The reporting time was 7 am and I reached last but before the Tempo Traveler, so I was not late, TT was late .....

We started at 7:30 am with expectation to experience a different day ahead. I already knew the organizer Gaurav & Hiren from previous trek and others were all new expect another two Harini & Sudesh. 

Usually before any trek I google the place to check out the place, terrain and trekking challenges, this time I didn’t which was pleasure in disguise. As the vehicle dodge through the city traffic, Gaurav came up the idea of playing Dumb charades with a twist. And the twist was to enact your name as this was new crowd and less likely for anyone to know each other’s name. Request was also put to people who knew the names to remain quiet to keep the game going. 

The distance to reach the Hutridurga is around 60 km and it hardly takes 2 hours through Magadi village. There is also other way around through Kunigal route but Magadi was the direct route from Bangalore. Dumb charades is become like a magic wand that breaks the ice among stranger. As we all enacted to hear our names guessed, we got introduced as well. After a hour drive we had our breakfast and also parceled our lunch from the same place. 

Somewhere around 9:30-10 am we reached the base and looked around to see a place that I was ready to explore. We had a round of official introduction and the other 19 trekkers were Hiren, Gaurav, Raja (the organizer), Sudesh, Rajita, Jyothi, Anitha, Harini, Shweta, Sreeraj, Parth, Anish, Jackson, Ram, Prashant, Mahesh, Sandeep Paul & Sandeep Patil and Aniruddh.

From the base when I looked around it looked fairly easy trek and indeed it was. What I like the most in Karnataka while I have trekked around four of the best trekking places are its rocks. I remember from my first trek at Siddarbetta till Hutridurga trek I get this immense happiness when I walk around the boulders. It is difficult to understand the natural formation of these mountains and rocks edging or balancing on each other without any support. And its good not to question and get into the details but to walk through the tangles and turns and unwind your day. 

This place is a fort and belongs to the era of KempeGowda.  Well, time and the people have taken the toll on this fort as well. The fort is almost destroyed and the stone bricks are missing and thus the whole built up of fort seems not being there. I guess if the great wall of China was in India, it won’t have been in the seven wonder’s of the world. We are not the heritage conscious people and just love to write about the ancient ruins of this country. Feels pathetic to say we don’t care for anything. 

To talk about the trek we have a temple at the hill top dedicated to Shiv and Nandi and it is also not maintained at all. Any ancient temple I have seen is all small and surrounded by nature. I think it was only humans that have made the temple bigger and nature smaller. So its good we understand that Nature & God doesn’t need people, people need God & Nature & Cleanliness.  As we started, we walked a km on tar village road to take a cut into the bushes and manmade trails to proceed to the hill top. Huge laid rock mountains, cut steps and trails of foot way made us reach the hill. We reached the temple around 11:30 pm. waited there for sometime and again walked to another 30 minutes to take an amazing view down the hill. I could see the fields were ready to be ploughed again and there was few beautiful hamlets and many boulders too and of course the cool breeze amidst the blazing sun. 

While climbing up there was natural resting places and it was as chill as a AC room. Don’t understand nature sometimes how it shelters us so beautifully. 

We spent some time clicking pictures and then came back to the temple to have our lunch. The lunch was the simple wangi baath & Idlis were followed by chocolates, chikkis, and oranges. 

This trek we actually had an hour rest. We lied on the rock to get our aching feets some releif and once again Gaurav was with all his imagination beyond laughter. He imagined Lord Krishna flowering him from the sky, star dust falling and later himself thought of the eagle flying high on the sky, what that eagle can do or not do. LOL.  But he just makes the whole trek more fun than anybody else. 

After a nap , we had group pics taken and started again around 3 pm to reach the base. By 5 pm we we were down the hill. I happened to see the passion of photography with Sandeep Paul, Gaurav and Mahesh. I saw Raja getting lost in the wild and reaching and jumping on every rock edge. And to add it all, these individual things added up to the whole event to bring in life and laughter at every second of   the walk up and down the hill. We might forget the path and trails and the view but the memories of these 19 people will remain always. 

Feedback session down the hill is always the moment for organizer to cherish and this time as well I think they were the best. 

Back in tempo traveler , the whole team was into antakshari and that’s how we ended our day in enthusiasm and smiles.

Thank you all to bring up a day that was different from routine. This is how you tune and rewind I guess. 

Written By     : Sunita Nair

Organized By : Hiren & Gaurav

Date of event : 8th Feb, 2015

Place              : Magadi

Pictures          : BTC FB Page