The trek to "Bhavishya Badri"

I am an avid trekker.
(Though the lack of time has made only once a year phenomenon.)

A couple of week ago (January 28th to be precise) Me and four of my friends trekked to "Bhavishya Badri" (3641 m)

A digression: "The mythology of Bhavishya Badri"
As the name suggests it is the future abode of "Lord Badri" , which as the most Indians would know is worshipped in "Badrinath". The mythology states that the current route to "Badrinath" will turn inaccessible and then "Lord Badri" would be worshipped here. Hence the name "Bhavishya Badri" or Future "Badri".

Now back to the trek:
I will skip the details of the route (They can be found here), but we (there were five of us in all) started the trek at around 10 AM in the morning few kilometers from a place called Saldhar.

All climbs begin with energy and enthu. All climbs end with no energy , but only enthu.
The is a strenuous trek and even though we only averaged 26 years in age , we had a real tough time after just 15 minutes. The "Saldhar" is a typical mountain village with very friendly people and twenty minutes later we were given water by a friendly lady and a tip : The normal route to the top has ice sheets and is unusable; use the long and pucca route.

We messed the routes big time :) though of course we didn't knew it that time.
Three of us (including me) went on the wrong route and realized that we had to climb a mountain.

This split caused us a delay of about an hour and was first in the series of tragedies that were to unfold.

The route we were now following was a gully carved by flowing water from top of the mountain. The soil was very soft and we were continuously struggling to locate good footholds. Falling and slipping became regular and I was hoping against hope that I do not tear my clothes.

On a particularly tricky section, our food packet fell below. The salvage operation that followed yielded a few badams and a box of haldirams sweets.

After around an hour we joined the main route. Here we were met by a local who was transporting sand for a construction. We had worked hard to reach here and we felt the need to get a reward. Reward: A nice photo with the deep valley behind us. We requested the local. He agreed. I put down the box of sweets near the edge of the route.
We got the photo clicked. We moved forward.

We reached another village "Subhai". We were painfully aware that we had forgotten the box of sweets in our enthusiasm to record our journey.
The next this was to buy food/water on our way up. Imagine to our surprise, no food/water is available in the village (To be more accurate, the shop did not had biscuit packets, bottled water).No choice but to move ahead.

The temple was still "some distance away". Actually this village also has a temple, but the "true" temple is on top of the mountain [this info. is from the locals, and I really don't know the truth; anyway we were more interested in the trek, so we ignored this village temple]

From here onwards the going became very interesting.
If you can't believe that every muscle in your body can be painful, you have to go on this trek.
The trek is an almost 70 degree incline for about a kilometer. It sucks up energy at a rate that thought did not even existed. Lack of water only made the matter more excruciating.

We were now walking on ice sheets and our progress slowed down considerably.
The route now had a pine forest alongside. I cannot express in words how trekking in this forest felt. The silence was broken only by our walk.

It is very serene and very beautiful. You can watch the whole valley below, joshimath and Auil ski slope included.

We spent fifteen minutes in the temple and started on our way down (we would probably have enjoyed it more but we faced two constraints: A) Time B) No food since morning).

General trekking trip: Coming down can some time be tougher than going up especially on an incline > 45 degrees.

I was feeling unwell and slowed the group.

We finally reached our jeep @ 4:00 PM and hit Auli some time later. Starving, we pounced on food (the shopkeeper was as surprised as he was happy, we had a bill of about 300/- in fifteen minutes)

PS. I got away with my jacket safe and sound.