Harihar Fort Trek — Mar 2021

So one more Maharashtra trek done last weekend. After doing Kalsubai trek with Utkarsh Arora and friends, I decided to go for the Harihar Fort trek with Utkarsh, under his new banner Urban Trekkers.

(https://www.wikiloc.com/.../harihar-fort-trek-from..., https://www.forttrek.com/harihar-fort/)

When Utkarsh posted about the trek, the photos looked intimidating — and thats why inviting as well! I shared the plan with a few of my friends and there were 5 friends who also decided to join the trek along with me. Totally, there were 19 of us — age group ranging from 16 years to 50+, and many of them first time trekkers. We started from Kandivali in a bus at 12:45 on Saturday night and reached the base village by about 6:40 am. We were to start a bit earlier and try to catch the sunrise from the peak, but then we witnessed the sunrise while climbing the fort. It was a relatively easy climb and great views from the mountain — till the time we reached the final summit. The gradient is almost 70+% and looks fairly intimidating. However, there are stone steps with grooves made on the sides of the steps so that the climbers have a good hold while going up. Ajit, Dhaval, Capt Amit Mishra were of great help to some of the climbers for whom it was a first time adventure. While actually doing the climb on the stairs, it was much easier than it looked.

Another interesting aspect was the monkeys we encountered during this climb. One of the monkeys nearly put its paw in my trouser pocket assuming that I was carrying some food there. Later, one monkey tried to take a water bottle out of my backpack (see the attached video!).

After going through these steps, we reached the top, and realised that there was one more small peak to climb! It was good fun, we had some fruits and theplas at the top and then started our descent. The descent, as always, was trickier that the ascent, and especially when you have to get down on a 70+% gradient. Most of us got down facing the mountain and not the valley — so the scare factor was less.

We finally got down to the village at about 1 pm, and had excellent lunch there (Utkarsh had asked them to prepare lunch for us in the morning itself before we started our climb). It was a simple but very tasty meal of roti, dal, two veg subzis, besan pitla, thetcha chutney, rice, papad and chicken. We then hopped onto our bus and returned to Mumbai, having great fun in the bus along the way. (Dhaval introduced us to a game called mafia, where we realised that one of us, who was multiple times getting nominated as the doctor, was more of a kasai than the saving kind :)).

Overall, an excellent experience. As Nurjaha pointed out, going for a trek in Maharashtra becomes a bit difficult as one has to typically travel to Dadar for the meeting point. Thanks to Utkarsh and the Urban Trekkers, we can not get into a bus within a kilometer of our residence, do the trek and get ourselves home delivered!!!

Looking forward to more treks and fun like this (hopefully with a couple of weeks break in between!!!)

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