Dayara Bugyal

Delhi → Dehradun → Raithal

Archie delays departure. Paras enters as the wild card.

We started driving at 5:30 am—or, more accurately, most of us did. Archie made everyone wait at his stop, ensuring that his first contribution to the trek was a delayed departure. Once he finally appeared, we took the Delhi–Dehradun highway and settled into the long road north.

We reached Dehradun around 10 am, collected our last-minute wild-card Paras, parked the car at his place and transferred ourselves and our luggage into a Bolero for Raithal. The Himalayan views were majestic. Naturally, we ignored them long enough to conduct a deep investigation into why pipes exist on hills. No useful conclusion survived the journey.

By about 4:30 pm we were in Raithal, where we met our guide Dipesh, claimed our rooms and ate food prepared by his team. Day 1 then became suspiciously uneventful: no disasters, no missing people, no Crocs on the trail. Just six friends resting before the mountain started contributing to the plot.

Raithal → trail → campsite

Two blackouts, six worried faces and one stubborn comeback.

A beautiful sunrise had us feeling extremely organised. By around 6 am the bags were packed, the rooms were behind us and the trail had begun. Roughly 200 metres later, the mountain delivered a plot twist nobody had requested: Gaurav fainted, then blacked out again. The jokes stopped, everyone gathered around him, and the thought that we might be turning back arrived much faster than the summit ever would.

After resting and hydrating, Gaurav steadied himself and chose to continue. Going from two early blackouts to completing the trek is how a person earns extra applause—and the permanent right to say, ‘I survived this,’ whenever Dayara comes up. The rest of us simply tried to look supportive while quietly recalculating the day.

The trail also carried an unsettling recent story about a girl trekker who had gone missing around Dayara. Our coping mechanism, unfortunately, is questionable humour. Ankita, being the only girl in the group, became the unwilling lead character in a run of Babita-related jokes. It was not our finest comedy, and never meant to make light of what happened; it was six nervous people trying not to let fear become the loudest member of the group.

We reached camp almost offensively early, leaving us with hours to fill. An evening stroll took us past the area connected to the missing-trekker story and gave us time to identify distant peaks with considerably more confidence than certainty. Back in the dining tent, Dumb Charades exposed everybody’s acting limitations, Uno restored the usual competitive nonsense, dinner arrived, and a bright moon turned the campsite into its own outdoor spotlight. Day 2 had started like a cancellation notice and ended like a proper Peak Pursuit evening.

Forest → high meadows → summit day

8K views, suspicious berries and horses with no bathroom etiquette.

Day 3 was about going up, then going up some more, until Dayara Bugyal finally stopped being a destination name and became the enormous green world around us. The trail was pleasantly quiet, the crowd was almost absent and the rain kept things dramatic without becoming a full production.

Dew sat on the flowers like poetry. The surrounding evidence that trekkers had treated parts of the meadow like an open-air toilet was considerably less poetic. Paras chose to ignore the entire environmental review and ate small red fruits whose identity nobody could confirm. This is a memory, not a Peak Pursuit recommendation.

The weather kept switching between sunlight, hazy sunlight and short spells of rain, so the raincoats finally came out and justified their luggage space. The trail was never treacherous, but the occasional steep section made sure nobody became overconfident. Meanwhile Ankita and Paras maintained a running series of impressively lame discussions that somehow became entertaining purely because there was nothing else competing with them except spectacular scenery.

Then the forest opened into the meadows and the scale became ridiculous. Horses looked tiny from miles away; people beyond them looked even tinier. There were strange plants, stranger mushrooms and more shades of green than any phone camera had permission to capture. The panoramic view felt like 8K Dolby Vision made specifically for human eyes.

The horses grazing across the meadow added their own majestic detail—and their own generous quantity of horse poop. Nature’s perfect wallpaper came with full behind-the-scenes access. We had been able to see the summit area for ages without ever seeming to reach it, but the misty photographs, wide views and feeling of finally standing there paid off every stubborn step.

With the summit adrenaline spent but the afternoon still available, we headed back down to GUI base camp. A couple of hours later we were there, then promptly went out again to see the mountains behind camp. ‘Beautiful’ felt too small a word, so we mostly looked, took photographs and let the view win. Evening tea, Parle-G and the cold settled around our last night together. From here, everything left was downhill—geographically, at least.

The way down → Raithal → home

Archie chooses Crocs. His trekking boots exit the story.

Day 4 began with breakfast and Archie making a decision no trekking guide had requested: the descent would be done in Crocs. He packed his trekking boots into his bag, and that was the last time he saw them. The Crocs, meanwhile, survived and became the most discussed piece of equipment on the trip.

We took one final round of photographs at camp and started down to Raithal. This was the last hike, followed immediately by the long drive home, so every step had one foot in the mountains and the other mentally searching for a car seat.

Back at our starting point, we took more pictures at the exact place where Gaurav’s Day 2 had nearly ended the trek before it began. Now all six of us were down, Gaurav had completed the whole thing, and Archie had somehow descended in footwear designed for entirely different ambitions.

We started driving around noon and reached home at approximately 1:30 am. That thirteen-and-a-half-hour road journey was the final endurance event: no summit, no medal, just the slow realisation that the trek was over and regular life had found us again.