13 Years On These Trails: Why I Now Trek the Famous Peaks on Weekdays

A few honest thoughts on crowds, carrying capacity, and how the Western Ghats I fell for have changed — gathered over more than a decade of walking these hills.

I've been trekking the Western Ghats for thirteen years now. Long enough to have watched them change in ways that still catch in my throat.

When I started, these trails carried a fraction of the people they do now. Even weekends felt unhurried — you'd pass a few groups, exchange a nod, and still find long stretches of trail entirely your own. And on a weekday? You could climb for hours and meet barely a soul, just the forest, the mist, and the occasional Malabar giant squirrel crashing through the canopy. Solitude wasn't something you queued for. It was simply how these mountains were.

Even later, when I founded Wanderophile and began bringing groups into these hills before the pandemic, the trails never felt anything close to as crowded as they do today. The change since has been swift, and steep.

That older world is mostly gone, and I've made my peace with much of it. More people discovering these hills is, on balance, a good thing — for the local economies that depend on us, for the cause of protecting what we've all come to love. But somewhere along the way, the most famous peaks tipped from popular into overrun, and the experience curdled. Which brings me to the small, unglamorous shift that has saved my love for these mountains.

Zero. Out of three hundred.

If you've tried to book Kudremukh or Netravati on the Aranya Vihaara portal lately, you know the feeling. You open the forest department's portal, full of hope, and there it is in unforgiving red — 0/300 Available. Saturday, gone. Sunday, gone. Even Friday, gone. Come peak season, Kodachadri sings the same dirge.

These slots no longer fill over days. They vanish almost as soon as the booking window opens — so fast that ordinary trekkers report being shut out entirely. When everyone covets the same summit on the same two days, nobody truly gets it. Least of all the mountain.

Let me be clear about which peaks I mean

I'm not going to tell you to abandon the weekend. That would be both impractical and untrue to how I actually trek. Most of the Western Ghats is still gloriously, peacefully doable on a Saturday — we still run our weekend departures to Narasimha Parvatha, Kurinjal, Gangadikal and others precisely because those trails haven't buckled under the weekend crush (yet!)

My argument is narrower and, I think, more honest: it's the handful of famous, capacity-capped peaks — Kudremukh, Netravati, Kumara Parvatha, Kodachadri — that have become casualties of their own fame. These are the ones where the weekend now works against you, and against the hill. For these, and really only these, the midweek shift is transformative.

A cap is not bureaucracy. It's a heartbeat.

It's tempting to read that "300" as red tape. It isn't. That number is the daily carrying capacity the forest department has set for these trails — drawn not to frustrate you, but to shield a landscape that cannot heal as fast as we can wear it down.

Kudremukh National Park is one of the inscribed sites of the Western Ghats UNESCO World Heritage Site — a chain UNESCO calls one of the world's eight "hottest hotspots" of biological diversity, home to at least 325 globally threatened species. It shelters lion-tailed macaques, Malabar giant squirrels, and rare frogs found only in these mountains. Its shola grasslands — those rolling, mist-soaked meadows we all climb for — are among the most fragile montane ecosystems in India. They're also why, in the driest months when fire risk runs highest, these trails are closed altogether: a single careless spark in tinder-dry Shola can erase decades of growth. They reopened only this June, after months of enforced rest.

In thirteen years I've watched what concentrated footfall does up close — the widening scars where a single path becomes three, the litter that wasn't there a decade ago, the wildlife that has learned to keep its distance. When 300 pairs of boots compress onto one trail on one morning, the cost isn't only your diluted experience. It's the mountain's slow erosion. The cap is its pulse. Weekends push it to the edge of that pulse, over and over.

The quiet magic of a Tuesday-night bus

Here is the gentle, almost embarrassingly simple thing I've learned. For these famous peaks, shift your trek to the middle of the week, and almost everything changes.

On a Wednesday or a Thursday, that 300 ceiling is rarely troubled. There's no long wait at the forest check-post while hundreds of IDs are verified ahead of you. There's no slow procession up the narrow forest paths. There's just you, a handful of fellow walkers, the streams, the squirrels, and a summit that finally feels like it was waiting for you alone. The trail is identical. The views are identical. The soul of the day is restored to what I remember it being all those years ago.

It's why, when we plan our weekday treks from Bangalore, we build the popular peaks around that midweek calm. Our Kudremukh weekday trek and Netravati weekday trek leave Bangalore on a Tuesday night and walk on a Wednesday — so you wake to a near-empty mountain while the city is still at its desks, and you're home before the weekend even begins. No refreshing the Kodachadri Trek calendar at midnight. No scramble. Just the trail, the way it was meant to be met.

Or fall in love with a peak no one is fighting over

There's a second path, and it's the one that brings me the most joy these days. You don't have to keep crowding onto the same three celebrated summits when the Kudremukh range is stitched through with trails just as breathtaking — and gloriously uncrowded, weekend or not.

Step one ridge over, and the mountains open up again. The Gangadikal Trek hands you the entire Kudremukh range laid out across the horizon, the Lakya Dam backwaters shining below, and shola grasslands that seem to have no end — on a trail most trekkers have never heard of. The Kurinjal Trek winds through dew-soaked forest and wildflower meadows to a summit that asks nothing of you but wonder. And for those who want their lungs to remember the climb, the Narasimha Parvatha Trek and the gloriously offbeat Valikunja Trek offer the kind of solitude I once took for granted everywhere. These you can happily do on a weekend — they see a fraction of the footfall the famous peaks do.

Choosing one of these isn't settling. It's a small act of care. Every trekker who disperses to a lesser-known trail is one fewer boot pressing on an over-loved one — footfall spread thin enough for the land to recover between visits. The mountains don't need more of us in one place. They need us, thoughtfully, in more places.

Travel that gives back a little more than it takes

After thirteen years, I've come to believe the best trek is the one the forest barely notices we were there. Walk in a small group, not a stampede. Carry your plastic back out with you. Stay in the local homestays and trek with the local guides who read these ridges like old friends — so the money you spend stays in the hills it came to see. Pick the quieter peak. And for the famous ones, pick the quieter day.

None of this dims the adventure. If anything, it deepens it. A trail you can hear yourself think on, a summit you can sit with in silence, a forest you've left exactly as you found it — that is the version of this journey you'll still be telling stories about years from now. It's the version I'm still chasing, all these years in.

So the next time that booking screen flashes 0/300 Available, try not to read it as a door slammed shut. Read it as the mountain, gently, asking you to come a different way.

Come on a weekday. Or come to a quieter peak. But come like the hills are something to be loved — not used up.

If that's the kind of trek you're after, wander through our full range of weekday treks from Bangalore and find your quiet peak — or message us on WhatsApp at +91 8431990115, and we'll help you plan a gentler way up.