Siddhagad

This month’s trek’s one common thing was last minute decision to arrange trek.  After 19^th Dec’s Kalsubai trek this was again planned last moment. But both treks were different. One of the major difference was in Kalsubai, Sun keeps on smiling (or rather laughing) on you continuously but for Siddhagad, more than 85% trek is through thick forest. That makes it very pleasant experience (So it is OK if you do not have Cap for this trek). But the same reason makes it tricky because there are lots of chances that you may select wrong “Vaat” in forest.

Trek was scheduled to start from Kalyan at 7.00 am with onwards journey through public transport. But Nilesh had some work at his village which was nearby to our base village. So he decided to get his car to travel till base village. Nilesh, Sanket, me and Pramod reached at Kalyan on time but Vishal (Nilesh’s friend) reached 2 hours late (BIG SIN in treking). So we utilized that time by helping ourselves with Bhaji Pav and Tea in nice cool, foggy morning. Surprisingly we had fog till 10 am.

         We started trek from Narivali (base village) at around 11.00 am. Path is through nice forest. View of Gorakhgad and Macchindra gad at one side , Siddhagad on other and Bhimashankar mountain in between makes it very beautiful landscape.  

After leaving Narivali, we crossed small river and after some walk reached “Siddhagad Pada”. This is the village from where gradual climb starts. (Narivali to Siddhagad Pada is straight walk).

As we started our climb Nilesh started guzzling lots of liquid (water, energy drink etc.). So we realized that this heavy vehicle will have less mileageJ. But he, along with whole group, keep climbing steadily with few breaks. Vishal periodically keep asking same question “yeh rasta to sahi hai na?” till we reached Kalyan.( yeh, he even asked same question to Nilesh in car when we were coming back) .

Sanket was wearing t-shirt with hood and his fav. goggle and looking like Phantom (Name courtesy : Pramod).

Almost midway we crossed stream (where we had mini break for snacks) and after around 3 hours (after starting from base) we reached a “Darwaja.” After this darwaja there is temple and further a small village “Siddhagav” This whole village is situated on Siddhagad forts "Machi". Not only people stay at such height but electricity is also available in this village.

Climb after this village (towards Balekilla) is bit steep (after darwaja, no need to go till village, one vaat starts climbing before that).  After another hour (from darwaja) we reached at Cave . From cave one can see Gorakhgad, temple on top of it, Bhimshankar and tip of Bhimshankar temple.

We quickly finished (in 10-15 min.) our lunch in cave and then started our upward journey towards top of Balekilla. Many group finish trek at this point. Climb beyond this point is very very steep and one has to be very careful. Also on top nothing much to see except few remnants.

Before we could reach top, we realized that it was already 4 pm and in order to reach base before dark then we had to start our journey back. Also climb was getting steeper and riskier which means that it would have taken much more time to reach top and come back even though it was very very near. So we decided to start descend. We reached back to caves at 4.20 pm and started descend with very very few halts. Nature of slopes was reducing our speed.

With all efforts we managed to reach “Siddhagadpada” before it got total dark but after that we have to put our torch lights on. Path till Narivali even though on plane, it was through forest which made looking for “Vaat” in darkness bit tough. Some how we reached Narivali around 7.30 pm (couple of times with the help of some villager in total darkness).

After that we simply had to sit in car with Nilesh driving. We took a couple of halt, once at Nilesh’s uncle’s house having nice hot tea and another at Murbad for having snacks break. We reached at Kalyan at around 9.00 pm and then dispersed for our homes.

It was another nice enjoyable trek.