Kudremukh in a Day: 22 Kilometres Up Karnataka's Horse-Faced Peak
A dawn-to-dusk climb up Karnataka's horse-faced peak — a night bus with no reclining seats, my first night in a tent, soaked shoes from kilometre one, a storm on the summit, and a man who has come back to this same trail every year since 1996.
None of the photos in this piece do this trek justice. I took hundreds and not one of them holds what it actually felt like to stand on that ridge. You have to see it yourself to appreciate it.
Booking it, and the permit at midnight
I booked the trip through Tripbae, a Bengaluru travel company that runs treks near the city. Bus out, homestay, food, transport — all of it handled, and cheap. The one thing left to me was the trek permit, and that turned out to be the hardest part of the whole trip.
Kudremukh permits are booked on Aryavr, the Karnataka government's trekking website. There are 300 a day, they open at midnight exactly two weeks before your date, and the site collapses under the rush. I sat there refreshing and failing for fifteen minutes before one finally went through, with around 100 permits left. Pure luck.
Honestly, I was skeptical about the whole thing before I booked. I am a bit of a luxury traveller — budget trips are not my natural habitat. But I wanted the adventure, so I decided to find out what the cheap version actually feels like.
If you want a permit: set an alarm for 11:55 PM exactly two weeks before your date, keep the form half-filled, and expect the site to crash at least once. The trail is not the bottleneck; the website is.
Packing, and a bus with no reclining seats
It only hit me on Thursday evening, back from office, that I had to pack. I used a free duffel bag I already had — the plan was to spend as little as possible and get the honest budget experience. The only thing I bought was a pair of Decathlon trekking pants. I went in for the MH500, they only had the MT500, and I walked out having spent about ₹3,000 — more than the entire trip cost me. That is how I buy things: rarely, and then properly.
Friday night I left from Indiranagar. The bus did not even have reclining seats, and half of it was playing disco and dancing in the aisle. I was too tired to care and slept through most of it. We reached Kalasa on Saturday morning.
First night in a tent
The homestay was better than I had braced for. But being me — introvert, slow off the mark — I did not sprint for a room with an actual bed, and ended up one of the last people assigned anything. What was left was a tent.
It was a two-person Decathlon tent, and because I had come solo there was nobody to share it with, so I got the whole thing to myself. First time sleeping in a tent, and I loved it. Not claustrophobic, quiet, completely fine. Easily one of my favourite parts of the trip, which I did not expect to be able to say.
Saturday itself was the filler day: a tea garden, a temple, a waterfall, a hanging bridge. Only the last two landed for me. The bridge was privately owned, and standing on it after dark with bats flying past was genuinely eerie — also a quiet lesson in how much wealth some people quietly hold. The rest of it I sat through politely. I was there for the trek.
4:30 AM, and a ride in a cattle carrier
I do not like my morning routine being rushed, so I set an alarm for 4:30 just to have the bathroom to myself. Probably unnecessary — 5:30 would have done — but I was first ready and standing around while everyone else took their time. Then a group of college girls joined us last minute, the homestay owner asked us to wait for them to eat and get ready, and the five of us doing Kudremukh became ten. We reached the trailhead at 8:30 instead of 6:30. Very Indian, and the price of travelling with a group.
Getting there was its own experience. Our transport was one of those small Tata Sumo carriers used to move cattle — a two-seat cabin and a tiny open bed at the back. We stood in the back and the driver took us up to the base. No bus, no cab. That is transport in a village like Kalasa.
At the forest office the guy scanned everyone's printed permit. Mine had gotten damp and would not scan, so he asked me to pull it up on my phone, scanned that, and waved me through — which raised the obvious question of why he made ten people print anything at all. He is in the forest department. Print less paper.
On the way out he handed everyone a wooden stick as a stand-in for a trekking pole. I turned it down. I am in the best shape of my life and I was sure I would not need it. Remember this part.
The climb
The very first stretch — just the road from the base up to the permit office — was steeper than anything I had budgeted for. All of us had the same thought at the same time: if it stays like this, we are finished. It did not, thankfully.
It never really stopped being wet. Drizzle, then proper rain, then an hour of nothing but cloud sitting on the hill, and cold the whole time — cold enough that a soaked t-shirt and a breeze were all it took to start shivering at the top, in June, in Karnataka.
The terrain changes three or four times on the way up. First shola forest: dense, dark green, dripping, the trail a channel of red mud with tree roots laid across it like badly spaced steps. Then the streams, running fast and cold and shin-deep. Then the forest opens and you are on grassland — kilometres of rolling green hills with pockets of forest tucked into the folds, the trail a single brown line running over the top of it. Then the last push, steep and exposed, straight into the cloud.
About a kilometre and a half in we hit the first stream, crossed with a rope strung across it so the current could not take you. We got across and every one of us had completely soaked shoes, at the very start of an 11-kilometre climb. The guide told us not to worry, this would happen many more times. He was right. Every time my shoes were nearly dry, another stream showed up, and the only way through was through.
We had been promised nine kilometres one way. It was eleven. And in a couple of sections the gradient was absurd — steep enough that I was climbing on both hands and both feet, pulling myself up over wet roots. That was the first time I regretted turning down a pole. It was still fine. It was still a climb.
Wayanad was the only Western Ghats trek I had done before this — 2.5 kilometres, out and back, inside a resort's own property. Far more isolated an ecosystem, and I came back with a leech bite. Kudremukh is commercialised enough that it never felt like that, and I did not pick up a single leech all day.
What I did not expect was the scale of it. I have never done a Himalayan trek, so this was the biggest landscape I had ever walked into. All those hills you see from a train window, far away and blue — I was standing inside them. Forest, streams, uphill, downhill, and then open green rolling out in every direction. I kept stopping to take photos, and the photos kept failing to be the thing.
Somewhere on the way up I passed an older gentleman setting up a photo and offered to take it for him. He waved me off — he had been here plenty of times, he said, he was only doing it for the fun of it. So I asked how many. He told me he has come to this trek every year since 1996. Thirty years, without a break. He was not going to summit this time; his body does not allow it anymore. He climbs to the best viewpoint on the trail, sits with it, and turns around. No drama about it, just a fact. For me this was a once-in-a-lifetime day. For him it is an appointment he keeps.
The summit
I reached the top at about 1:30, half an hour ahead of everyone else in the group. It was white in every direction — fog, mist, cold wind cutting straight through me. The horse-face cliff that gives the peak its name was somewhere in front of me and completely invisible. I took my photo with the congratulations board and sat down to eat.
One rule I liked: you cannot carry a protein bar wrapper up the trail. So you unwrap everything at the bottom, put it in a tiffin, and carry the tiffin. I had eaten two bars and a chocolate on the way up — that is how hungry the climb made me. At the top I finished the entire 400-odd grams of tomato rice my homestay had packed. And by some coincidence every single person up there had been given tomato rice by their homestay. Ten strangers, same lunch, on top of a mountain in the cloud.
The descent, in a storm
We sat up there for about half an hour, and then it started raining like nothing I have stood in before. Absolutely hammering. I put on my raincoat and got wet anyway, my shoes were beyond saving, the rain actually stung, and everyone was suddenly thinking about slipping, landslides, and getting stuck up there. So we went down fast.
Descending is easier than climbing, except where it isn't. The steep sections frightened me. This was where I really missed a pole — a pole would have made the whole thing safer and simpler, and instead I was going down on both hands and both feet again, taking my time, refusing to twist an ankle or land on my back. One guy in our group had sixteen or twenty treks behind him and floated down like it was a footpath. I did not.
On the flat parts I was quick. The scenery had stopped registering by then, so I put in my AirPods, put on music, and walked eleven kilometres without a single break. Raincoat on when the rain came, off when it stopped, because I did not want to spend the whole descent sweating inside plastic. I wanted the cold air on me. That is what I came for. We were back at the base point by 4:30 PM, eight hours after we set off.
Maggi, and my blanched feet
Back at the forest office I was cold, soaked, and starving again despite another protein bar on the way down. There was a man selling Maggi for ₹50. If I had been running that stall I would have charged ₹100 and everyone would have paid it. I sat there with a bowl of it, talking to the sixteen-trek guy, who had beaten me down by half an hour.
Then I took my shoes off and my feet were blanched. Not pale — drained of colour, like there was no blood in them at all. Wet all day inside tight shoes with a bad sole, which is what I get for trekking in the Adidas pair I own instead of a real trekking shoe. I put my Crocs on, and circulation came back over the next hour or two, but it was unsettling to look at. Meanwhile there were people who had done the entire climb in Crocs. I still cannot decide whether those people are amazing or insane.
The cost of a single day
We waited for the rest of the group. A guide is mandatory on this trek — we had taken ours at the trailhead that morning, and bringing the whole group back down was his job, so the college girls, the last people off the summit, came down with him. Then the cattle carrier again, standing in the back in the rain, in the dark, while the driver took hilly wet turns at a speed I did not think was survivable. Rainwater in my face, branches at head height, one hand holding on and the other protecting my face for half an hour. He was completely confident. I was completely convinced we were going into the valley.
Somehow we made it back, got cleaned up, waited for everyone, and left for Bengaluru. Dinner somewhere on the highway at 1 AM, city at around 5:30 AM. I did not go to office the next day. I could not walk properly — I was limping — because 22 kilometres in one day is 22 kilometres in one day.
That is exactly why Kudremukh is rated moderate to difficult. It is not technical. A few sections are genuinely steep, but nothing needs skill. The difficulty is that all of it has to be done between sunrise and sunset, in one push, up and back.
Doing this from Bengaluru
It is an easy trip to put together. Pick a weekend, book one thing yourself, and let an operator do the rest. The permit is the only part nobody can do for you: Kudremukh's forest permit has to be booked in your own name on Aryavr, at midnight, two weeks before your date. That is your whole job.
Everything else I handed to Tripbae — bus from Bengaluru to Kalasa and back, the homestay, homestay meals, the local transport to the trailhead and back. I turned up with a bag. Here is what the weekend actually cost me:
That is genuinely all I spent. I already owned the bag, the shoes and the clothes, so the only extra was a pair of trekking pants I wanted anyway. You can absolutely do this independently — permit, your own transport to Kalasa, your own stay — and if that is your style, go for it. But with a group it is simpler, there is less to arrange and go wrong, and it is cheaper than doing the same weekend alone.
If you are going: book through a permitted operator, set the midnight alarm for the permit two weeks out, carry rain gear whatever the forecast says, bring a trekking pole for the descent, wear shoes you actually trust, and start early enough to be well down before dark.
Soaked shoes, a stolen view, a storm at the top, and someone else's thirtieth year on the same trail. It was one of the best days of my life, and I know how that sounds from a photo of white fog. That is my whole point: the pictures do not carry it. Go stand in it.