A Misadventure of a Picnic turning to trek

Sun was burning, the climate humid and legs tiring. Water was running out and there was hardly any food. And there was Nature, at her deceptive best. The so-called trail disappeared every now and then, camouflaged by dry leaves. The peak was visible, giving a false motivation that reaching it is so easy. Finally we gave up. For how much you can stretch a simple picnic to an arduous summer trek ? It took equally arduous hour to find our way back to meet some human soul.

We: Saurabh, Nikunj, Chirayu, Rohit and Krishnan.
Place: Karnala Bird Sanctuary
Peak: Karnala Fort

The normal path to reach the Karnala fort is through the Northern ridge. We decided to meander in a nature trail before catching up that path. But we meandered too much and ended up on the South side of the peak. Till that time the kind of landscape we were seeing had kept us not to worry that we were getting lost. Finally, we got to meet a wood cutter. We took his word of hopes and proceeded to reach the peak from the Eastern side. Then the above paragraph happened.

Not that coming back was easy, for back tracking was even more difficult with the questions like "Did we come this way?", "Did we see this tree", popping up now and then. And added to it, we had a few hours of trek in scorching sun left to reach back the place where we last saw water. So it was no wonder we were happy to see some goats grazing and even more happier when the shepherd said the village was just a few minutes walk away. Ghervadi village is nestled between trees on the mountains slopes and it gave us with the much needed water. And after another half an hour walk we were in Apta village among the civilization with vehicles buzzing around.

The misadventure brought back the memories of my summer treks, especially the Ethina Bhuja trek , where we got lost on every possible opportunity. The trip was supposed to be leisurely break from our academics and work, but turned out to shake some of us to the bottom. But the Bird Sanctuary area turned out to be having amazing landscape and if not for birds, which we hardly saw, we vowed to come back here for the landscape during or after monsoon.

The following Map of our trek route (rough one) was made out of Google map.