Four days through Gangotri pine forests to the snout of a glacier — the first drop of the river that feeds half a billion people.
The trail leaves Gangotri town and runs about eighteen kilometres up the Bhagirathi valley, through deodar and birch and then out above the treeline, to the ice cliff where the glacier ends and the river starts. Bhojbasa, a scatter of huts on the moraine, is where most people sleep before the last push.
The glacier has retreated by more than a kilometre over the past century, so the snout you reach is not the one in the old photographs. Numbers inside the national park are capped, and having someone along who has walked it before matters more here than the distance suggests.
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A Uttarkashi homestay run by retired Indo-Tibetan border police.
