Big Basin Trails

If there was a little less sun in california then it would have been an ideal place for hiking. But on a saturday morning, with nothing useful to do, not in mood to go to crowded San-Francisco, you can't blame on Sun and stay at room watching US election forcasts. So me, Ravi and Viraj went out for a trip to nearby "Big basin Redwood parks". The name speaks everything. It is a vally surounded by mountains and covered by 200-300 ft. redwood trees. We stated from Freemont through San Jose on the way to Santa Cruz. It took us about one and half hours to reach there. From big basin Santa Cruz beach is just 50 miles. Basically you are supposed to see the pacific from a certain point in Big basin!


We left from Freemont after having breakfast. So there was no delay on the road except a couple where I stopped them to take some photos (they must have been fed up with me). The road towards the Park office, from where all the trails start, is a little bit elevated. But the road is very well maintained and the bikers use it as a race track! So if you are not driving then it's pretty amazing to see 1000cc bikes zoom in from behind and then zoom out. Of course if you are in the steering wheel you have to struggle to stay out of there way.

There are many trails (more than a dozen) that start form the Park Office and are categorized according to easy, moderate and strenuous. We unanimously decided to take a moderate trail. Our first plan was to take Sunset Trail to Berry Creek Falls Trail to Skyline to the Sea Trail Loop Trail. But the Berry Creek Falls trail was closed for the day. As a result we were suggested by the office to take the Skyline to Sea Trail followed by Meteor Trail, Creeping forest Trail and Dool Trail. The total length of our root came to be about 6 miles and it took us 3.5 hrs to come back to the base. One suggestion as any other hiking I would like to mention is to take LOTS of water. Otherwise you will repent.

For most part the trails were through jungle. Only after the Skyline to sea trail we went to a clearing at about 3000ft height from where pacific could be seen. All other trails were never able to see sunlight due to huge Redwood trees. The Creeping forest Trail still reminds of some old earthquake. The trees in this 1 mile stretch are all at a non-perpendicular angle with respect to the ground. Following are some pics that I took during the trek. Too sad I didn't have a DSLR to take the bird pics :(

Antaragange Trek

Last weekend 3 of us visited Antaragange, a hill-station very suitable for a day away from Bangalore and closer to nature. Antaragange is near Kolar that is maximum 2 hours travel from Bangalore city. Yet it's calmness reminded us of some very distant village.

We started from our home at 7:30 am. Ideally we should have started an hour and a half before because it is advisable to start hiking before 9 am. But couple of late night Age-of-Empires and Counter-Strike games did not help us to get up at that time. Anyways, after having breakfast at a "Sagar" restaurant near our home we reached the "Majestic" bus stop at about 8:30 am. There are regular buses to Kolar from Majestic and the bus we boarded started almost immediately. The road to Kolar was good and the journey was smooth except a small patch where repair work was going on. In the 2 hours of journey we enjoyed a good slumber and also discussed about some photography techniques that are possible with our Super-zooms (and concluded that we should have bought DSLRs).

After buying a couple of liters worth of fluids for the trek we boarded an Auto-rickshaw upto the stairs for the Antaragange temple. It's approximately 250 (nobody of us counted though) steps to the "Kashi of South India". The stairway to the temple is infested with monkeys. Now this is probably true for many temples in India but these monkeys are no less than terrorists! We lost a 500ml unopened "Slice" bottle to a silent-stealer monkey. After getting hold of the bottle it purposefully mocked us for a moment before engaging itself to open the bottle. It was not smart enough to know the mechanism of a bottle-cap, but it became clear to us that it's teeth were sufficient to open the bottle from other directions. When we figured out that it is not holding the bottle as a ransom or is unwilling to trade it for anything else we decided to move forward.


The mystery regarding the temple is that the water source to the water body near the temple is unknown. That's also the origin of the name - antara (inside) + gange (ganges). Water was coming out from depth of the rocky mountain as a spring. Probably there is some hidden stream inside the mountains, but let the myth survive.

After the temple actual trekking begins. The temple is in a height of about 1000 ft. The highest altitude we went was about 3500 ft to 4000 ft. It's not much, but the rocks - rather than a trail - make it a bit difficult. On the way we met with another large gang that came equipped with a tour guide. The tour guide warned us not to be alone in the mountains as it is infamous for robbery and stealing. There were no monkeys in that are, but then it seemed to us terrorist monkeys were better.

We continued with the gang for some time upto a small village. There they stopped for some group activities and we continued forward. Some school-going kid from the village let us know that there is a cave somewhere on the way up the hills. We were not sure of which way to go, so we took a village boy with us. It was his first job and he did a good job of guiding us around.

We were not sure where our summit was. Our guide too knew that much Hindi as much we knew Kannada. So, what we thought to be a Durga temple appeared to be a 'durga'(fort) - 'Chitra Durga'. We were hopping from rocks to rocks following some white painted arrows. On the way our guide suggested we go inside a cave. He asked whether we had torch, we nodded 'yes we have batteries in our cameras' (thought he was asking for flash). The entrance was a narrow one and inside was pitch black. The Nokia 1100 torch did not put up a good performance. Some few steps inside and we knew that we were a bit late to come there at least some 10 years. Further entrace to a relatively bigger hall was possible only for a 10-15 yr old. Yes we were happy when we came out.

Another steeper hour of trek and finally we reached a level land on the hill (our fort top). It was an amazing view around. There was a man-made well to store rain water and also a natural one. It was really worth the toil.

The journey back was also smooth. We had a very late lunch at a restaurant in Kolar and we were back to Bangalore before 7pm. Here are some more pictures we took during our treks.