Two hill regions that behave nothing alike, four temples at the top of four valleys, a national park in the plains below, and a monsoon that shuts half the state for two months. This is the map we are building the guides on top of.
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We have not written the Uttarakhand guides yet — this page is the map they are being built on. Everything below is a place worth planning a trip around, grouped the way the state actually splits rather than the way package itineraries chop it up.
Garhwal is the west: Rishikesh on the Ganga, the Char Dham temples at the head of four valleys, the meadows at Auli and Chopta, and the Valley of Flowers, which is open for about ten weeks a year. Kumaon is the east and it is gentler — Nainital's lakes, the Almora and Kausani ridges, and long views of Nanda Devi from places you can drive to. Below both sits the Terai: Jim Corbett, Rajaji and the sal forest belt where the hills meet the plains.
The season is the whole game here. Char Dham runs roughly late April to early November and closes for winter. The Valley of Flowers only blooms in July and August — which is also the worst of the monsoon, when Garhwal's roads are at their most dangerous. Almost every mistake people make in Uttarakhand is a calendar mistake.
Twelve months, honestly. Green means go, amber means it depends, rust means don't.
The pages are not up yet, but the calendar mistakes are already avoidable. Tell us your dates and what you want out of the trip, and we will tell you what is actually open, what is safe, and what to move.
No guide behind these yet — this is the shortlist, in the order we are writing them. Each one gets the same treatment the Darjeeling and Goa pages got: how to reach, what it costs, where to stay and what is genuinely worth the climb.
These are roadmap cards, not guides — there is nothing to click yet. As each page goes live it will become a link here, exactly as the Goa and North Bengal pages did.
Same structure as every other cluster on the site: six core guides first, then a full page for each place above.
We have walked this state even though the pages are not up yet. Tell us your dates and we will tell you what is open, sequence the valleys sensibly, and say plainly what to cut. No packages, no commission.
