Trekking CougarsChoosing & Chasing Mountains
Published: July 2026 · Reading time: ~19 min · Written by ShubhKaran, Trekking Cougars team
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In 2009, we walked up to Triund and didn’t see another soul the whole climb. No litter on the trail, no speakers at the top, nothing but the Dhauladhar range and the sound of our own breathing. We’ve been watching Triund overtourism build for fifteen years now, one season at a time, and in 2026 the place finally hit a breaking point serious enough that the government stepped in and privatised it. This is the story of what changed, why it changed, and what we think responsible trekking actually has to mean now, because “it’s just Triund, anyone can do it” is exactly the sentence that got us here.
Triund at a Glance
Triund sits at 2,850 m in the Dhauladhar range above McLeod Ganj, reached by a 9 km climb that follows an old shepherd migratory path once used to move livestock between Chamba and Kangra. The Forest Rest House at the top was built in 1913, which is worth sitting with for a second: people have been walking up here for over a century, long before “Triund” meant anything to Instagram. If you want the complete day-by-day itinerary, packing list, and booking details, our full Triund Trek Guide covers that ground properly, and you can book directly through our Triund trek page. This piece is about something else: what’s happened to this trail, and why.
2009 vs. Today
We started trekking this trail in 2009, a year before Trekking Cougars existed as a company. Back then there was no checkpost at Gallu, no entry fee, no fine for anything, because there was nothing to regulate. You’d pass maybe a handful of other trekkers on a good weekend. The meadow at the top was just grass, sky, and the Dhauladhar wall of rock in front of you. Nobody was carrying a speaker up a Himalayan ridge in 2009. Nobody needed to be told not to leave plastic bottles at 9,350 feet, because it genuinely didn’t occur to people to do that.
That is not nostalgia talking. It’s the actual, measurable arc of what happened next: by November 2023, the situation had gotten crowded and littered enough that the Himachal Pradesh High Court had to step in and formally endorse crowd-control regulations for this one trail, capping daily footfall at 400 trekkers and overnight camping at 40 people across 20 tents. A court order, for a walk up a hill. That’s how far it had drifted from what we remember.
Why Triund Gets Hit Hardest
Here’s the uncomfortable part we need to say plainly: Triund isn’t struggling despite being easy. It’s struggling because it’s easy. It’s the trek people reach for specifically because they’ve never trekked before and the word “trekking” sounds exciting to say out loud, on a caption, to a friend. There is nothing wrong with a first trek being easy. There is something wrong with treating “first trek” as “no preparation needed, no trail ethics needed, no idea what Leave No Trace even means.”
We see two very different kinds of people walking up to Triund on the same weekend. One kind loves the mountains, is a little nervous, asks good questions, and treats the trail like it matters. The other kind wants twenty minutes at the top for photos and doesn’t think about the trail at all, before or after. The second kind isn’t malicious. They’re just not being told, anywhere, that a Himalayan meadow is not a party venue and not a bin. Nobody hands out that information before you buy a bus ticket to McLeod Ganj, and that gap is exactly what’s eating this trail alive.
The Privatisation Question
Here’s what actually happened, in order, because the facts matter more than anyone’s opinion of them, including ours.
Triund: An Honest Review — Best Trek or Not a Trek Anymore?
November 2023: the Himachal Pradesh High Court endorsed Forest Department regulations for Triund: a 400-trekkers-per-day cap, a new checkpost at Gallu charging ₹200 entry, and overnight camping capped at 40 people across 20 tents with an extra ₹1,000 surcharge.
Early 2024: local hotel owners and adventure operators pushed back hard, arguing the fee was hurting footfall while basic amenities like water and toilets still didn’t exist at the top. The Forest Department responded by cutting the entry fee to ₹100 and the tenting fee from ₹1,100 to ₹550 for two people, and exempted registered local guides from the fee entirely.
September 2025: the Forest Department issued its first tender to hand trek management to a private operator. It was cancelled after allegations of irregularities in the bidding process, with doubts raised about transparency. Fresh bids were invited instead, starting with smaller contracts like the souvenir shop and toilet block at Gallu.
March 27, 2026: new tenders opened, and management of the Triund trek passed to a private operator. Entry is back up to ₹200 per person, with a ₹5,000 fine for trekking without a valid receipt. Registration at the Gallu checkpost is now mandatory.
The government’s stated reasoning isn’t unreasonable on its face: manage the footfall, fund the toilets and waste systems that should have existed years ago, professionalise a trail that a High Court already had to intervene on once. And to be fair, a January 2026 Tribune report confirms this isn’t a one-off decision about one trail. The Forest Department is already earning close to ₹10 crore a year from 18 sites under this leasing model and is preparing to extend it to 73 more eco-tourism sites across the state.
That last number is the part that should concern anyone who loves these mountains, not just us. If you’ve heard talk of Prashar Lake being next, here’s the honest version: we haven’t found a report naming Prashar by name. What we have found is a Forest Department that has said, on record, it’s expanding this exact model to dozens more sites, and Prashar Lake, one of Mandi district’s most-visited lake treks, already sits within the state Ecotourism Society’s own listings. We can’t tell you it’s confirmed. We can tell you the direction is now unmistakable, and if you love a quiet trail anywhere in Himachal, this is worth paying attention to, not dismissing.
Where we personally land: we don’t object to management, in principle. A trail that a court had to intervene on needed something to change. What worries us is the gap between what gets announced and what gets enforced on the ground, because we’ve watched that gap up close for fifteen years. A rule on paper and a rule a tired forest guard actually checks at 6pm on a busy Saturday are two very different things.
Triund’s 2026 Rules & Fees, in Brief
| Rule | Detail |
| Entry fee | ₹200 per person, mandatory, receipt required |
| Non-compliance fine | ₹5,000 for trekking without a valid receipt |
| Registration | Mandatory at the Gallu checkpost before starting |
| Managed by | Private operator, under Forest Department oversight |
| Water at the top | Still no permanent supply as of 2026 — carry at least 2 litres per person |
Rules on a trail this actively contested change fast. Confirm current fees at the Gallu checkpost or with us before you go, rather than trusting any single blog, including this one, to have the latest number.
The Trail Ethics No One Teaches You
Nobody is born knowing Leave No Trace principles. Somebody has to say it once, clearly, before your first trek, so here it is:
- Whatever you carry up, carry back down. Every wrapper, every bottle, every cigarette butt. There is no bin at 9,350 feet. Your backpack is the bin.
- No speakers. Not portable ones, not phone speakers. The mountain is not a venue, and the person forty feet away came for silence, not your playlist.
- Stay on the marked trail. Cutting switchbacks or wandering off-path erodes soil and damages regrowth that takes years to recover, if it recovers at all.
- Don’t feed or approach wildlife for a photo. It’s not as harmless as it looks, for you or for them.
- If you’re new to trekking, say so, out loud, to whoever’s guiding you. Preparedness isn’t about ego. It’s about not becoming the emergency that ropes in a rescue team on a trail that was never supposed to be dangerous in the first place.
None of this requires trekking experience. It requires being told once, and actually caring afterward. That second part is the one we can’t fix with a blog post, but we can at least stop pretending nobody ever told you.
Why We’re Still Looking for New Trails Anyway
Here’s a tension we’re not going to pretend we’ve resolved. Our team is always out looking for trails all across Himachal and Uttarakhand that still feel the way Triund did in 2009. Most recently, we found one in the hills beyond Dharamshala, past Triund, more beautiful than Triund ever was on its best day. We’re not naming it or pinning its location in this post, and that’s deliberate, not an oversight.
The honest problem is this: to connect with the kind of nature lovers who’d actually respect a trail like that, we have to talk about it somewhere, on social media, on this website, somewhere. The moment we do, some of the people who find it will be exactly the crowd this whole article is about: here for the photo, gone before they’ve learned anything about the place they just stood on. We don’t have a clean answer for that. What we have is Deepgot.
We’ve been running the Deepgot Trek as a single fixed batch a year, deliberately, since we started running it. Not because it scales badly as a business (it does, and we know that), but because a trail this quiet deserves a limit, not a marketing push. It’s the closest thing we have right now to an answer: we can slow down how fast a place gets discovered. We can’t stop it, and anyone who tells you they’ve solved that trade-off completely is selling you something. If you want to see the trails we’re willing to point people toward more openly, our Hidden Trails collection is where we put the ones we’ve decided are ready for that.
Our Trail Promise
Instead of just writing about the problem, here’s what we’re committing to on our own treks, starting now:
- Every fragile or newly-discovered trail gets a capped batch size, no exceptions for group bookings.
- No speakers, on any Trekking Cougars trek, at any campsite. We’ll say it before you book, not after you’ve packed one.
- Every group gets a trail-ethics briefing before the first step, not a leaflet nobody reads.
- We don’t geotag exact coordinates of newly-found trails in public posts. Ask us directly if you’re serious about one.
- We pack out more than we pack in, every trek, as standard practice, not a special event.
It’s not a complete fix. It’s what a fifteen-year-old operator can actually promise and mean it.
Frequently Asked Questions
Q: Is the Triund trek privatised now?
A: Yes. As of tenders opened on March 27, 2026, management of the Triund trek passed from the Forest Department directly to a private operator, under Forest Department oversight.
Q: What is the Triund trek entry fee in 2026?
A: ₹200 per person, with a ₹5,000 fine for trekking without a valid receipt. Registration is mandatory at the Gallu checkpost.
Q: Is Triund still worth doing given the overtourism?
A: Yes, if you go prepared, go respectfully, and ideally avoid peak weekend crowds. The trail and the views haven’t changed. What’s changed is how many people forget it’s a wild place, not a backdrop.
Q: Is Triund a good first trek for someone with no experience?
A: Yes, physically. It’s genuinely one of the most accessible Himalayan treks in India. The gap isn’t fitness, it’s trail-ethics preparation, which almost nobody covers before a first-timer’s first trek.
Q: Will other Himachal treks be privatised too?
A: The Forest Department has stated it’s preparing to lease 73 more eco-tourism sites under the same model, after 18 sites already generate close to ₹10 crore a year. No further sites have been named publicly as of this writing.
Q: Is there water available at the top of Triund?
A: No permanent water supply exists at Triund as of 2026. Carry at least 2 litres per person.
We didn’t write this to tell you not to go to Triund. We wrote it because we’ve loved this trail since before it needed rules, and we’d rather it survive its own popularity than get loved to death by people who were never told any better.
Trek Triund with people who’ve watched it for 15 years. Trek it properly, with Trekking Cougars.
More From Trekking Cougars
- Triund Trek: Complete Guide 2026
- Deepgot Trek: Your Secret Path to Dhauladhar Splendor
- Hidden Trails Collection
- Bhrigu Lake Trek Guide
- Kashmir Great Lakes Trek
WhatsApp Trekking Cougars at +91 81988 38368 or email contact@trekkingcougars.com. We’re based near Shepherds Homestay, Kareri Khas, Dharamshala, Kangra, HP 176218.
