The Epic Sahyadri Trail: How One Project Mapped India's Longest Hiking Trail - and Opened It to Everyone

What Is the Epic Sahyadri Trail?

The Epic Sahyadri Trail (EST) is a continuous walking route that traces the length of the Sahyadri mountains - the northern stretch of the Western Ghats - down the western side of Maharashtra, running roughly parallel to the Arabian Sea coastline. At 1,724 kilometres, it is the longest mapped hiking trail in India, and the first that has been documented end to end in a way an ordinary hiker can actually follow.

The Sahyadri is older than the Himalaya and forms part of one of the most biodiverse regions on the planet. The EST threads together the features that make this range remarkable: ancient ghatvaats (mountain pass routes worn in over centuries), the hill forts built by the Marathas between the 17th and 19th centuries, dense monsoon forests, high plateaus, waterfalls, caves and old temples. Along its length the trail passes more than 300 points of interest - including dozens of forts, peaks and passes - and links up over 250 villages and settlements.

Crucially, the EST is not one intimidating monolithic route. It has been divided into 40 stages across 11 sections, and each stage is designed to be walked on its own. This structure is the single most important thing to understand about the trail, and we'll come back to it - because it's what makes a 1,724 km trail approachable for someone who has never hiked more than a day in their life.

1,724 km Total trail length - the longest mapped hiking trail in India

40 stages Across 11 sections - each walkable independently, a weekend at a time

300+Points of interest - forts, peaks, passes, waterfalls, temples

250+Villages and settlements along the route

1,646 m Highest point - low enough that altitude is never a concern

8 months Hiking window, June to January - one of the longest in India

The entire trail - maps, GPS tracks, stage-by-stage notes, hazard information, route breakdowns and audio logs - is being published free on hikex.in, with no ads and no paywall, released one stage per week.

The Problem It Solves: India's Invisible Trails

Here's something that sounds like a contradiction but isn't: India has more walking trails than it has roads. The mountains, forests and rural stretches of this country are laced with countless footpaths - routes worn in over centuries by villagers moving between hamlets, herders taking cattle out to graze, pilgrims walking to shrines, families crossing a ghat to reach the next valley. Unlike in much of the West, there is no clean line here between "front country" and "backcountry." These are living, working routes, connecting settlements just a few kilometres apart. For anyone who loves to walk, they are pure gold.

And yet, until now, you could not really use them - because none of these paths existed on a map you could follow. There were no notes on where to find water, where the safe exits were, which stretch turned treacherous after rain, or where you could sleep for the night. The trails were real on the ground and invisible everywhere else. What knowledge existed lived in the heads of a few experienced hikers and a handful of guiding companies. If you weren't already inside that circle, the outdoors stayed just out of reach - beautiful to look at, intimidating to actually enter.

There is a second, more urgent problem. These centuries-old trails are quietly disappearing. As new roads get laid over old footpaths and younger generations leave villages for city jobs, the routes fall out of use - and a path only survives as long as people keep walking it. Stop, and within a few seasons the forest takes it back. Centuries of accumulated knowledge - where the path runs, how to read it, where it's safe - vanishes with it.

A trail survives only as long as people keep walking it. When they stop, the wild takes it back - and the knowledge disappears with the path.

The EST was built to address both problems at once: to rescue a set of living routes before they vanish, and to make them usable by writing down - properly, on the ground - everything a person needs to walk them safely.

Built for Everyone, On Purpose

What makes the EST genuinely different from the big mountaineering expeditions you may have read about is that it was designed, from the start, to be approachable. Three deliberate choices make it that way.

1. You can walk it in small pieces

The full trail is broken into 40 stages across 11 sections. You are not expected to disappear into the mountains for three months. You can walk a single stage over a weekend, come back to your life, and pick up the next one whenever you're ready. Skip the harder bits, rejoin further down - the trail does not break if you do. It is a long journey you can take one afternoon at a time, which means a working professional with two free days can experience the EST just as meaningfully as a thru-hiker with three months to spare.

2. There's an exit almost every day

The EST was mapped as a village-to-village route, which means on nearly every day of the trail you pass through a place with people, food and a way out. Manav describes the whole trail as being like a long hallway with doors down the length of it - you're rarely far from a village and a road. If the weather turns, if you're tired, if something feels wrong, there is a way off. That built-in escape route is rare among long-distance trails anywhere in the world, and it is precisely what makes this one safe enough for a beginner to attempt. It also functions as an inbuilt safety system: help is never far, and the route has identified local relay guides who can hand hikers off from one section to the next.

3. You don't need to carry a house on your back

Because there's a village at the end of most days, you can sleep in someone's home, eat a hot home-cooked meal, and set off again the next morning - without a tent, a stove, or days of food weighing you down. There is also no serious altitude anywhere on the route; the highest point sits well below the level where thin air becomes a problem. This is not an endurance test dressed up as a holiday. Walked at an easy pace, it is a genuinely enjoyable long walk through some of India's most beautiful and least-known terrain.

This design also makes the EST culturally rich in a way a remote wilderness trek can't be. Over long distances you move through changing food, dialects and architecture from one village to the next. You are hosted in people's homes, you eat what they eat, you see the paintings on their walls and the books on their children's shelves. The trail is not a corridor cut through emptiness - it is a thread running through living communities.

The Man Who Walked It Into Existence

A trail like this doesn't get mapped from a desk. Someone has to physically walk every step of it - verify the path, mark the water sources and the hazards, find the exits, and talk to the people who live along the way. A GPS line traced on satellite imagery is not a trail. Only the ground truth is.

The person who did that walking is Manvendr Singh Shekawat - known to most simply as Manav - a speed hiker, outdoor educator and trail mapper, and a co-founder of HikeX. Over roughly 70 days across one winter, he covered more than 2,000 kilometers on foot, mostly alone, scouting and documenting the entire route. He climbed a cumulative height he compares to summiting Everest from sea level every week for ten weeks straight. He recorded a field note and an audio log every single day, gathered footage for a documentary, and even left first-aid kits behind in remote shepherd hamlets that have no medical access of their own.

Manav came to this the long way around. He drifted through electronics engineering and civil-services preparation before an unshakeable pull toward the mountains took over. He trained in mountaineering, helped run a trekking club, and then discovered how much ground he could cover travelling light - compressing four-day treks into 12-hour day hikes with nothing but a small daypack. Over a decade he has clocked thousands of kilometers across India, Nepal and Indonesia, and mapped a large share of them onto OpenStreetMap, the free, community-built map of the world.

But ask him about the EST and he won't dwell on the athletic side. In his own words, it was never an endurance challenge disguised as a mapping project - it was a mapping project that happened to demand endurance. The walking was never the point. The record it left behind was.

"In my head, I was just following a process — day 1, day 2, day 70."

Manvendr Singh Shekawat (Manav), on scouting the EST

It was only at the finish, he says, when he saw a group waiting for him - his parents, his sister and his niece among them - that it caught up with him and he broke down. Until that moment, it had simply been the next day's work, and then the next.

And it did not happen alone. HikeX - the name stands for Hiking Information and Knowledge Exchange - was co-founded by Manav and Shubrank Mukhiya, who leads the product, systems and business side of the project, turning all that raw fieldwork into resources that an everyday hiker can actually pick up and use. Behind the two of them is a team, a documentary crew who walked long stretches of the trail capturing everything, and a community of thousands who followed the expedition day by day and continue to support the work.

Why a Mapped Trail Changes Outdoor Culture

It is worth slowing down here, because this is the real reason the EST matters - beyond being a remarkable feat.

There is a particular problem with the outdoors in India, and Manav puts it plainly: we love the idea of the outdoors, but we don't have the skill set to enjoy it confidently. The gap between wanting to go and knowing how to go - safely, on your own terms - is enormous. So most people either never start, or they funnel into the same handful of famous, overcrowded spots, because those are the only ones with any information attached to them.

Mapping is what closes that gap. When a trail is documented - when you can see the terrain, the water sources, the exit points, the difficulty grade, and honestly assess whether a section is within your ability - the outdoors stops being a gamble. You can choose a route that fits you. You can attempt something at your level instead of guessing and hoping for the best. And if something does go wrong on a mapped trail, a rescue team can actually reach you, because the route exists on record. Mapping is the foundation layer everything else stands on: safety, confidence, and the simple ability to begin.

It also reshapes the economics of the outdoors. Right now India's hikers are packed onto the same few well-known routes while thousands of kilometres of beautiful, walkable trail sit empty for lack of information. A documented long-distance trail spreads people out — across 40 stages instead of five famous forts, across hundreds of villages instead of a handful of hill stations. That footfall brings real income to remote households through homestays, meals, guiding and transport, and it gives shrinking villages a living reason to keep their old paths open. The people who walk the trail gain confidence; the people who live along it gain a livelihood.

The philosophy behind HikeX is refreshingly honest: educate rather than encourage. It would be easy to simply pump people up and push them onto trails they aren't ready for - that is exactly how preventable accidents happen. Instead, every stage of the EST comes with the real, unglamorous information a person needs to make a sound decision about whether they are ready for it. That is a fundamentally different way of building outdoor culture. It doesn't just get people out. It gets them out prepared.

Underneath all of it is a genuinely warm idea of what the outdoors should feel like. Manav talks about wanting to put the word "mother" back into mother nature - to make the wild feel like something that holds you rather than something that threatens you, reached by routes that are easy to find, welcoming and safe to follow. A mapped trail is how that feeling becomes real for someone who has never before had a safe way in.

The longer-term ambition is bigger still. HikeX is advocating for the EST to be recognised as a national tourism asset - in the way the United States protects its National Scenic Trails, a network of tens of thousands of kilometres of designated pathways. The belief is that the same approach, proven once on the Sahyadri, could be repeated across the whole of India.

How to Hike the Epic Sahyadri Trail

If reading this has made you want to actually go, here is a practical starting guide. The EST is being released stage by stage, so the full route becomes walkable progressively - but you can begin planning now.

Start with a single stage, not the whole trail

The most important piece of advice: do not think of the EST as a 1,724 km commitment. Think of it as 40 individual hikes. Pick a single stage that's close to you or that passes through terrain you like, walk that, and see how it feels. The stages are designed to stand alone, so there's no obligation to walk them in order or to complete the whole thing. For most people - especially working professionals - the trail works best as a series of weekend outings collected over months or years.

Choose your season

The hiking window runs roughly from June to January. Each part of that window offers something different. The monsoon months (June to September) bring the Sahyadri to its most dramatic - green ridgelines, full waterfalls, mist-wrapped forts - but also slippery trails, leeches and reduced visibility, so they suit hikers with some experience and good rain gear. The post-monsoon and winter months (October to January) offer clearer skies, firmer footing and comfortable temperatures, making them the easier choice for beginners. Always check the specific stage notes on hikex.in for seasonal guidance before you go.

Understand the difficulty of your chosen stage

Because the EST crosses varied terrain - from gentle village-linking paths to steep fort ascents and exposed rock sections - difficulty varies significantly from stage to stage. This is exactly why the documentation matters: each stage's notes describe the terrain, the hazards, the elevation gain and the skills required. Read them honestly and match the stage to your current ability. There is no shame in choosing an easier stage first; that is the entire point of the trail being graded and documented.

What to carry

For a single day-stage, a light daypack is enough: 2 to 3 litres of water, ORS or electrolytes, energy-dense snacks (dry fruits, chikki, roasted chana), a small first-aid kit, sun protection, a rain layer during monsoon, a headlamp, a whistle, and your phone with the stage's offline map downloaded in advance. Wear proper trail or hiking shoes with good grip - the Sahyadri's basalt rock becomes extremely slippery when wet. Because the trail is village-to-village, you generally won't need camping gear for shorter segments, but always confirm accommodation availability in advance.

Follow the trail as it releases

The complete EST - stage maps, GPS/GPX tracks, trail notes, hazard information and audio logs - is published free on hikex.in, released one stage at a time. Follow the HikeX platform to see which stages are live, download the documentation for the stage you want, and use it to plan. The eventual vision includes physical trail markers - coloured ribbons indicating the main route and side trails - though building out that infrastructure at national scale is a long-term effort.

Walk it responsibly: safety and Leave No Trace

Two responsibilities come with a trail like this.
The first is your own safety: never attempt a stage beyond your ability, tell someone your plan, carry the essentials, respect the weather, and turn back when conditions demand it. The trail's documentation exists so you can make good decisions - use it.
The second responsibility is to the land and the people. The EST passes through living villages and biodiverse, protected forest. Carry out everything you carry in, leave no litter, stick to the path, respect local customs and homes, and pay fairly for the hospitality you receive.

The trail only survives if the communities along it benefit from it and the landscape is left intact. Leave every trail better than you found it.

Where Reccy Fits In

We'll keep this part short, because the story belongs to HikeX, not to us.

Reccy was the apparel partner for the EST mapping expedition - one of our dry-fit t-shirt and trailtuck cap went the full distance with Manav, worn almost every day through nineteen hundred kilometres of heat and dust, and still going at the finish. We're quietly proud of that. But it isn't really why we backed the project.

Reccy exists because we believe India deserves a stronger, more open outdoor culture - our mission is to help ten million Indians get out. And when you sit with what that actually requires, it isn't louder advertising or bigger inspiration. It's exactly this kind of patient, foundational work: mapping the trails, marking the hazards, and making the outdoors safe and legible enough that an ordinary person can walk into it without fear. That is what Manav, Shubrank and the HikeX team have built - and getting ten million Indians outdoors looks a great deal more like this than like anything you could put in an advertisement.