Monday 21 December 2015

Irshalgad to Prabhal machi via ridge trek..

Irshalgad-Prabhalgad,
Feb,2012,
                Irshal Prabhal Kalvantin form a cluster of forts for hiking in that region,, we planned to connect Irshalgad trek to Prabhal machi as just irshal trek was too easy...
               Me,Ajit,Madhav,and Shashikanth were free for the day,,so all of us planned for it,,..
 We took last train for karjat which reached KJT around 3 am... rested at karjat ST stand for the night.. After few hrs sleep we took first bus going towards panvel side around 6 am.. we got down at Chowk rly stn stop. and with no wasting time,started the trek to reach irshalgad.. we crossed tracks,and after 20-25 mins walk we reached near morbe dam,,walked along its banks,sighting early birds and vegetable plantation on other side,was a nice walk,,we chose a spot where we had dry woods and water from the dam,,,we made our breakfast and tea,,,after munching on noodles and tea,,we had a thought,,why not make the trek bit harder,,as we knew irshal trek is too easy for a trek,,we decided to make our own route till base of irshal .. we wound off our breakfast and rest and took off for irshal.. used the following route to reach irshal as shown on map

                                            our breakfast :)
                           Yellow line is the regular route,, Red line is what we took to make it more thrilling...
  

later we reached the base of irshalgad,,rested for few mins,and then without any waste of time took off for the fort,,after around 1 hr,we reached the top and were confused,,as last time when we had come,,the top part was connected all the way till the end,,but this time we found entire section to be very thin and dangerous with steep fall on both the sides,,,we reverted back and saw another route going from down near the caves which would later rise till top.. we descended and took that route to find that the old caves had disappeared ! entire section from top of the fort had collapsed and closed that caves..later we reached till top of the fort took few pics,tried acrobatics on the small pinnacle on top,saw needhe and then descended the fort towards north east side,,we reached a spot and found route reached to a dead end,! so we walked in wrong direction,,and were too lazy to go back all the way and come around,,although the route seemed to be dead end,but one could descend those huge rocks with few acrobats,,,so we tried it,and it was quite easy,,we saved lots of time and energy due to our dare to try it. check the pic for the route we took

                            Red line is the acrobatic stretch,,yellow is the route we took to descend towards the ridge connecting both forts.

               It was already noon,,so decided to have our lunch,,made sandwich and took a 30 mins nap beneath a tree.. it was 1:30 pm and time for the ridge..following is the pic of the ridge


                 Red line is the path we took from ridge till thakurwadi base of prabhal via machi.

After a long walk around 2 hrs via ridge we reached the machi,,route was pretty straight and easy,spotted lots of birds while we passed near prabhalgad region,,we reached the first house on machi,,they showed another easy short cut to descend the machi than to go across the machi which joins kalavantin route,,it saved nearly 1 hr of us.. we reached the base around 5:30 pm,got a tempo,hitch hiked till panvel stn.. had food at a hotel nearby,,took train and that ended our another beautiful trek.

Any questions,do post it in comments.

Happy Trekking


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