When you bring someone along with you while hiking, you have to take extra safety care and when you are with children, you have to take super extra safety care. Understand that you forget yourself and all your focus goes on the children. Something similar happened to me while going to Gunhed waterfall. Let me tell you what happened to us at Gunhed waterfall.
Me and my two friends decided to take our 3 children with us to the waterfall. I also told that this trek will be a bit difficult for the children. If we take the children along, it will not be fun because they will be dependent on us, so neither the children will be able to enjoy nor we. But the children's father did not agree and finally we set out towards Gunhed waterfall at 9 in the morning.
Yesterday we came from Bir to a campsite in Gunhed. This place is very peaceful away from the crowd. Last night after dinner itself we had decided that we will go to Gunhed waterfall. Although I have roamed around Bir a lot but I never got a chance to visit Gunhed waterfall. The people in the camp told me that the waterfall is just 1.5 km away from here. They further told me that the path is not that good so be careful. We thought that no matter how difficult the path is, where it takes us 20 minutes to cover 1.5 km in the mountains, it will take us an hour at the most with the kids. And with this intention we set off on the trail.
We had just walked 200 meters when all three of us started feeling that we had made a big mistake in bringing the kids along but now that we have set out on the trail, we will see and move ahead thinking this. Turning back we see the campsite visible in Gunhed, we admire the flowers blooming around here and looking at the number of houses on the mountain in front, we wonder which village with 3 houses is this.
After 800 meters where we had to go down from the trail, we move ahead on the upper path. And by now I had understood that we had lost our way. Now I leave everyone and run ahead quickly to see if there is any shortcut to reach the waterfall, but on not finding any shortcut, I come back and tell everyone that we have to take a U-turn because we have come on the wrong path.
Everything is fine on turning back but the children have no experience of walking in the mountains, so our speed had become like that of a sloth. In the next 20 minutes we reach the right trail, now from here the trail is descending gradually, on which we hold the hands of the three children and take them down. And when everyone descends safely, we also start seeing the waterfall.
On reaching here, we all take off our shoes and pants and enter the water of the stream. While moving forward, we have to lift the children in our lap many times and at times make them stand on our shoulders and climb on big boulders. We stop for a while, drink water and start walking again. In another 15 minutes, we finally reach in front of Gunhed Waterfall. The waterfall is about 80 feet high and the air pressure of the water falling from such a height was taking us flying.
The temperature here is completely different due to the flowing water, we make the children stand at a safe place and decide to take a dip in the pond of the waterfall. I am the first one to get into the water, after going neck deep in the water we realize that the water is very cold and we will not be able to stay in it for long. One by one we all enter the water, swim a bit, jump a bit and have a lot of fun.
After about 30 minutes we wear our clothes and start descending with the children. We face a lot of problems while descending because our shoes are slipping on the stones. It takes us 30 minutes to get out of the stream and another 40 minutes to reach the campsite. After reaching the camp, everyone has breakfast. The children are happy to see the photos clicked on the phone and we three are happy to see them happy.
Disclaimer: This post is originally written in Hindi and I have used Google Translator to tranlate the Hindi text in English. All the photos have been clicked by me from POCO F1 and edited in Lightroom/photoshop.