The Better India · 5 hours ago

How Pilgrims & Trekkers Are Cleaning Himachal’s Himalayan Trails

Along the sacred high-altitude trails of Himachal Pradesh, where pilgrims climb toward shrines and trekkers seek the particular silence of the Himalayas, the Himalayn Tribe Foundation has spent years doing something quietly radical: turning visitors into stewards. Founded after RP Negi Yullam witnessed plastic buried under snow near Shrikhand Mahadev and Kinnaur Kailash, the organization has removed more than 500 tonnes of waste from these fragile corridors - carried down on volunteers' backs, across 35-kilometer stretches, through altitude and sudden weather, with no roads or bins waiting at the end. "People who trek or go on pilgrimage directly interact with the ecosystem," Negi explains. "When conservation is led by those who walk these trails, the connection becomes personal, not instructional." What has followed is a slow, durable transformation: pilgrims now ask where to dispose of their waste, locals report hotspots and join the drives, and volunteers like Bhuvan Malik return home packing differently, thinking differently - because carrying the weight of the mountain's burden down on their own backs changed something in them that a sign or a campaign never could.