In the mountains of eastern Uttarakhand, Shakti Himalaya’s pioneering Kumaon walking circuit has been elevated with two blissful new properties that open a window onto the slow rhythms of remote village life.

Photographs by Chris Schalkx

A farmer in front of her home near Shakti Prana; a bedroom at Shakti Panchachuli.

So, where were these snow-cloaked mountains, exactly? The sun had barely tipped above the horizon when the wheels of our prop plane kissed the tarmac at Pantnagar Airport. I had boarded an hour earlier, bleary-eyed in Delhi, and watched the landscape below unfurl into an endless, chapati-flat patchwork of farms and industrial estates. A car was waiting at Pantnagar, and we drove north, past shanty towns and smoke-belching paper mills—yet the alpine peaks I’d imagined were still nowhere to be seen.

Here in northern India’s Kumaon district, you don’t get anywhere fast. Taking up the eastern half of Uttarakhand, this little-visited region is wedged between Tibet and Nepal in the northeast, and the palace-dotted plains of Uttar Pradesh to the south. I’d come here to check out Indian adventure outfitter Shakti Himalaya’s refreshed Kumaon circuit, a slow-travel route linking small but sumptuously refitted “village houses” and their new Shakti Prana lodge, with generous helpings of forest trails and mountain air between them.

About an hour into our drive, the land began to crumple like a carpet pushed against a wall. As the road writhed upward, we overtook grunting trucks and buses with shrink-wrapped cargo strapped to their roofs and plastic marigold garlands bobbing from their hoods. Macaques loitered on the guard rails; roadside stalls, shaded by blue tarpaulins, sold bags of potato chips and nuts strung up like bunting.

It was only after a chai stop and three more hours of hairpin bends and precipitous inclines that Nanda Devi came into view. Before Nepal’s chart-topping summits were mapped, this silvery 7,816-meter peak was the highest mountain known to man, revered by the people of Uttarakhand as the earthly manifestation of the goddess Parvati. Even now, she remains off-limits to climbers. Every September, local devotees carry effigies of the goddess up the slopes in a symbolic pilgrimage to her consort’s mythical abode atop Mount Kailash, another sacred peak across the Tibetan border.

Over the course of the following days, Nanda Devi would become our constant, shifting from a fiery orange silhouette at dawn to an eerily glowing outline at night. Sometimes she stood crisp against a cobalt sky; other times she floated, half veiled in haze. But she never quite disappeared.

By the time our driver finally cut the engine, the road had long since dwindled into a serpentine track. From our parking perch, an unassuming footpath snaked farther up into the hills. Porters were waiting to carry our bags, and my guide, Rohan Dhar, and I set off on foot. The air was sweet with the scent of resin seeping from V-shaped grafts scarring the pine trees, and mica-flecked stepping stones shimmered underfoot. Halfway up, after weaving through groves and terraced farms, a chorus of “yihooos” echoed from the hillsides, where women in bright saris were cutting grass and piling it into stupa shaped mounds for winter cattle feed. The hum of crickets and cicadas filled the silence in between, and every so often Dhar warned me of “land mines”—the still-fresh cow patties that polka-dotted the trail.

Then, just beyond a one-house hamlet, Shakti Panchachuli’s three wooden cabins jutted out from a grassy terrace overhead. This new addition to Shakti’s Kumaon circuit felt high-design compared with its more rustic—though equally snug—counterparts in villages farther south. The cabins are built from timber and Tetris-stacked stone, with thatched roofs, spacious copper-accented bathrooms, and a bukhari stove to fend off the evening chill. At the foot of each cashmere-swathed bed, a wall of windows framed Nanda Devi and the peaks of the nearby Panchachuli range like a landscape painting.

Left to right: One of the three cabins at Shakti Panchachuli; a book from Shakti Prana’s library.

Left to right: A village encounter on the climb up to Prana; detail of a door at Shakti Panchachuli’s baakhli row house.

Left to right: Sunrise at Shakti Panchachuli; rubbing hashish at a herder’s home.

Below the cottages sat a long, lime-washed baakhli, a traditional Kumaoni row house once shared by generations of a single family. Part of it has been swapped out for a newer structure that houses the staff quarters, kitchen, and communal living room, where a wood fire crackles after dark. The surrounding gardens teemed with produce: blood oranges drooping on their branches, banana trees and sugar cane swaying in the wind. From the terrace out front, Dhar and I watched the day’s last slivers of light gild Nanda Devi’s edges until she glowed moon like against a purpling sky.

I could easily have spent my entire trip here, as many of Shakti’s guests do. I’d rise with the blinds drawn up to catch the first rays of sun turning the peaks to gold, then saunter down for breakfasts of fresh curd with nutty granola, punchy masala omelets, and pomegranate seeds that glinted like rubies. I’d trek up to the Binsar Wildlife Sanctuary, whose perimeter skirts Panchachuli’s perch, half-hoping to spot a leopard on the prowl. Or I’d descend into the valley, past women hauling bales of grass twice their size, and walk between temples and village homes where chilies and lentils lay drying in the sun.

But Panchachuli, in my case, was just a stopover—a teaser for the main event, another four-hour drive farther north. We set out again early the next morning, the stone path still slick with dew, passing sleepy village homes and mist-wrapped trees on our way down to the car. On the map, the road ahead looked as though it had been drawn by someone with tremors. In an endless succession of tight curls and sharp switchbacks, the route wound through mountainsides ribbed with terraced fields of potatoes and wheat; past near-vertical valley towns split by glacier-fed rivers and mountaintop temples gleaming in the sun. Agave plants burst from the hillsides like green fireworks, and pines pinned the ridgelines above. Every so often, the car was swallowed by a herd of goats.

Once again, we parked the car and continued on foot along a trail that proved a notch more demanding than the first. With two porters darting ahead with our bags, we threaded through the backyards of lone farmhouses and along the slippery paths of their orchards, where blue magpies flitted between the branches. We passed a hilltop temple and a pack of mules on a supply run, their backs loaded with rice sacks and gas cylinders. By the time we crested the final ridge, my shirt clung to my back and I was panting—but the sight of Shakti Prana and its wide-screen vistas made the climb instantly worthwhile.

Left to right: The communal lounge at Shakti Prana; a villa at the same property.

Left to right: A depiction of the Hindu goddess Durga at a local temple; a village snack of cucumbers with salt and chili.

Morning fog blankets a valley near Shakti Prana.

There’s a concept called the Blue Mind Theory, which holds that being near the ocean makes people calmer, happier, and more focused. If there’s a high-altitude equivalent—a Green Mind Theory, perhaps—I think I’ve found it here. From Shakti Prana’s terrace, forested slopes rolled away in layers of green and gray until they dissolved into the silver thread of the Ramganga River, roaring hundreds of meters below us. The air smelled of pine and woodsmoke, and apart from the river’s white-noise thunder, it was blissfully quiet. The geography itself forces you to slow down: there are no roads, no rush, and barely a phone signal.

It was this go-slow rhythm—and Kumaon’s staggering beauty—that first drew Shakti’s soft-spoken founder, Jamshyd Sethna, to this far-flung corner of the Himalayas. When I met him over drinks in the lodge’s communal lounge that evening, he was sitting by the fire, a whisky sweating beside him. Born in Mumbai and now based in Delhi by way of London, Sethna spent his childhood at a Himalayan boarding school, where his love for the high country began. After a three-year stint managing a tea plantation in Assam, he moved into hospitality with the establishment of Banyan Tours, a high-end tour operator for bespoke trips around India. On a hike during one such outing two decades ago, Nanda Devi appeared on the horizon, and something clicked. Soon after, he founded Shakti Himalaya to show travelers, as he put it, “a part of India no one really knew about.” The company now has circuits in Ladakh, Sikkim, and Kumaon—but Shakti Prana is arguably its most ambitious venture yet.

Though it opened for its first season in October, the lodge is technically only half-new. For years, Shakti’s Kumaon circuit culminated at a mountaintop retreat—Shakti 360° Leti—designed by architect Bijoy Jain of Studio Mumbai. But when the landowners raised the rent, Sethna started looking around for a new roost. He eventually found this spot, so far away from the nearest road that “nobody would be mad enough to build anything on it.”

But mad enough, Sethna was. He had the old lodge taken apart piece by piece, each wooden beam, stone, and slate roof tile ferried across the valley by mule and reassembled here, on this lonely escarpment above the clouds, like Theseus’s ship in reverse. More than a hundred artisans helped shape Shakti Prana’s new look: seven timber-and-stone bungalows set into the slope and glassed in on three sides to catch the views. Inside, each has two fireplaces and yak-wool rugs from Ladakh’s We Are KAL workshop strewn across the floor. Private terraces come with firepits, while in the bathrooms hang silk-soft robes created by Delhi-based design duo Abraham & Thakore.

I woke up to a knock on the door the next morning, and found one of Shakti’s koti-wearing staff waiting with a tray of milky chai and butterscotch cookies. After breakfast, Dhar and I headed out for a hike, tracing a stone footpath above the lodge. As we ambled through a forest of oaks and rhododendrons, their gnarled branches dripping in moss, Dhar told me about the British Raj’s trigonometrical survey expeditions that crossed these trails in the 1850s, and the Kumaoni pundits they hired to secretly map the ridges beyond the Tibetan border.

Left to right: A breakfast spread of masala omelets and granola with fresh curd and pomegranate seeds at Shakti Panchachuli; guide Rohan Dhar.

Left to right: Shakti Prana’s sauna and hot tub; a figurine in the dining room at the same property.

Left to right: Chickpea curry; a hillside villa at Shakti Prana.

High up on a hillside, where the grass grew knee-high and sun-bleached chunks of soapstone poked through the fields, we stopped at a shepherd’s farm. We found its matriarch—who must have been at least a century old—sitting cross-legged on the ground, shelling sun-dried kidney beans into a tin bowl. I helped her out for a while, and though our conversation was mostly wordless, it felt full of meaning. Higher up, a man with a rifle slung over his shoulder ambled past. He told us rather nonchalantly that he’d spotted a couple of Himalayan black bears below the ridge where we had just stopped for a drink. On the way back, I paused often to pet the goats roaming the trail.

Dinner that night was mutton curry. Tibetan chef Yeshi Lama, who has been with Shakti since the beginning, draws mostly on the Himalayan larder for breezy terrace lunches and candlelit dinners that punch well above their weight for such a remote outpost. Other evenings, there was cardamom-scented chicken korma, pilau rice studded with fresh morels, and an ever-changing rotation of flatbreads—ballooning bhaturas, perfectly flaky parathas—all paired with excellent wines.

Another early morning, we hiked down into the valley, our walking sticks click-clacking against the rocks lining the path. Lanky-limbed langurs crashed through the trees overhead, while we had to stop occasionally to flick a leech off our shoes. Everywhere, terraced farms slid down the slopes like slow spills of green lava. We stopped at one of them, a hill-clinging hamlet of two baakhli houses, where the men were out in the fields while the families’ teen daughters were hauling back breaking loads of compost down the slopes. We swapped our stash of cookies and cashews for cucumbers as fat and plump as squashes, which we ate with chili and salt, the juice dripping down our fingers.

By the time we reached the valley town of Tejam, where the Ramganga and Jakuli rivers tangled into a braid of whitewater, the sun had long burned through the morning haze. Pigtailed girls in neatly pressed uniforms shrieked “hellooo!” from their schoolyard as we passed, and just beyond the town’s small riverside temple, the Shakti crew had magicked up a full picnic with cold towels, watermelon juice, and a spread of noodle salad and sha phaley—Tibetan meat pies stuffed with spiced chicken. We ate it, muscles screaming, in the cool shade of a tree, before hitching a ride back to the lodge.

When it came time to leave, Sethna’s words from our first evening together lingered in my mind: “I feel that great beauty—whether it comes from literature or art, music, or nature—has a healing effect on people,” he had told me. “What I hope they take back is a little balance, a little peace, a sense of who they really are.”

All too soon, I was back in Delhi, surrounded once again by the hot, honking chaos of urban India. But Nanda Devi remained in my mind’s eye—white against a blue sky, and perfectly still.

Left to right: A view of Nanda Devi from Shakti Panchachuli; a bedroom at Shakti Prana.

Exploring a mountain trail above Shakti Prana lodge.

Shakti Himalaya offers five-night Village Walk experiences in Kumaon from October through April. The all-inclusive itinerary includes three nights at Shakti Prana and two nights at Shakti Panchachuli, and is priced from US$4,360 per person based on double occupancy.

This article originally appeared in the December 2025/February 2026 print issue of DestinAsian magazine (“Kumaon Calling”). Buy a single issue or subscribe here.

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