Route guides, weather windows, safety briefs and month-by-month plans — researched on foot and rewritten before every season.
Free to read. We don't sell trips, and we name the routes we've walked and the ones we haven't.
Every month has something. We publish what's actually open, what the weather really does, and where it's worth being — including the months other sites tell you to stay home.
The verdict
Conditions
Worth going now
Conditions describe typical patterns for Sikkim, Darjeeling and the Dooars. Mountain weather doesn't read averages — check local forecasts and forest department notices before you travel.
Most sites grade a trek by how far you walk. That tells you almost nothing about whether it will hurt. We grade on altitude, daily ascent, consecutive days and how easily you can get off the mountain.
How we grade
Four factors, applied the same way to every route on the site. Difficulty is a single scale with three grades — nothing is two grades at once. When a trek sits on the boundary we publish the harder one, because the cost of underestimating a mountain is higher than the cost of overestimating it.
Maximum altitude
Above 3,500 m, fitness stops being the limiting factor and acclimatisation takes over.
Daily ascent
Metres gained per day predicts suffering far better than kilometres walked.
Consecutive days
Day four is where most people discover what their body actually thinks of this.
Escape options
How long it takes to reach a road if something goes wrong — hours, or days.
Most trekking content treats safety as a paragraph near the end. We publish it as a section, because the things that hurt people in the eastern Himalaya are predictable, well documented, and almost never mentioned in a route listing.
Three rules that don't bend
Don't go higher with symptoms
Headache, nausea, breathlessness at rest, poor sleep. If they're present, that day's altitude is where you stay until they clear.
If it's getting worse, go down
Descent is the one treatment that reliably works. Not rest, not paracetamol, not pushing on to the next camp because it's only two hours away.
Nobody with symptoms walks alone
Altitude illness impairs judgement before it impairs walking. Someone going down needs a companion, not directions.
These three follow long-standing wilderness medicine guidance, including the Wilderness Medical Society's practice guidelines for acute altitude illness. They are also the three most commonly ignored.
Where altitude starts mattering
4,000 m and above
Grade 3 on our scale. Evacuation measured in days.
3,636 m — Sandakphu
The region's most-walked summit, and well past the threshold.
3,000 m
Above here, cap the gain in sleeping altitude to roughly 500 m a day.
2,500 m
Acute mountain sickness becomes a genuine risk from about here.
This is journalism, not medical advice. RoamWire is a publisher — we don't guide treks and we aren't clinicians. Altitude illness can become life-threatening quickly. Use this to ask better questions of a doctor, a qualified guide and your own judgement, not to replace any of them.
Every guide tells you a place is peaceful. None of them tell you how many people you'll actually pass, whether your phone will ring, or if you'll hear a road at night. So we started measuring it.
The Silence Index
Tap a band to see what it means
Most travel content is assembled from other travel content. Ours isn't, and you should be able to check that. Here is the process every route guide, month page and safety brief goes through before it appears on this site.
We walk it
A route guide is written by someone who has walked that route, in a season we name. If we haven't been, the page says so at the top rather than pretending otherwise.
We cross-check it
Permits, fees, closures and transport get verified against local guides, homestay hosts and the relevant forest or tourism department — not against another blog.
We date it
Every page carries the date it was last verified and the name of the person who did it. An undated trail description is a guess with confidence.
We go back
Routes are re-checked before each season. Bridges wash out, permit offices move, teahouses close. A guide written once and left alone stops being true within a year.
What we won't do
Shorter than the list of things we will, and more useful. These are commitments, not aspirations — hold us to them.
Corrections
Conditions change faster than we can walk. If you've been somewhere recently and found us out of date, that's the most valuable message we can receive.
Every page has a "something wrong here?" link
Corrections are checked, applied, and credited to whoever sent them unless they'd rather stay anonymous. We log what changed and when, at the foot of the page.
Most of these follow a lunar calendar, so they land on different dates every year — which is precisely why you'll find last year's dates still sitting on other sites. We track them, and we say plainly when a date hasn't been announced yet.
What the scale means
We mark size honestly, because a festival worth crossing the country for and one worth a detour are different decisions.
Dates we haven't confirmed
A lunar festival's date is often announced only a few weeks ahead by the monastery holding it. We publish the window, then replace it with the confirmed date — and we never leave last year's showing.
Open the full calendarThere are far more trails in this corner of the Himalaya than one team can cover. If you've walked something we haven't — or found our page out of date — your report becomes a page on this site, under your name.
Routes we don't cover
Anything outside our published library. Small trails, local circuits, the walk from a village nobody writes about. These are the pages that don't exist anywhere yet.
Most wantedTrips that turned back
Weather, illness, a closed road, a bad decision caught in time. Almost nobody publishes these, which is exactly why they're the most useful thing a reader can find.
Rarely writtenOff-season conditions
What a trail is actually like in July, or in the last week of February. Everyone publishes the peak-season version. Nobody reports the other nine months.
Fills a gapWhat we'd need from you
No polished writing required. We edit for clarity, never for tone, and nothing gets published without you seeing it first.
You send it
A form, an email, voice notes — whatever's easiest. Rough is fine.
We check and edit
We verify what we can, ask you about anything unclear, and send the draft back.
It publishes under your name
With your byline, your photo if you want one, and a link wherever you'd like it pointed.
You keep the copyright to your words and photographs. We ask for permission to publish them here and to keep them online while the page is live — nothing more. We don't pay for reports yet, and we'd rather say that plainly than imply otherwise.
Planning happens weeks ahead of travelling. So the letter goes out at the start of each month, covering the month after next — while there's still time to do something about it.
Twelve letters a year, no more. Unsubscribe in one click, from any of them. We don't sell or share your address, and we don't email you about anything else.
Prefer something faster? Route conditions and closures go out on our WhatsApp channel as we hear them.