Tarsar Marsar trek

We pick you from the Srinagar airport and drive to Aru via Pahalgam. The drive from Srinagar to Pahalgam is a 100kms journey and another 13kms ahead is Aru. This takes 3 and a half to 4 hours of time to cover. You meet our staff at Aru and check into the rooms for the night.

Today’s trek is a beautiful trail started with a gradual ascent. We trek right next to the Lidderwat nalla (river). We cross a couple of streams and the second one over a wooden bridge. The water from here is safe to drink and fill. We get to this spot after a couple of hours trek. We cross patches of grasslands, trek into forests of Fir and Pines, Gujjar huts and get to our campsite for the day.

There is a PDA (Pahalgham District Authority) huts here as well. There is ample camping space around the area and we rest for the remaining day. We can choose to stop anywhere in between for lunch, as we’ll be having packed lunch with ourselves.

Today’s trek starts as we start from right behind our campsite at Lidderwat. We enter into a Pine forest and start our climb with an ascent for a couple of hours. We enter the grasslands of Lidderwat post this ascent. We cross a few Gujjar huts on our way. We cross a few narrow streams on our route. These streams are clean and are safe to fill water from. We need to make sure to trek together, so that we do not take the trial leading upwards. We take the trail down (also has a marking for Homwas) crossing a stream.

We trek for nearly an hour over beautiful grasslands crossing a few Gujjar huts. Before getting to our campsite at Shekwas, we cross a patch of Silver birch (Bhoj-patra) trees. This is a very pretty camping site.

Today’s trek is mostly of gradual ascent. We trek upwards towards the ridge above and enter into the Tarsar valley. A couple of hours later we can see the Tarsar lake from a distance. This view is undoubtedly one of the best views of this trek. We cross over the bolder patch to get to the campsite, next to the lake.

Today’s trek is moderate graded as we start by trekking over the Tarsar Pass. This route saves us nearly 2 to 3 hours. Additionally, we trek over grasslands which are beautiful and vastly spread out. This patch on the entire trek will have maximum flowers. They not only bring a smile on the face, but also rejuvenate our senses with their bright colors.

Crossing the flowers patch, we have a descent over scree and some boulders. A final ascent from here and we get to the shores of Sundersar lake.

We start today early in order to witness the Marsar lake during dayrise/ sunrise. From Sundersar, we need to trek upwards for about 35 to 40 mins to get to the top from where we witness the beautiful Marsar lake. Marsar lake is a similar looking lake as Tarsar in terms of beauty and size. Getting to the top could be challenging if there is snow on the boulder patches. The guide would be carrying an ice axe to make the route in this case.

We spend some time here and descend back to our campsite. Post breakfast we retrace our footsteps towards Shekwas. 45 mins from here and we get to Homwas in time for Lunch. We rest for the rest of the remaining day.

We start our day post an early breakfast as we have a long day. We retrace our steps all the way back to Aru. We trek for nearly 90mins to reach Lidderwat. We can spend time on the way to enjoy the views of the Kolahoi glacier. From this point we descend all the way down for 11kms to get to Aru. We can have lunch on the way/ Aru depending on the time and option. If we had left some of our belongings before the trek here we collect them and get into the vehicles to get to Srinagar. We should get to Srinagar by late evening.