How TrekBaba works
Every operator calls its treks “easy to moderate”. We wanted one number that means the same thing on every trail — and a way to know what you'll actually see from the top.
The difficulty grade
One formula, applied identically to all 49 treks: 35·altitude + 15·ascent + 15·longest day + 35·exposure, scored 0–100. Altitude is convex — the term grows faster the higher you go, because acute mountain sickness does. Exposure captures snow, scree, ice, glacier and pass crossings. Bands: Easy under 40, Moderate to 63, Difficult to 84, Very Difficult from 85.
The formula was calibrated against a founder-walked set of treks, then run on every trek in the catalogue. 27 treks have their altitude, ascent and exposure computed from OpenStreetMap route relations over the Copernicus 30 m terrain model — those are marked provisional until field-verified. The rest are hand-filled from public approximations and equally labelled.
The viewshed — peaks you will really see
For 40treks we run a line-of-sight computation from the trek's viewpoint over the terrain model against every named peak within 40 km that rises 150 m above the viewpoint. A peak counts only if the ground between you and it does not block it — so the panorama on each page is proved, not promised. Sunrise and sunset alignments are then computed from the same bearings with NOAA's solar equations.
Climate, remoteness and crowding
Per-camp climate (49 treks) comes from the ERA5 reanalysis (2016-01-01–2025-12-31), with temperature lapse-rate-corrected to the camp's true altitude; precipitation stays at grid-cell resolution and is shown as area context. Remoteness (49 treks) is hours to the nearest drivable road along our own route line — a floor for any evacuation. Crowding is a percentile of public attention across the catalogue, not a headcount, and a trek without a signal shows no score rather than a fake zero.
Operators and prices
TrekBaba sells nothing. Operator rows are structured facts — price, days, batch cap, inclusion flags — read from each operator's own public page on the date shown, kept as an append-only history (so you can see a price trend), and always linked out. We never copy an operator's itinerary, prose or photos. If a price is missing, it is because we could not read one reliably; we do not guess.
Who is behind it
TrekBaba is built by Piyush Pathak, who walks these routes and posts them as @piyush.wanders. Field-collected facts — GPS-accurate viewpoints, last ATM, carrier signal — come from those trips; everything else is computed in the open from public data. Corrections are welcome.
Sources and licences
- Route data © OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL.
- Terrain: Copernicus DEM GLO-30 (ESA).
- Climate: ERA5 via Open-Meteo. Solar position: NOAA equations.
- Satellite imagery on route maps: Esri, Maxar, Earthstar Geographics. Terrain tiles: OpenTopoMap (CC-BY-SA).
- Every computed figure is an estimate and is labelled as one where it appears.
Start with all treks or the beginner set.