We had been looking for land for over a year. Every weekend trip to the mountains had a second agenda — talking to locals, asking about plots, walking ridgelines.
Most of what we saw was either too remote, too expensive, or too close to the road. We wanted forest. We wanted silence. We wanted a view that would make you forget whatever you were carrying when you arrived.
The drive above Joshimath
It was October 2022. The autumn light in Uttarakhand is something else — the oak leaves go golden, and the air has this crystalline quality where you can see individual peaks a hundred kilometres away.
We were driving up from Joshimath on a road that barely qualified as one. The kind of road where you have to reverse to let a truck pass. At one point the forest opened up, and there it was.
A clearing in the oaks, facing south-east, with the entire Nanda Devi range stretched across the horizon like a wall of light.
We got out of the car and stood there for twenty minutes without saying anything.
The land
The plot was about half an acre, gently sloped, covered in wild grass and surrounded by mature oak and rhododendron trees. The nearest house was a ten-minute walk downhill. No road noise. No power lines in the sightline.
A local farmer owned it. He had been using it to graze his cattle. When we asked if he would sell, he looked at us like we were slightly mad — why would anyone from the city want a patch of forest?
What convinced us
Three things:
- The view. Not just the mountains, but the depth of the valley below and the way the light moved across it through the day.
- The forest. Mature oaks on three sides, with birdsong that started before dawn and didn't stop.
- The silence. Standing on that clearing, the loudest sound was wind in the leaves.
We came back three more times over the next month, at different times of day, in different weather. Every visit confirmed what we felt the first time.
By December, the papers were signed. We had our piece of land at 7,500 feet.