You know, whenever we speak to trekkers—or even to our own families—we find ourselves raving about how extraordinary our Indiahikes Trek Leaders are.
But somehow, we are never able to do justice to their skill, especially when it comes to safety. Words always seem to fall short.
Until yesterday, when we read a message from one of our Trek Leaders, Ankit Chippa. He’s currently on his way to explore trails in Madhya Pradesh. And he shared something on our internal WhatsApp group that gave many of us goosebumps.
We thought to ourselves: If this doesn’t reflect the depth of our Trek Leaders’ emergency skills, nothing else will. So we are sharing his message with you exactly as he wrote it, without any edits.
He writes:
“Sham ka salaam team,
Just wanted to share an experience that happened today.
My Path From Doubt to Leadership
(An anecdote from my journey )
With the happy and proud feeling of getting an opportunity to explore new trekking trails in M.P., I started my journey to Delhi yesterday from Manali. It had been almost 19 hours, and my bus was still 450 km away from Delhi. The road blocks caused by the heavy rainfall and landslides in the region had stretched my journey way beyond my expectations. After a long, long halt bus started crawling. It brought instant joy to all the dull, exhausted faces. But turned out it was too soon to celebrate, the bus stopped in the next 10 minutes as if the bus was trying to teach us a life lesson.
Sitting inside an AC bus, I started missing the ordinary buses; at least you can open their windows. I was sweating, so I decided to come out to get some fresh air. Looking at the angrily flowing Beas river, I was trying to calm myself down. And dhammmmmm
I saw a lady sitting by herself on the roadside eating Chana Chat, suddenly falling on her head on the ground. If I were there in that situation a few years ago, I would have been completely clueless and in panic, but today it was not the case; I was confident and skilled enough to deal with the situation.
I jumped into the scene. The lady was having an episode of seizure. I did what I was supposed to do. I made sure her airway was not obstructed, protected her dignity. A foreign lady who was a paramedic collaborated throughout. In her purse, we found medicines that control seizures. After 4-5 minutes seizure stopped. We put her in the recovery position. By the way, it is too hard to stop people from crowding the scene. I had to be firm and assertive to keep them away. When she recovered completely from the episode, I did a PAS (Patient Assessment System) and found out she had epilepsy. We took her back on the bus and made her comfortable. We suddenly realised traffic started moving, and our bus was a little away from her bus. We started running towards our bus and got inside. To my surprise, the people on my bus welcomed us with a round of applause. We noticed a young girl in our bus who saw all that was breathing heavily and was very anxious. She was diagnosed with an anxiety disorder.. I helped her with guided breathing (box breathing) and calmed her down.
I am still sitting in the bus and thinking while writing this, how I was able to do all this, where did I get the courage to scold random people for interfering in the medical response? And getting the answer is not difficult.... It's Indiahikes
I am not the underconfident person you all saw in the office. This organisation groomed me a lot as an individual, and I will be forever grateful for that. Aap sabhi ko Ankit ka salaam.”
Ankit’s presence of mind was extraordinary—but what stands out even more is how instinctively he responded.
There’s a reason he credits Indiahikes. The calmness with which he performed a PAS, protected the patient’s dignity, managed a crowd, and even helped a fellow passenger with an anxiety disorder—all of it stems from rigorous training.
This isn’t a one-off story. We’ve heard many such incidents from our Trek Leaders—off the mountain, on a bus, at railway stations, even in marketplaces.
It’s because they don’t just train once. Safety is woven into their everyday practice—until it becomes second nature to them.
This is what makes our Trek Leaders stand out—not just as skilled professionals, but as dependable human beings. And to us, that’s what makes our Trek Leaders some of the finest in the world.