About Us
We build slow, small-group journeys through the Kumaon Himalaya rooted in local culture, led by local people, and designed to leave the valley better off than we found it.
Wayward Outdoors exists to make travel that actually gives back — where the guides, hosts, and teachers are the same people whose land you're walking through, and where a share of every rupee spent stays in the community that earns it.
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Founder's Note
I didn't start this because I love travel. I started it because I noticed something, and I couldn't unsee it.
For years, I worked as a mountaineering and survival instructor at NIM. I watched people arrive at the start of a course as one version of themselves, and leave as someone else, not because the mountain was beautiful, though it was, but because they'd spent long enough inside something unfamiliar and hard that they simply couldn't perform their normal self anymore. Somewhere around day four, something cracks. What's underneath is usually quieter, steadier, more honest than what walked in.
I kept looking for that same thing in ordinary travel, and I couldn't find it.
I'd see people book a weekend away — a yoga retreat, an art retreat, a beautiful place to "reset" and come back rested, maybe, but not changed. They'd seen a lovely location. They hadn't had the time or the slowness to actually notice it, or to take part in what was really happening around them in real time. It was a getaway. It was never going to be a transformation. Those two things get sold as the same thing, and they are not.
So I went back to where I actually understood this best: my own village.
This isn't outside access I arranged. I belong to this community. I grew up watching my grandmother make buttermilk by hand, twice a day, from milk that came from a cow that was part of our family, not livestock kept for it. I watched people walk to the jungle for grass, not as exercise, but as a chore that happened to keep them strong, capable, and calm in the face of daily problems most of us have engineered out of our lives. None of it was designed to be meaningful. It just was. That's the difference between a curated experience and a real one.
What I'm building is simple, even if it isn't easy to explain in a sentence: I take people into remote communities that already live differently — sustainably, unhurried, without needing anyone to visit them — and I let them live inside that life long enough to stop performing who they are back home.
Not a few days. Long enough. I've seen that four days is usually where it starts to shift, and further than that is where it settles in. So the journeys I build start there, and the longer ones go deeper, because I'd rather be honest about what actually changes people than sell you a shorter version and call it the same thing.
You won't come back with a highlight reel. You'll come back having spent real time inside someone else's life, long enough that your own starts to look different when you return to it. More grateful. More grounded. Less in a hurry to prove something.
I'm not offering you an escape from your life. I'm offering you a chance to see it differently, by spending long enough looking at someone else's.
This starts with my own community, because that's the only place I could build it honestly. Where it grows next depends on how true it stays to that.
— Aastha
Meet our Team
Guide : Yashpal Singh with the Kitchen staff
Wayward is run by a small team based in the Kumaon hills, alongside a network of local guides, hosts, and cooks across every valley we operate in — most of whom have been walking these trails their whole lives."
