“Hey, so what are you planning as your next destination?” asked our friend. “Did you say plan? Oh I am a great planner. But, the universe seems to dislike the planned version of me,” I replied. In 2013 I was trying to plan a hiking trip to the Valley of Flowers in Uttarakhand. Two months prior to its execution, India saw one of its worst natural calamities. Multiday cloudbursts in Uttarakhand killed thousands of people, animals, and destroyed roads and trails. In 2016, from the Facebook group Globetrotting Girls India, I got to know about Kas Pathar, another valley, or more accurately, plateau, of flowers near Satara city of Maharashtra.…