The working mountain: what “unexplored Vellarimala” actually means

Type Vellarimala into a search engine and the adjectives arrive before the facts: untouched, virgin, unexplored, a hidden gem the crowds have not found. It is the standard vocabulary of Indian adventure blogging, and on this particular mountain it has become actively misleading — not because the slopes are busy, but because what has been done to them is precisely the thing that makes the mountain dangerous, and the language of untouched wilderness makes that invisible.

What the land-use record says

A 2022 study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health found that Wayanad district lost roughly 62 per cent of its forest cover between 1950 and 2018, while plantation cover over the same period rose by something in the order of 1,800 per cent. That is not a marginal shift. It is the wholesale replacement of a deep-rooted, structurally complex forest with shallow-rooted monoculture across most of a district. Post-disaster analyses of the 2024 landslides cite that change, together with quarrying, among the factors increasing the susceptibility of these slopes to failure under heavy rain.

The settlements themselves tell the same story. Mundakkai, Chooralmala and Puthumala were estate villages — labour lines, a canteen, a school, a post office, places of worship — grown up around tea and cardamom operations. When the Puthumala slope failed in August 2019 and killed seventeen people, what it swept away was a post office, a temple, a mosque, an estate canteen and two lines of estate housing. These were not forest hamlets in an untouched valley. They were the residential edge of an industrial agricultural landscape that had been reshaping this mountain for well over a century.

And the reshaping is accelerating

Since August 2025 the Anakkampoyil–Kalladi–Meppadi tunnel road has been under construction directly through the Vellarimala massif: 8.73 kilometres of alignment, of which 8.1 kilometres is a four-lane twin-tube tunnel, at ₹2,134.5 crore, implemented by Konkan Railway Corporation. It is intended to cut the Anakkampoyil–Meppadi distance from 42 kilometres to 22 and is expected to open around 2030. Stage-II forest clearance, for the diversion of 17.263 hectares of forest land, was granted on 24 February 2026; rock excavation began in early 2026 and blasting in March.

Environmental groups had gone to the Union environment ministry in October 2024 — barely two months after the disaster — asking for the clearance to be cancelled, on the grounds that driving a tunnel through this specific massif at this specific moment was indefensible. They lost that argument. Then, on 7 July 2026, a landslide at Kalladi, at the eastern end of the alignment and roughly five kilometres from the 2024 crown zone, killed three people and left five missing. The dead and missing included migrant workers from Madhya Pradesh, Bihar and Jharkhand as well as local residents. Officials attributed the failure to excavated spoil stored near the exit portal and mobilised by monsoon rainfall.

The expert commentary afterwards was blunt. The geoscientist C. P. Rajendran pointed out that tunnelling alters the distribution of stress within a hill slope and creates fractures, which can precipitate failure during intense rainfall. The ecologist C. K. Vishnudas described the Kalladi slide as an engineering failure imposed upon an inherently fragile mountain, noting that around 200 millimetres of rain in a day had been sufficient to overwhelm the disturbed ground. Two hundred millimetres in a day is not an exceptional figure in a Western Ghats monsoon.

Where the blogs are accidentally right

So much for virgin wilderness. But the correction has to be careful, because the framing is wrong in one dimension and accidentally right in another. Vellarimala is heavily modified at the plantation and infrastructure level, and it is genuinely under-described at the level of species.

In 2025 a new snake was formally described in the journal Zootaxa under the title Hidden in the Sky Islands, from six specimens collected on Vellarimala and the neighbouring Kurichyarmala hills. Xylophis chenkaruppan is a wood snake — small, glossy, secretive, of a genus first named by Richard Henry Beddome in 1878 — and molecular work places it as sister to Xylophis perroteti of the Nilgiris, while its head scalation resembles that of a species found only south of the Palghat Gap. In plain terms: a lineage isolated on this particular high massif for long enough to become its own thing, and unrecognised by science until the year before last.

What a sky island is

That is the accurate frame for these slopes. Vellarimala is separated from the Nilgiris by the Chaliyar valley and is floristically similar to them but not continuous with them. Its summits are cool, wet, isolated habitat patches marooned above warm lowlands, and the species that live on them are frequently found nowhere else. A range that is still producing snakes new to science in the 2020s is under-surveyed in a real and specific sense — and that under-surveying is a reason for caution about what tunnelling, quarrying and plantation conversion cost, not a marketing line about untouched adventure.

The two truths sit together uncomfortably, which is exactly why the honest sentence about this mountain is longer than the blog version. Vellarimala is one of the most ecologically significant blocks of high ground in the northern Western Ghats, one of the most heavily converted, one of the most repeatedly landslide-prone, and currently one of the most actively engineered. It has failed catastrophically at least three times since 1984 — including at Puthumala in 2019 and above Mundakkai in 2024 — and again, on a smaller and entirely man-made scale, at Kalladi in July 2026.

None of that argues for pretending the mountain is not there, or for writing about it only in terms of what happened. It argues for describing it accurately: a working, contested, biologically remarkable massif, best understood from the foothills, and best approached — if at all — with a permit, a guide who has been on it this season, and no illusions about wilderness. Anyone planning around it should confirm current access, closures and conditions with the Kerala Forest Department range office and the district administration rather than with a route description, however detailed, that carries no date (indicative — confirm locally).