There’s a particular moment on Sach Pass – usually around the third water crossing when you’re already exhausted, wet, and beginning to suspect you’ve made a terrible mistake – when you look at your motorcycle and can sense its betrayal. This machine, which has reliably transported you across thousands of kilometers, is now making sounds that suggest it’s filing for divorce.

Sach Pass doesn’t have Ladakh’s fame or Spiti’s Instagram appeal. It’s a 4,420-meter high pass in Himachal Pradesh that connects Chamba to Pangi Valley, and it’s one of those routes that people discover by accident and then warn others about for the rest of their lives. The pass is technically open for maybe three months a year, though “open” is a generous term for what’s essentially a goat trail that the Public Works Department occasionally remembers exists.

What makes Sach Pass uniquely terrible – and I mean this with a kind of horrified respect – is that it combines every possible challenge into one concentrated experience. It’s not just high altitude. It’s not just bad roads. It’s not just water crossings or steep inclines or loose gravel or narrow passages with thousand-foot drops. It’s all of these things, simultaneously, for 25 kilometers of what can only be described as geological hostility.

The approach from Bairagarh is deceptive. The road is bad, but manageable. You’re thinking, “This isn’t so terrible. Why do people complain?” This is your ignorance talking. Sach Pass reveals itself slowly, like a horror movie that understands pacing.

First come the water crossings. Not the shallow, photogenic kind you see on adventure tourism websites. These are legitimate streams flowing across the road with enough current to destabilize your bike and enough depth to flood your engine if you stop. You’re supposed to cross them in first gear, maintaining momentum, keeping your feet up, trusting that traction exists somewhere beneath that rushing water.

Your motorcycle’s air filter, designed for air, not water, begins to question its career choices.

Then the road surface deteriorates from “bad” to “conceptual.” Loose rocks the size of your fist cover everything. Your front wheel finds every single one of them, each impact traveling up through your handlebars into your shoulders with the subtle message that you’re going to feel this tomorrow. And the day after. Possibly forever.

The altitude is doing its usual work of making everything harder. Your engine is gasping. You’re gasping. The thin air makes the bike sluggish, and sluggishness on a road where momentum is survival is problematic. You downshift, the engine screams, and you wonder if this is how motorcycles pray.

But the real psychological warfare of Sach Pass is the drop-offs. The road is narrow – barely wide enough for one vehicle in many places – and one side typically features a cliff face while the other features nothing at all, just air and a very long fall into the valley below. There are no guardrails because this is India and we don’t believe in coddling tourists.

You ride as close to the cliff face as possible, your panniers occasionally scraping rock, because the alternative is looking at that drop and confronting your mortality in high definition. If you meet a vehicle coming the other way – a truck, a jeep, another motorcycle – someone has to reverse. On a narrow road. On loose gravel. Next to a cliff. This is when you understand that adventure is just poor planning with better marketing.

I’ve ridden Sach Pass twice. Both times I arrived at the top and immediately wondered why I’d done this to myself. The view is spectacular, sure, but so is the view from literally any high pass in the Himalayas, most of which don’t require you to ford rivers on a motorcycle.

The descent is worse than the climb. Your brakes are already tired from the ascent, and now you’re asking them to control a 200-kilogram motorcycle on steep downhill sections covered in loose gravel. Engine braking helps, but engine braking also heats your engine, and you’re already operating at the thermal limits of what’s reasonable.

Your clutch hand develops a cramp. Your throttle hand is permanently tensed. Your legs are exhausted from balancing the bike through the technical sections. Your brain is running overtime trying to process the terrain ahead, choose lines through the rocks, monitor the cliff edge in your peripheral vision, and maintain the concentration required to not die.

What Sach Pass teaches you – what it beats into you over those 25 kilometers – is that difficulty isn’t just about altitude or distance. It’s about the cumulative effect of multiple challenges sustained over time. You can handle a water crossing. You can handle loose gravel. You can handle steep climbs or cliff edges or thin air. But all of them together, for hours, creates something greater than the sum of its parts.

This is why Sach Pass breaks more riders than Khardung La, despite being 4,000 feet lower. Khardung La is high, but it’s also paved most of the way. It’s dramatic, but it’s manageable. Sach Pass is technically difficult in ways that altitude alone isn’t.

By the time you reach the bottom, your motorcycle sounds different. Something in its soul has shifted. The suspension has new creaks. The chain needs attention. The air filter needs replacement. The entire machine has aged in ways that kilometers alone don’t explain.

And you sit there, in Killar or wherever you’ve ended up, and you think about never doing this again. You think about selling the motorcycle and taking up a reasonable hobby like stamp collecting or meditation.

Then, inevitably, someone asks if Sach Pass was worth it. And you hear yourself say yes. Because despite everything – or maybe because of everything – it was genuine. No Instagram gloss, no tourism board marketing, just you and your motorcycle and a road that didn’t care whether you made it or not.

That’s worth something. Even if your motorcycle disagrees.