Auli Ropeway Ticket Price, Fare and Booking: The Joshimath to Auli Cable Car Has Not Run Since January 2023

by Nav & Vandana Sharma · Published 25 September 2026 · Status last verified 8 September 2026

In June 2025 we reached Jyotirmath on the bus from Delhi, with no car of our own for once, and went up to Auli the way anyone in that position does now: in a shared jeep, by road. Until January 2023 there was another way up. A cable car ran 4.15 km from the town to Auli, about 25 minutes each way, and people still go looking for its fare, its timings and a page to book it on.

There isn't one. The cable car was stopped on 5 January 2023, during the land-subsidence emergency in Jyotirmath, and it hasn't carried a passenger since. All three of our Auli trips came after that, so we've never ridden it. We drove up in our own car in October 2024 and January 2026, and took the jeep in June 2025, when we stayed at GMVN at the top.

Is the Auli ropeway open right now?

No. The gondola hasn't carried a passenger since 5 January 2023. As of 6 September 2026 we'd found no source, in English or Hindi, from the government, the press or GMVN, reporting a restart, a trial run, an awarded tender or a reopening date.

Part of the reason so many pages still say otherwise is that the official ones do. GMVN, which runs the ropeway, still says on its own Auli page that Joshimath "is connected with Auli by highest cable car of Asia". The Chamoli district administration still tells visitors "Auli can be reached by road or ropeway from Joshimath".

Neither page carried a closure notice when we checked them on 6 September 2026, more than three and a half years after the lift stopped, and a travel writer who copies them in good faith gets it wrong. Tripadvisor's listing for the ropeway has no closure label either. Its 168 reviews simply stop in the week the lift did, in January 2023.

What is the Auli ropeway ticket price and fare in 2026?

There is no Auli ropeway ticket price in 2026. No ticket has been sold since January 2023, so there's no fare, no timetable, no counter and no online booking. The last fare it charged was Rs 1,000 per person for a round trip, reported by visitors in 2022, and that's the number most pages still print as if it were live.

If a page gives you Rs 1,000, Rs 785 or Rs 700 as the cable car fare, or 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. or 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. as its hours, it's describing the lift as it was before January 2023. When we last looked, on 24 September 2026, one ticket site still listed a Rs 1,000 Joshimath to Auli ropeway ticket with a working add to cart button. There's no ride behind it, so don't pay for one.

Which lift at Auli is actually running?

There are three lifts at Auli, and only one of them is the ropeway. Most of the confusion about whether "the ropeway" works comes from mixing them up.

When someone tells you the ropeway was working when they went, they almost always mean the chairlift. A November 2022 review on the cable car's own Tripadvisor listing is a good example: Rs 500 a head, "just 5 minutes going up and another 5 coming down". Five minutes each way is the chairlift. The gondola took twenty-five.

The chairlift's latest hard evidence is from Sunday 25 January 2026, when Amar Ujala reported more than 1,200 people riding it in a single day, quoting chairlift manager Rajendra Dimri. It was listed among the activities at the winter carnival of 13 to 16 February 2026, and nothing dated after 16 February speaks to it. GMVN publishes no live status.

Its fare is Rs 500 a person. GMVN raised it from Rs 300 on 6 February 2019, effective Monday the 11th, in the same revision that took the ropeway from Rs 750 to Rs 1,000, with General Manager B.L. Rana on record for the dates. We've found no revision to either since. The 2019 report doesn't say whether Rs 500 covers the return, and GMVN publishes no rate card, so we don't claim it; two undated sources say it's a return ticket. The Rs 300 that some pages still print is the fare from before 2019.

How do you get from Joshimath to Auli now the ropeway is closed?

By road. It's 11 to 16 km from Jyotirmath (Joshimath) up to Auli, depending on which road up you take, and 45 minutes to an hour on a clear day, longer in snow. On a normal day that's how it goes: in October 2024 we left our hotel in Jyotirmath at half past nine in our Baleno and were at our resort at Lower Auli by half past ten.

There's no local bus for the climb (Uttarakhand Transport Corporation's one Auli service is a long-distance run to Haridwar), so without a car of your own it's a shared jeep or a private taxi from the Jyotirmath taxi stand. The whole climb is written up in the Jyotirmath to Auli guide.

The one officially fixed taxi fare is Rs 1,500 one way and Rs 2,500 for a same-day return, up to five passengers in the vehicle, set by the SDM of Jyotirmath on 29 December 2024. When we checked in September 2026 we found no newer figure.

Don't book this leg on a national cab site. They price it as an intercity run, and when we priced it on them in September 2026 the quotes ran from Rs 3,598 to Rs 8,959. One engine gave three different distances for the same climb, the longest about 460 km. Auli's two Census-coded villages are named Auli Laga Joshimath and Auli Laga Salude, and the booking engines read them as separate towns. Ask at the Jyotirmath taxi stand or through your hotel instead.

In snow the question stops being the price. In the last week of January 2026 the road closed outright, then reopened to four-wheel drives only. On the 25th, with frost at Sunil, TV Tower and Kichad Bend, police stopped tourist vehicles from the TV Tower onward, whatever anyone was willing to pay. We were in Jyotirmath that week. On the evening of the 24th we waited five hours for the road to open, then drove our Thar up in the dark to a hotel below the top. The day-by-day reports are on the Joshimath to Auli page.

There's no helicopter seat to buy instead. Auli has a helipad and charters do land there, but what's published are whole-aircraft charters from Dehradun and packaged day tours, nothing like the ticketed seats to Kedarnath. The options are set out in how to reach Auli.

If riding a cable car up a mountain is the point of your trip, nothing in Chamoli district does it now. Both lifts at Auli are on the slope, inside the ski area, and the nearest point-to-point ropeways, Surkanda Devi at Kaddukhal, Mussoorie's Gun Hill lift, Nainital and the two temple ropeways at Haridwar, are a full day's drive away.

Why did the Auli ropeway close, and what is actually broken?

The warning came first. On 24 December 2022 Amar Ujala reported that towers two and three already stood inside subsidence zones, though the ropeway's manager said it was still safe to run. On 5 January 2023, with Jyotirmath in a town-wide emergency, the Chief Minister's Office stopped it "till further orders". On the night of 13 January cracks opened near the ropeway platform itself, at tower one, and manager Dinesh Bhatt said the service would stay suspended. Both dates are real, which is why sources give either one.

The towers themselves weren't what failed. Reporting from the site on 25 January 2023, ETV Bharat found no cracks in towers one, two or three, but heavy subsidence in the ground around them, and later reports single out the ground at tower one. GMVN took 32 tonnes of counterweight off each of two cable routes and fitted rope support brackets, the kind of work you do on a line nobody expects to run again soon.

A year later a technical survey settled it. On 21 January 2024 Amar Ujala reported its findings, attributed to Disaster Management Secretary Ranjit Sinha: the ropeway cannot resume, all ten towers must be replaced, the alignment has to change, and the line has to be rebuilt from scratch. It gave no cost and no timeline, only that it "will take considerable time".

When will the Auli ropeway reopen?

It will not reopen for the 2026-27 winter season. On the record so far it almost certainly won't open for 2027-28 either, and no date has ever been announced. The state stopped talking about repairing this ropeway some time ago and started planning a different one. What's been said about bringing it back, oldest first:

The Tourism Secretary, Dhiraj Garbyal, put the change plainly on 14 February 2026: the ropeway "was closed in view of the potential danger from the Joshimath land subsidence. Now, to be rid of such questions, a ropeway of new technology will be installed." His minister had called it a repair the day before, and the two positions have never been reconciled in public.

The new line, as it was reported, runs in two phases. Phase one is 2.76 km from tower three in Jyotirmath up to Auli, with 11 towers and 21 gondolas of six to seven seats. Phase two adds 1.85 km on to the Gorson slope, with seven towers and nine gondolas. It's a mono-cable system for around 500 passengers an hour, published as 4.5 km, though the two phase figures add up to 4.61.

Since the review of 2 September 2026 the scheme's official name has been जोशीमठ-औली-गोरसों, Joshimath to Auli to Gorson. The old gondola stopped at Auli, so anything still described as a Joshimath to Auli repair is the smaller, older plan.

Notice where phase one starts: tower three. Our reading, which the state hasn't put in words, is that the ground under the old towers one and two isn't being built on again.

The Rs 480 crore figure and the two-phase breakdown come from a single source, euttaranchal's ropeway page, which carried no date and has since been taken down. The shape of it, a full rebuild extended to Gorson, was confirmed separately by India TV in December 2025 and by Garbyal in February 2026, but we couldn't match the rupee figure to a government document. The June 2025 DPR and the December tendering look like a contradiction in the table; we read them as two different documents at two different scales.

What would actually move it is a tender, and there isn't one. When we checked BRIDCUL's tender list on 6 September 2026, there was no tender for this project and no ropeway DPR tender of any kind; its ropeway section holds policy documents only.

The one document that would say what state the old line is in, the report of the 28 January 2026 inspection, has never been made public. The September review says the corridor is still on the state's list of things to build, without giving it a stage, and the two reports of the August meeting don't even agree on whether it came up.

What the closure cost Auli

The fall in visitor numbers is real, and the state's own tourism board documents it.

Uttarakhand Tourism Development Board destination statistics, 2021 to 2023 and 2024. The 2025 figures were not published as of 6 September 2026.

We don't think the ropeway carries all of that fall. Pioneer Edge reported 38,311 people and Rs 3.83 crore of GMVN revenue for January to August 2022. That works out at Rs 1,000 a head, exactly the round-trip fare, so the count is ropeway riders rather than all Auli visitors. Auli had 412,752 visitors that year, and even with those eight months stretched across the whole year the gondola carried under a fifth of them. The rest came by road.

2023 also brought a national news story about a sinking town, a cancelled international ski race and a cancelled national championship. A page that tells you the ropeway alone halved Auli's tourism is simplifying.

The figures for what the closure has cost GMVN went down, not up. ETV Bharat reported a Rs 15 crore loss in October 2025, and in June 2026 the ropeway's manager, Rajendra Prasad Dimri, put it at "about Rs 10 crore so far".

The people who live off Auli's visitors put it more simply. "With the ropeway shut, tourism activity too comes almost to a standstill," Anti Prakash Shah, chairman of the Hotel Association Auli, told Amar Ujala's Chamoli edition in June 2026 (our translation from the Hindi).

In October 2025 a hotel owner at Auli, Ravindra Kandari, had told ETV Bharat that subsidence in the town had stopped and the effort to run the ropeway again should be stepped up. No official or engineer has argued in public that it should stay shut. The nearest thing to that position is the state's own record: three years of DPRs, no tender, and a plan for a new line instead.

By January 2026 the anger had a name. On 15 January a "Save Auli" campaign was launched, and effigies were burned at the Auli chairlift point. Its complaints went well past the gondola, to a snow-making system that has never been put to its intended use and an ice rink left abandoned. The season still went ahead: the carnival and national championship of 13 to 16 February 2026 drew more than 15,000 people over four days, and on 15 February Auli held India's first night skiing. The rest of that winter is in the best time to visit Auli.

Is it safe to go to Jyotirmath and Auli at all?

Yes. The town is lived in, working and open. Badrinath opened for the 2026 season on 23 April and Hemkund Sahib in May, both reached through Jyotirmath, and the state ran a national skiing championship at Auli in February 2026. We found no advisory against visiting.

The ground is still moving, slowly. Vineet Gahalaut, Director of the Wadia Institute of Himalayan Geology, told ETV Bharat in April 2026 that the town continues to slide and that the rate of movement is currently very slow. He also said the public belief that the town has stopped sinking is wrong. Scientists in the same report call for continuous monitoring and evacuation contingency planning.

The damage figures you'll see, 1,403 of 2,152 houses affected and 181 buildings evacuated, are cumulative totals from an expert-team assessment drawn from NDMA, GSI, CBRI and other agencies, reported by ETV Bharat on 25 April 2026. That report doesn't date the assessment and doesn't declare the town uninhabitable.

In August 2026 the state disaster management authority announced a geological observatory at Jyotirmath, with the Wadia Institute, the Geological Survey of India, CBRI, C-DAC Pune and IIT Roorkee, to measure the rate and direction of the movement directly.

About that "Asia's longest ropeway" line

You'll read on almost every page that this was Asia's longest or highest cable car. It was neither. On 24 December 2022 Amar Ujala called it the country's longest. Three weeks later, on 14 January 2023, the same paper called it Asia's biggest, with no measure attached, and travel sites settled on a hedged "second longest in Asia after Gulmarg".

Two comparisons are clean. Ba Na Hills in Vietnam holds a world record for the longest non-stop single-track cable car, at 5,801 m, and Tianmen Mountain in China runs 7,455 m in one continuous line. Both are in Asia and both are far longer than Auli's 4,150 m. Tochal in Iran and Ngong Ping 360 in Hong Kong are longer on published figures too, but they're built in sections, so they aren't like for like.

On height, Gulmarg's gondola reaches 3,980 m, and Auli's line topped out roughly a kilometre below that. The most we'd defend is that it was among India's longest single-section passenger ropeways.

The same carelessness produced the throughput figure. The 500 passengers an hour you'll see quoted for the old lift is the new system's design target, borrowed backwards. The published figure for the old one is 68 an hour, from skiresort.com's specification, and even that assumes no turnaround time on a 25-minute crossing.

Joshimath or Jyotirmath, and which one to search for

They're two names for the same town. The Centre's approval to rename Joshimath tehsil as Jyotirmath was reported on 12 June 2024, and the Chamoli district administration issued its own order on 24 July 2024. Uttarakhand's papers now write Jyotirmath as a matter of course, but GMVN's Auli page, the district's tourism page and Uttarakhand Tourism still write Joshimath, and so do bus boards, taxi drivers, hotel listings and every booking site. Search for Joshimath, and don't correct your driver.

Auli ropeway FAQ

Nav & Vandana Sharma

We're a husband-and-wife travel team based in Greater Noida. Nav has been travelling across India since 2015 and does the routes, costs and logistics; Vandana joined the road in 2020 and writes the stays, food, comfort and safety.

All three of our Auli trips, in October 2024, June 2025 and January 2026, came after the ropeway stopped, so we've never ridden it: we drove up twice and took a shared jeep once. The ropeway's status, history and plans are from our research, each checked against the paper or office that issued it.

Corrections: hello@wctoindia.com. Tell us the page and what is wrong, and we'll fix it and date the change in the log below.