Delhi to Auli Distance: About 500 km to Jyotirmath, Then the Climb to Auli

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

We left Greater Noida at half past one in the morning on 24 January 2026 and checked in above Jyotirmath at 01:20 the next morning. Just under 24 hours door to door, in our own Thar, and more than five of those hours went on waiting in Jyotirmath for the road up to Auli to open.

The distance is the simpler half of the answer. Delhi to Jyotirmath, the town most maps still call Joshimath, is 484 km to 500 km depending on whose figure you take, and Auli is 11 to 16 km further up, depending on the route. That's Auli in Chamoli district, Uttarakhand, on the road to Badrinath. There's another Auli in Himachal Pradesh, and at least one big route planner answers this question about that one.

Our drive from Greater Noida, and what it proves

The season's first real snowfall came on 23 January 2026, the day before we set off. Leaving at half past one in the morning meant we crossed the plains in the dark and were in Rishikesh for breakfast at eight. From there it was hill road the rest of the day: lunch at Srinagar (Garhwal) at half past one, and Jyotirmath at 17:45.

Our trip sheet for the evening in Jyotirmath says only "road khulne ka wait": we had dinner and tea, and waited for the road up to open. The news reports for that day say the road had closed after vehicles skidded on the snow, then reopened the same day to four-wheel drives only. At 23:00 we drove the Thar up, and at 01:20 on the 25th we checked in at a hotel near the TV Tower at Sunil, still below the top of Auli.

Two things about that day won't carry over to yours. We were in a four-wheel drive on a night the road was open to four-wheel drives only, so a sedan might not have gone up at all. And a January Saturday isn't a May weekend in the Badrinath yatra, when the queue through Jyotirmath can run for kilometres (more on that below).

October 2024 was a different drive, in our Baleno. That trip started from Aligarh, where we'd been with family. We left at seven in the morning on 17 October and reached Joshimath at ten that night, the hour the night rules begin: fifteen hours and about 550 km in a single day.

How far is Auli, Uttarakhand, from Delhi?

Delhi to Auli is about 495 km to 516 km by road, because both published figures stop at Jyotirmath and the climb goes on top. The Chamoli district administration, the government office Auli sits under, gives Jyotirmath to Delhi as 500 km. euttaranchal, a private Dehradun travel portal that much of the travel industry quotes, gave Delhi to Joshimath as 484 km before it took its tourism pages down in September 2026. The 16 km between them is no mystery: Delhi is a big city, and where you start inside it moves the number that much.

We use euttaranchal's figure, though it isn't a government source, because its own legs add up to it, 234 km to Rishikesh and 250 km on to Joshimath. The other reason is an independent table of the same road from SacredYatra, which comes to 481 km by different legs (the leg table below).

A quick test for any page quoting a single number: Delhi to Auli has to be longer than Delhi to Jyotirmath by the length of the climb, because Auli sits above the town on the same road. Plenty of pages fail it. Manchala Mushafir, one of the better sites on this subject, gives Delhi to Auli as 500 km on one page and Delhi to Joshimath as 504 km on another.

Two route guides go further wrong and send you to another mountain. Rome2Rio's page is for Auli in Himachal Pradesh and routes you by train to Kalka. Savaari's gives 397 km via Panipat, Paonta Sahib and Dakpatthar, which is the way into western Uttarakhand and Himachal. If what you're reading never mentions Jyotirmath or Joshimath, it's describing somewhere else.

What is the Delhi to Auli route, leg by leg?

From Delhi it's Haridwar and Rishikesh, then the five confluences up the Alaknanda: Devprayag, Rudraprayag, Karnaprayag, Nandprayag and Vishnuprayag, with Jyotirmath just before the last of them. From Rishikesh you're on one road, NH-7, and there's no alternative to it.

Added up, those legs come to 492 km to 497 km to Auli, depending on the climb.

Is this road NH-7 or NH-58?

Both. The road from Rishikesh to Jyotirmath is NH-7. It was NH-58 before the national renumbering, and people who use it daily still sign it, say it and write it that way. The old NH-58 ran 538 km from Mana, north of Badrinath, down to Ghaziabad, and the renumbering cut it into five:

• NH-7 from Mana Pass to Rishikesh, the whole hill section of your drive
• NH-34 from Rishikesh to Haridwar
• NH-334A from Haridwar to Laksar and Purkazi
• NH-334 from Purkazi to Meerut
• NH-34 again from Meerut through Modinagar to Ghaziabad

What did the Delhi to Dehradun Expressway change?

The plains half of this drive got much faster on 14 April 2026, when the 213 km, six-lane Delhi to Dehradun Expressway opened from Akshardham. The government's own figure cuts Delhi to Dehradun from over six hours to about two and a half. Two journalists who drove its full length in April and May 2026 timed it at 2 hours 17 minutes and about two and a half hours. The hill half didn't change at all. None of the Delhi to Auli route guides we read mentions the expressway; they still send you through Ghaziabad, Meerut, Muzaffarnagar and Roorkee.

The clearest sign it matters for Auli is a bus timetable. For the Kanwar Yatra in July 2026, Uttarakhand Roadways moved its Delhi to Rishikesh buses onto the expressway, and the run went from about ten hours to about four, with the fare down from Rs 535 to Rs 430.

• It goes to Dehradun, and you want Haridwar or Rishikesh. The spur to Haridwar, from near Halgoya to Bahadarabad on the Haridwar Ring Road, was under construction in January 2026 with a November 2026 target, and we found nothing dated later either way. The only source we found naming an exit for Haridwar and Rishikesh traffic is a villa rental blog, which says Ganeshpur; that's where the toll on the elevated wildlife section is collected, so it's at least the right end of the road.
• Driving on to Dehradun costs about 45 km. The Chamoli district administration puts Dehradun 298 km from Jyotirmath and Rishikesh 253 km, and the difference is valley and forest road from Dehradun down to Rishikesh rather than hill road.
• No fuel, and no two-wheelers. Both drive reports found no working fuel station across the 213 km, so fill up before you get on. Two-wheelers, three-wheelers and tractors are barred; on 5 August 2026 a motorcycle that was on it despite the ban was in a fatal crash.
• It has had bad weeks. A 17 day diversion ran on the Ganeshpur to Dehradun section from 22 May to 8 June 2026. On Saturday 13 June there was a five kilometre Delhi-bound jam from Asharodi to the border and a separate seven kilometre jam in Saharanpur district. Potholes were reported on 2 July, and in late August monsoon entry restrictions at Akshardham and Vikas Marg were causing queues at the Delhi end. A house in Mandola village, Loni, still stands on a 90 metre stretch, with traffic on a temporary bypass round it while the owners take their compensation claim through the courts.

The toll is still unsettled. Everything published around the April opening quotes about Rs 670 to Rs 675 for a car, one way, end to end. The rates notified afterwards are lower and charged by section. A car pays Rs 190 on the 119.79 km Mavikalan to Saharanpur bypass stretch from 10 May 2026, Rs 150 on the 12 km Ganeshpur elevated corridor, and Rs 85 at Chamari Kheda. We couldn't find an end to end total dated after 10 May, so we don't give one.

Payment is FASTag or UPI only, no cash. NHAI's annual FASTag pass went to Rs 3,075 from 1 April 2026, for a year or 200 crossings, private vehicles only. We already had an annual pass on our January drive, which is why our trip sheet shows Rs 0 for toll.

How long does the drive take, and where should you stop?

Plan on 14 to 16 hours of driving and one night on the way. The distance calculators are far more optimistic: Rome2Rio's page for the right Auli calls it a nine hour drive, and MakeMyTrip's cab page seven and a half. Both are working at open-road speeds across 250 km of single-lane Garhwal hill road with hairpins, army convoys and a police gate system at the top.

The clock matters more than stamina. Three written rules touch night driving on this road. The transport department's Green Card portal, in its advice to commercial passenger vehicles on Char Dham Yatra routes, puts the no-driving hours at 10 pm to 4 am. For the 2026 yatra season the Commissioner of Garhwal, Vinay Shankar Pandey, issued an order in April banning passenger vehicles in the same hours and letting goods vehicles run at night instead. Reports differ on whether the goods window opens at 9 pm or 10 pm.

Third, in October 2024 Tehri police said that from 1 November only emergency vehicles could use the road between Rishikesh and Devprayag from 10 pm to 5 am, after a run of night accidents. That's the first 74 km of hill road out of Rishikesh, and we found nothing later on it either way.

Neither yatra document tells a private driver where they stand, or what applies once the temples close, and nothing since 2024 says whether Tehri's rule is still in force. There is one road, so we'd plan as though every cutoff holds all year. Our own climb from Jyotirmath started at 23:00, in January, outside the yatra season, and one night doesn't settle the question either way.

Where to stop. Rishikesh or Srinagar (Garhwal) on the first night, then Jyotirmath. Don't try to reach Auli on day one, and don't sleep at Auli on your first night up there either. In October 2024 we slept two nights in Joshimath before going up; in January 2026 we went straight from the plains to our hotel at Sunil, above Jyotirmath. We compare the two bases in Auli or Jyotirmath.

Auli sits at roughly 2,500 to 3,050 m, around the altitude at which people start feeling it. Jyotirmath, at about 1,875 m, is a textbook intermediate stop, and it's where the ATMs, the fuel and the food are. Rishikesh is about 340 m, so Rishikesh to Auli in one day takes you from the plains to above 2,500 m.

Above roughly that height some people get headache, nausea, breathlessness or broken sleep. Gain height slowly, and go down rather than push on if it gets worse; that's most of the reason the Jyotirmath night is worth paying for. Anyone with a heart or lung condition, anyone pregnant, and anyone who has had altitude sickness before should ask a doctor before booking. We aren't doctors and this isn't medical advice. Which month you go changes all of this, and that's a question of its own.

One long day, or two?

Nav says one long day is fine in the dry months if you start early enough. The hill-road rules don't reach the plains, so leave in the small hours, as we did in January, and the flat half is behind you by breakfast. Add the expressway and you're in Jyotirmath by evening, with a hotel night saved and a day more up top.

Vandana's point is about who's in the car. Fourteen hours is fine for two adults who can share the driving, but not with children in the back, or anyone over sixty. The hairpins start around Devprayag and don't let up, so anyone who gets car sick will feel it from there. And a one-day plan assumes nothing blocks, on a road where something blocks most weeks.

Her other point: pack for the car as well as for Auli. You climb from the plains to nearly 1,900 m at Jyotirmath in a day, and the layer you want at four in the afternoon isn't the one you left Delhi in.

Where we agree: two days if anyone in the car will suffer for it, or in the monsoon or snow. One long day only in the dry months, with a small-hours start, a driver who has done hill roads before, and a plan that has you off the hill road by 10 pm.

Can you reach Auli from Delhi by bus, train or flight?

Every way from Delhi finishes with the same climb from Jyotirmath. Drive or take a taxi the whole way, take an overnight bus to Jyotirmath and a shared jeep up, or fly to Jolly Grant and drive from there. No train or plane gets you closer than a full day's driving, and the ropeway that used to cover the last leg hasn't run since January 2023 (the Auli ropeway).

Delhi to Auli by bus

We did this by bus ourselves in June 2025: Delhi to Jyotirmath, then a shared jeep up the last climb, and we stayed at GMVN at the top. We kept no trip sheet that time, so we can't give you our times, fares or operator. Everything below is what we found on the booking platforms and the state's own timetable when we checked in September 2026.

No bus reaches Auli, and the bus sold to Jyotirmath is usually two vehicles. Three booking platforms sell a single Delhi to Joshimath ticket, from zingbus and FlixBus. Departures run from about 22:30 to 23:55 from ISBT Kashmiri Gate and Anand Vihar, journeys take 13 to 17 hours, and fares ran from about Rs 2,500 to Rs 4,032 depending on platform and bus type.

The operators' own stop names give the structure away. FlixBus lists its Joshimath stops as "Joshimath (Drop by cab)" and "Joshimath (Pickup by cab)", and its Joshimath page says the Car Stand stop is for pickup and dropoff by cab. The zingbus drop shows on Goibibo and MakeMyTrip as "Joshimath Bus Stand (Drop via Tempo Traveller/Cab from Zingbus Lounge Rishikesh)".

Goibibo lists five zingbus departures from Delhi, at 22:30, 23:20, 23:30, 23:35 and 23:45, all arriving in Joshimath at 15:15. Five coaches leaving over 75 minutes can't all arrive at the same minute, but they can all feed one morning service, and zingbus runs exactly that: Rishikesh 06:00, Joshimath 15:15.

So the overnight coach takes you to Rishikesh, and in the morning you change into a tempo traveller or a cab for the hill section. It's the only structure that could work anyway, with passenger vehicles ordered off the mountain road between 10 pm and 4 am in the yatra season. The ticket is real, but if you've booked it expecting to sleep from Delhi to Joshimath in one seat, you've booked something else. Ask the operator what happens at Rishikesh, and where your luggage goes, before you pay.

The state doesn't run this route. Uttarakhand Transport Corporation's route table has no Delhi to Joshimath and no Delhi to Auli service. From Kashmiri Gate towards Chamoli district it runs a Gopeshwar bus at 20:30, Srinagar buses at 05:00, 20:00 and 21:30, and four to Rishikesh, and its Anand Vihar routes all go to Kumaon. Two of its rows do carry Auli's name, Haridwar to Auli at 05:30 and Auli to Haridwar at 04:30, both bookable online. But the table gives route names and times only, so we couldn't tell whether that end is Auli itself or the Jyotirmath stand.

From Rishikesh the buses to Jyotirmath run in the morning only. Two platforms separately put the first departure at 04:00 and the last at 08:45. DevBhoomi Travels, Royals Services, TGMO, zingbus and FlixBus run it, with fares from about Rs 750 to Rs 3,049 and nine to eleven hours on the road. Nothing we found leaves in the afternoon, so miss the morning and you lose the day.

For the last climb we found no bus listed. The Chamoli district administration's Auli page says ropeway, bus and taxi services run from Joshimath, in the same sentence that offers you the closed ropeway, and one travel page mentions irregular buses with no operator, fare or time. That isn't proof none has ever run. Plan on a shared jeep or a taxi from the Jyotirmath taxi stand, which is the next part of this page.

Delhi to Auli by train

There's no train to Auli, and none to Jyotirmath either. The nearest railhead is Rishikesh, which the Chamoli district administration puts 253 km from Jyotirmath, with the climb to Auli on top. So a train replaces the first quarter of this journey and leaves the hard three quarters as they were. The practical shape is a train to Haridwar or Rishikesh, a night there, then the morning bus window above or a taxi the next day. It suits anyone who would rather not drive the plains, and it costs you a night.

The Rishikesh to Karnaprayag line, 126 km and 12 stations, will move the railhead a long way up this valley when it opens. But its completion date has moved twice: from December 2026 to December 2028, as reported in late 2025, and then to December 2029, in a report of 15 September 2026. Railheads and airports are compared in full in all the ways up to Auli.

Flying from Delhi

Flying saves you the plains and none of the mountains. Jolly Grant at Dehradun is the nearest airport, and the Chamoli district administration puts it 279 km from Auli, which is still a full day on the road. Weather is the other catch: in August 2026 IndiGo warned that poor visibility, rain and changing conditions at Dehradun may cause delays and cancellations, and suggested morning flights and the Shatabdi as a fallback.

The last climb: the fare, and a road that can shut

The climb to Auli has one official price. On 29 December 2024 the SDM of Jyotirmath fixed it with the taxi unions, the police and the Nagar Palika: Rs 1,500 one way and Rs 2,500 for a same-day return, up to five passengers in the vehicle. It was reported in the Hindi papers and nowhere we could find in English, which is why English guides still say the last leg has no published price.

On 19 December 2025 the same office renewed the arrangement for the 2025-26 season without naming any figure, so December 2024 is still the last time an official put a number on this road. One traveller paid Rs 1,000 for a private drop in February 2024, and in December 2024 the taxi union's own booking rate was Rs 2,000, or Rs 3,500 in snow. We took a shared jeep up in June 2025, but we didn't note down what we paid.

The fare was one line of a crowd plan. When the number of tourists rises, the tehsil parks tourist vehicles at Ravigram Maidan in Jyotirmath and sends people up by local taxi, as it did at New Year 2024-25. The tehsil pulls that switch on heavy days only: in January 2026, once the road opened, our own car went up. How the order was worded, what people have paid, and what the cab apps charge instead are on the Joshimath to Auli page.

In winter the road can shut with no notice at all. The week we went up, it closed outright on 23 January 2026. It tightened again on the 25th, when frost set at Sunil, TV Tower and Kichad Bend and tourist vehicles were stopped above the TV Tower, and by the 28th it was one of seven blocked roads in Chamoli district. On the 30th there was still frost on it from Sunil upward.

None of it was published as an order. We looked at the district's notice board, the state police, the disaster management authority, the tourism board, GMVN and the PWD, and found nothing. The PWD's own road-closure list didn't mention this road once all winter. When the district banned tourist entry to Auli on a weather warning in March 2025, and lifted it the next day, we found no published order either.

So there's no page to check before you set off. Between December and March, ring your hotel or the taxi stand in Jyotirmath the morning you go up and ask what the road did overnight. If you're booked above Jyotirmath, get the hotel to confirm in writing how it will get you up.

What this road does to your schedule

The Rishikesh to Jyotirmath road has more than one road-blocking landslide per kilometre. A 2024 survey in Natural Hazards and Earth System Sciences mapped over 300 along roughly 250 km, 1.25 per kilometre, about 80 per cent of them since January 2022. Correcting for slope, rainfall and rock type, it found landslide density twice as high on the sections widened under the Char Dham works as on those that weren't. This is how it went between June and early September 2026:

It costs people schedules far more often than whole trips. On 5 September 2026 Amar Ujala reported that the Badrinath highway had been the best-performing Char Dham route of that monsoon and hadn't stayed closed for more than 24 hours at any point. Totaghati and Singtali, the two chokepoints that usually shut, held, and statewide the PWD counted 1,393 road closures from the start of the monsoon to 5 September, against 2,013 by the same date in 2025. So carry one spare day and keep the booking.

A jam at Jyotirmath is often a gate. In the yatra season Chamoli Police hold Badrinath-bound traffic at Kamet Chowraha and returning traffic at the Vishnuprayag to Marwari bridge, roughly an hour at a time, and an hour of held vehicles makes five or six kilometres of queue. In May 2026 the district's SP said the "traffic jam" photographs going round social media were queues under that system.

It still gets bad: on 30 May 2026 a weekend rush was reported at 25 to 30 km, from Vishnuprayag and beyond, and one traveller told Amar Ujala a three day trip had taken ten.

How far is Auli from Noida, Gurgaon and the rest of NCR?

Every NCR start is the Delhi figure give or take about 30 km, and no government source publishes a number for any of them. Ghaziabad is the nearest, since it's already on the way, and Gurgaon the furthest. The two distance tools below rank the starts the same way and agree on almost none of the values:

Noida to Auli distance

Noida to Auli is about 490 to 500 km. Besides the two tools above, TourTravelWorld gives 491 km and about 12 hours. From Noida the natural join is the expressway at Akshardham, a straightforward run over the DND. The alternative is the Eastern Peripheral Expressway north to the Khekra interchange in Baghpat, where the expressway's first phase meets it, which keeps you out of Delhi entirely. No source compares the two and we haven't timed both, but the late-August queues were at the Akshardham end.

On the bus, AbhiBus lists Sector 62 Noida and Zero Point Greater Noida as pickup points on the Delhi to Joshimath zingbus services, while Goibibo and redBus list only Kashmiri Gate and Anand Vihar for the same buses.

No platform gives per-stop pickup times, and since departures already cluster at 22:30 to 23:45, a Noida pickup is necessarily earlier than the Kashmiri Gate time. You trade a short taxi ride for a longer sit on the bus, and you still change vehicles at Rishikesh. redBus's "Greater Noida to Joshimath" service boards at Akshardham, Kashmiri Gate, Mohan Nagar and Vaishali, none of which is in Greater Noida.

Gurgaon to Auli distance

Gurgaon to Auli is 523 km to 534 km on the tools that publish a figure, roughly 20 to 30 km more than Delhi. Every one of those kilometres goes on getting out of the wrong side of the capital, so this is the one NCR start where the exit is a real decision.

Cross Delhi to Akshardham and join the expressway there, which is short in kilometres and hostage to Delhi traffic. Or go round: the Western Peripheral to Kundli, the Eastern Peripheral east to the Khekra interchange in Baghpat, and onto the expressway without entering Delhi at all. The Western Peripheral is 135.6 km at about Rs 1.35 a kilometre and the Eastern Peripheral 135 km at about Rs 2.50 a kilometre, both closed-toll, so you pay only for the distance you use.

We found no source that compares the two for this journey. What we would say is that the peripheral route doesn't care what Delhi is doing at 4 am, and a 4 am start is what this drive wants. Rome2Rio also lists a FlixBus service from Gurugram Rajiv Chowk to Joshimath at about 15 hours, and everything in the bus section above applies to it, including the change at Rishikesh.

How do you get back from Auli to Delhi?

We split the way home in January, and it's the version we'd recommend. We left the hotel at Sunil at 08:45 on the 26th, checked in at MVT Resort in Tapovan, Rishikesh, at seven that evening, and were home in Greater Noida at 13:30 the next day. The room cost us Rs 2,226 for the night, plus Rs 392 in taxes and fees, in January 2026. In October 2024 we did the way home in one go instead, out of Lower Auli at five in the morning and into Greater Noida at eight at night.

If you split the journey only once, split it on the way home, because that's the direction with a flight or a Monday at the end of it. And put a spare day before any flight. The Parthadeep block in the table above fell in exactly the hours the buses leave Jyotirmath: you don't need a disaster to miss a plane on this road, only one ordinary morning.

The distance back is the same, whatever the booking sites say. CabBazar gives Delhi to Auli as 502 km and Auli to Delhi as 515 km, and Yatra gives Noida to Auli as 493 km and Auli to Noida as 505 km; nobody has built a new road in one direction.

What changes is the bus timetable. Buses down from Jyotirmath run from 05:30 to 11:30 for Rishikesh and 06:00 to 12:05 for Haridwar, a wider window than the 04:00 to 08:45 going up that still closes at midday. We found no direct Jyotirmath to Delhi service listed on redBus, AbhiBus, Goibibo, MakeMyTrip or UTC's own route table, so you change at Rishikesh or Haridwar. The one government row that carries the name is UTC's Auli to Haridwar at 04:30.

Nor should you count on downhill being quicker: redBus's own timings make the descent to Rishikesh about half an hour slower than the climb.

Delhi to Auli 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.

This page stands mostly on January 2026, when we drove the whole way from Greater Noida in our Thar: the day table, the way home and every photograph here come from that trip and its record. We also came up from Delhi by bus in June 2025, and drove from Aligarh in October 2024. The distances, rules, timetables and road reports are from our research, each checked against the office or paper that issued it, and what we couldn't confirm is in the list above.

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.