Changelog

A board for growers and neighbours to say what they found on the ground at first light — no frost, white frost on the grass, or hard frost — at the Race Course, the Botanical Garden lawns, Thalaikundha, Kandal, the Kuthirapanthaya ground and Sandynallah. The frost forecast reads one point on the map; this is the people who went and looked. Reports drop off by the afternoon. Reading is open to everyone; reporting needs an account.

Sign up on the ground-frost page to get an email the evening a frost or watch night is forecast, instead of checking back yourself. It only fires on nights that matter — a handful over a winter.

During 2026 tourist vehicles from Kerala and Karnataka were barred from the Sigur ghat — the Kalhatti road up from Masinagudi — with only Nilgiris-registered vehicles allowed and residents of that side needing a pass from their own police station. A valid e-pass does not open that road; they are separate instruments, like the e-pass and plastic checkpost lists. We could not find an official statement of whether the restriction holds outside the summer months, and the page says so.

Five roads climb onto the plateau and any of them can be shut by a slide in a wet season, but nothing publishes which stretch is passable right now — the district's own disaster-management page has carried nothing since the 2018 monsoon. So this is drivers and neighbours telling each other: tap a road to say whether it is clear, slow going or blocked. Reports fade after a day. It also covers Nondimedu and Manjanakorai, where slides come down inside the town limits. It is pinned on the town page for the north-east monsoon; the frost page comes back in late November.

Up here the air almost never freezes and the ground regularly does — across last winter the coldest air reading was 6.2 °C while the soil surface reached 0.6 °C on 20 December. The new page reads the temperature of the ground itself, night by night for the next week, and says what the air reading cannot show you.

The town page now opens with a colored-pencil drawing of a December morning on the vegetable terraces at the edge of town: white frost over the carrot and bean rows, tea bushes on the slope behind, and the Doddabetta ridge under mist. It is the plateau's signature weather — the same night that brings visitors up to photograph the frost dries out a grower's crop.

Someone asked for this town on 18 August because the season can multiply who is here. It now has four tools: a neighbour board for whether the water has come to your ward, what happens at the district checkposts, who to call, and what each month on the plateau is actually like. More to come — tell us what is missing.

Our research said the entry pass runs year-round. The court orders we could read describe it as a summer measure, and the year-round claim traces only to travel sites — so the page now states the orders, their dates, and what we could not establish. We had also merged two different checkpost lists into one, and had no penalty to cite for arriving without a pass. All three are fixed.

The two monsoons, the frost season, the fire season and the two months that bring eight lakh visitors — with what each month means for getting here and for living here. The busiest months are already wet, which is not what most guides say.

Ten documents on the town: how water is rationed ward by ward, what the e-pass and plastic rules actually require, the ghat roads that close in the monsoon, the December frost that is a tourist attraction and a crop loss on the same night, and the town's year from Hethai Habba to the Flower Show. Tools come next; the build queue is written down, including what we could not source.