How does hiking in Himalayas show academic promise, as an admission criterion? I am a student from India and I have been reading a lot about graduate admissions in US lately. I have read in some article that an average(below average) applicant from the "maybe" pile is moved to an "accepted" pile when their resumes contain something like "hiked in Himalayas".

Now I realize that it is a great achievement but it does not correlate with the capacity to publish quality research papers at all. So how do universities measure the applicants future in academic prospects?

P.S. Sorry, I do not have the link of the article.
I've never seen a graduate admissions committee take anything like this at all seriously, and I would certainly not recommend it as a strategy for getting into grad school.  If anything, emphasizing irrelevant experience makes applicants look clueless and may hurt their chances of admission.

But I agree that you can read all sorts of strange things in discussions of graduate admissions on the internet.  Some commentary is by people who simply don't know what they're talking about, but some is by faculty who have actually served on admissions committees.  The best explanation I can give is that certain faculty are just eccentric.  If you gather opinions from enough professors, you'll presumably find people who honestly believe that some non-academic experiences (such as hiking in the Himalayas) are so formative or telling that they are enough by themselves to salvage an otherwise mediocre application.  I haven't run across this particular opinion myself, but I've certainly worked with admissions committee members whose judgments differed from the rest of the committee's in other ways.