Kangchenjunga: A Trekker’s Guide

Known as the Five Treasures of the Snows because of its five summits, Kangchenjunga is the world’s third highest peak (8586m). With the North Base camp trek, Ghunsa to the Simbua Khola valley, southern approaches and trekking to Kangch from Sikkim. The trek to base camp is regarded by many as the most beautiful walk in the world.

“It is always interesting to roam with ... a mountain people, through their thinly inhabited valleys, over their grand mountains, and to dwell with them in their gloomy and forbidding forests, and no thinking man can do so without learning much, however slender the means at his command for communion.”
(Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker: Himalayan Journals)

Joseph Hooker was not only one of the greatest of British botanists, he was also a man who loved to travel in wild and unknown country, and in 1848-49 he made two pioneering journeys in the Himalaya during which he almost reached the base of Kangchenjunga - the first through Nepal, the second in Sikkim - and the account of his travels recorded in the two volumes of his classic Journals makes fascinating reading one hundred and fifty years on.

Whilst the Western world would hardly be recognised by Hooker and his contemporaries today, Kangchenjunga, its valleys and villages, seem hardly to have changed at all, and the comments quoted above with regard to learning much from roaming with “a mountain people through their thinly inhabited valleys [and] over their grand mountains” remains as true now as when it was first written. Following trails described in this present guidebook provides the modern-day trekker with ample opportunities to do just that.

Straddling the border with Sikkim in the far north-eastern corner of Nepal, Kangchenjunga (8586m: 28,169ft) is the world’s third highest mountain, a huge massif with five main tops and five great glaciers dominating a spur that projects southward from the main Himalayan axis, likened by F.S. Smythe to “a rugged peninsula [jutting] from the main Himalayan coast”. Long considered sacred, its Tibetan name (Kang-chen-dzö-nga) has been translated as ‘The Five Treasuries of the Great Snows’. Although some claim this to be a reference to its five distinct summits, it is more likely to stem from the number of glaciers flowing from it.

It is a fabulous massif with several outstanding satellite peaks of striking individuality whose characteristic outlines signal from afar. Jannu, or Kumbhakarna to give its Nepalese name, is the most obvious of these, but there are others. In fact the head of several parallel valley systems are simply bursting with drama and magnetic appeal.

Until Nepal opened its borders rather tentatively in 1949, Kangchenjunga and its immediate neighbours were probably the best-known mountains in the entire Himalayan chain, thanks to the clear view obtained of them from Darjeeling, that great hill station of the British Raj, some 70 kilometres away, and the fact that access to the south-eastern side had been established for a hundred years and more. Moreover, several expeditions had made attempts to climb it from both sides of the border, but always starting from Sikkim, and as early as 1899 D.W. Freshfield had made an almost complete circuit of the massif.

However, once Nepal relaxed its borders, Sikkim became off-limits to travellers from the West, and Kangchenjunga slipped into a shadowy semi-oblivion as other Himalayan mountains (Everest and Annapurna are obvious examples) became the focus of attention for mountaineers and, more especially in the context of this guide, for a growing number of trekkers. Although Kangchenjunga was climbed just two years after Everest, the approach via the Nepalese foothills remained out of bounds to all but a few select expeditions until 1988. Only then was the full majesty of the far north-east of Nepal revealed to an eager vanguard of adventurous travellers. Since then Kangchenjunga has taken its rightful place in the trekking world as the connoisseur’s mountain.

But apart from the obvious attraction of its mountains, the whole region is considered so special that at the time of writing plans are in progress by the World Wildlife Fund and the National Parks and Wildlife Protection Department of the Nepalese Government to dedicate the border regions (Nepal, Tibet and Sikkim) as a ‘protected park’ by the year 2000. This is in recognition of several endangered wildlife species found here: snow leopard, musk deer, red panda, grey wolf and Himalayan black bear.