Manaslu: A Trekker's Guide

The Manaslu trek is one of the finest and most scenically spectacular in Nepal. At 198km it is long, wilder and remoter than Everest and Annapurna treks, and needs about three weeks. Also covers Thonje to Jomosom (Manang area) via the Thorong La and exit to Pokhara via Bagnes Tal.

    ‘Have you gazed on naked grandeur where there’s nothing else to gaze on –
    Set pieces and drop-curtain scenes galore?
    Big mountains heaved to heaven which the blinding sunsets blazon –
    Black canyons where the rapids rip and roar?’
    (Robert Service)

From the ramparts of an historic palace set on a ridge crest high above Gorkha in Central Nepal, the Manaslu Himal appears as a jagged arctic wall to the north; a wall of snow and ice hanging in the sky, attached to the earth, it appears, by skeins of morning mist. Towards evening that wall loses all identifying features as it turns pink, then purple, and delays nightfall long after shadows have swamped the lowlands.

On three sides this ridge plunges in steps to a rucked and wrinkled land. Down there terraces of rice fan across the foothills. At the tail end of the monsoon the landscape has been laundered, and by day colours are vivid beyond words. With the clarity of autumn everything sparkles. Everywhere, it seems, hillsides are dotted with thatched houses. Around them bananas are growing and buffaloes belching. Cicadas are seething in the trees and shrubs where blossom adds contrast to the scene; the foreground is a palette of colour, the background a stark drama of vertical snow and ice.

This is the background to one of the finest treks in Nepal: the Manaslu Circuit.

Together with its neighbouring peaks of Ngadi Chuli, Himalchuli and Baudha, Manaslu (8156m/26,758ft) forms a huge southerly spur of the great Himalayan range, by which it is linked with Cheo Himal on the Nepal–Tibet border across the glacial saddle of the 5213 metre (17,103ft) Larkya La. To the east it is separated from the Ganesh Himal by the gorges of the Buri Gandaki; to the west it is cut off from the Annapurna range by the deep cleft of the Marsyangdi Khola.

The town of Gorkha lies in the foothills to the south, about 48 kilometres (30 miles) – as the Himalayan chough flies – from the icy crest of the world’s seventh highest mountain, its position and accessibility making it the ideal place from which to begin and end this magnificent trek.

The trek itself is a three-week extravaganza which leads across lush foothill ridges and down into the valley of the Buri Gandaki at Arughat Bazar, then roughly northward through that valley – one of the longest of all trans-Himalayan defiles – tucked against outliers of the Ganesh Himal, and into a series of gorges that protect the Himalayan giants. Above Deng, a week or so from Gorkha, the gorges begin to slacken their hold as the valley curves below Himalchuli and Ngadi Chuli – otherwise known as Peak 29. At Ligaon a tributary glen gives the first truly close view of the big snow peaks, while Lho (Lhogaon) produces an unforgettable vision of Manaslu itself – a soaring monarch with a double-edged summit towering above fields of barley.

Encroaching on forest, Syala seems to be embraced by a massive horseshoe of peaks, while Samagaon (Sama) lies at the foot of Manaslu overlooking a broad flat plain where yaks graze the scant pastures. On a rise just above Samagaon stands a handsome Buddhist gompa surrounded by a collection of low, white-painted buildings that house the monks and nuns who study there.

From Samagaon a half-day’s trek leads to the highest village in the Buri Gandaki valley. This is Samdo, a group of Bhotiya dwellings set in a commanding position below Pang Phuchi and with the Tibetan border curving in an arc above and behind it. From Samdo the trek heads roughly westward up a major subsidiary glen to gain the Larkya La, then plunges steeply in full view of Cheo Himal, Himlung Himal, Kang Guru – and with an occasional glimpse of Annapurna summits above a vast walling crest – to the flat meadowland of Bimtang (Bimdakhoti), nearly 1500 metres (4920ft) below the pass. Bimtang is flanked on one side by an extensive glacial moraine, on the other by birch-clad mountain slopes. To the south-east Manaslu is once more on display, crowded though it is by other attractive peaks.

On departing Bimtang the Manaslu Circuit descends along the banks of the Dudh Khola, the milky river that spills into the Marsyangdi at Dharapani on the Annapurna Circuit. Now the route crosses and recrosses the Marsyangdi on trails shared with trekkers heading upvalley towards Manang, while we go downvalley to Bhulbule, then take little-trod trails to Tarkughat before closing the circle by crossing the Chepe Khola and Dorandi Khola and their intervening ridges, back to Gorkha.

That is but one trekking possibility. In such a region of lofty peaks, high snowbound passes and fertile foothills, several other alternatives exist. One of these joins the Annapurna trail at Dharapani and continues upstream to Manang, then crosses the Thorong La to descend as far as Jomosom in the Kali Gandaki, from where it’s possible to catch a flight out to Pokhara.

Another option is to remain with the Manaslu Circuit as described above as far as Bhulbule, then cross the Marsyangdi to Khudi, where you leave the busy Annapurna trail in favour of a cross-country route over cultivated ridges and valleys to Sisuwa, a small township by the Begnas Tal, linked by bus with Pokhara.

Each of these treks will provide a harvest of experience through landscapes of unforgettable beauty. As H.W. Tilman once said, ‘In such country there is no monotony.’

Tilman was one of the first Europeans to set eyes upon the Manaslu Himal when, in 1950, he led a small-scale expedition to explore part of the Annapurna range. In those early days there were no roads to facilitate travel out of the Kathmandu Valley, so Tilman and his five companions trekked across the foothills, and on the sixth day camped at Khanchok on a ridge between Arughat Bazar and Gorkha. This is what he wrote:

‘We had a clear view of Himal Chuli (25,801ft) nearly thirty miles to the north... Binoculars and monoculars were trained on its glistening spire, but even at thirty miles, a distance at which most mountains are easily climbable, we had doubts about Himal Chuli. Just to its south lay a beautiful snow peak called Baudha (21,890ft) presenting us an apparently easy ridge; but such was the loftiness of our thoughts at that time that we gave it only a passing glance. Four months later when we were looking for a peak we could climb, Roberts and I regretted this oversight. Neither of us could remember whether Baudha had looked climbable or not.’ (Nepal Himalaya)

Before exploring the valleys and glaciers of the Annapurna massif from a base near Manang, Tilman’s party diverted their attention to the upper reaches of the Dudh Khola. There they obtained a clear view of Manaslu from Bimtang, and were suitably impressed. Three months later, after failing to climb Annapurna IV, they returned to Bimtang, and Roberts (Major J.O.M. Roberts, who was later to become the ‘father’ of Himalayan trekking) crossed the Larkya La and reported having seen what he thought might be a direct route to the summit plateau of Manaslu, ‘which we discussed with the dispassionate calm of men who have no intention of trying it’, said Tilman later.

The first attempt to climb Manaslu was made not by Tilman or any of his contemporaries, but by mountaineers from Japan, who sent out an initial reconnaissance party in the post-monsoon season of 1952. The following year an expedition under the leadership of Y. Mita set up base camp beyond Samagaon, but their attempts failed at about 7750 metres. In 1954 another Japanese party advanced through the Buri Gandaki, but met with hostility at Samagaon, where the villagers claimed that climbers on the previous expedition had so upset the gods by their actions on the mountain that a huge avalanche had been sent down to destroy the Pung-gyen Monastery, where eighteen people had met their deaths. Such was the ferocity of threats by the Samagaon villagers that the mountaineers were forced to withdraw to the Ganesh Himal. Two years later, however, Manaslu’s highest peak was reached on 9 May 1956 by Toshio Imanishi and the expedition Sirdar, Gyaltsen Norbu, members of a team led by Yuko Maki.

Thus far the Manaslu Himal had been the object of attention only of mountaineers, for trekking had not yet added a new emphasis to Himalayan travel here. But in 1956 David Snellgrove, a noted scholar of Tibetan culture and religion, made a remarkable seven-month journey through the mountains of the Mid-West and Central Nepal with three Nepali companions, during which he crossed the Larkya La from Bimtang and descended the Buri Gandaki – in effect reversing a large part of the trek described in the following pages.

In 1950 Tilman had written: ‘Three of the party who...returned down the Buri Gandaki, found the going bad, and food and transport scarce.’ In Himalayan Pilgrimage, Snellgrove wrote: ‘I had heard frightful stories about the route down the Buri Gandaki’ and went on to describe sections where it was necessary to wade waist deep through raging tributaries in the gorge, where ‘a slip would result in almost certain death’. He wrote of narrow cat-walks consisting of small trunks pegged against the rocks, and of single-pole bridges across which shepherds carried their sheep one by one. Another traveller reported working a way around the base of numerous steep rock ridges, of trails that climbed and descended so frequently that the constant loss and gain of altitude was frustrating. More recently, Bill O’Connor summarised the way in simple, direct, but effective language: ‘In places the path and the bridges are airy and in wet conditions positively scary’ (Adventure Treks in Nepal).

Long after trekking had become one of Nepal’s major sources of income, the Manaslu Himal remained out of bounds to virtually all but mountaineering expeditions. Only such intrepid and persistent travellers as the late Hugh Swift managed to obtain a permit to trek there, but this was a very rare privilege granted to few (see Trekking in Nepal, West Tibet and Bhutan). However, late in 1991 the Nepalese government announced that a number of formerly closed areas were at last to be opened in an attempt to alleviate the pressures suffered by more heavily-trekked regions elsewhere. Manaslu was named as one of these derestricted areas, but with a limited quota of just 400 permits per year.

In the fifty-odd years that have passed since members of Tilman’s expedition descended the Buri Gandaki and found the going bad, many improvements have been made to the trail. Snellgrove’s single-pole bridges have been replaced by more substantial crossings, and it is only very rarely that wading rivers becomes a necessity now. Nevertheless, the route through the Buri Gandaki’s gorges remains something of a helter-skelter with a seemingly never ending succession of demanding ascents and descents, some of which are narrow and airily exposed, and the way maintains its reputation for being both dramatic and almost intimidating. But it leads to a Himalayan wonderland, where the rewards are rich indeed.