Guides first, since 2011

Nepal Trek Planner started in the spring of 2011 with a rented desk in Thamel, a folder of hand-written route notes, and one conviction: the person who plans your trek should be someone who has walked it. Kumar Adhikari had spent seven seasons guiding the Annapurna and Everest trails and kept meeting trekkers whose itineraries had been drawn by a sales office — too fast over the passes, too rushed to acclimatize, too packaged to change.

So the company was built the other way around. Guides came first and the office grew around them: the first three hires were trail crew, not salespeople, and the first itineraries were written at teahouse tables between seasons. Fifteen years later the desk has become a full office, but every route we sell is still drafted, walked and revised by the people who lead it.

We stayed deliberately small. Groups are capped at twelve and average six; the guide team numbers 28, licensed and retained year-round rather than hired by the season. Growing this way is slower. It is also why more than a third of each season's guests arrive because a former guest sent them.

The mountains are the point, and they belong to nobody. Our job is to get you among them safely, at a humane pace, in a way that leaves the valleys better off for our passing. Everything else — the permits, the flights, the yak-bell logistics — is detail we have had fifteen years to get right.