The Great Himalaya Trail

“We had snow leopards following us,” says Glyn. “Once, we woke up in the morning and found the prints of a leopard mother and cub on the ground – they’d been sniffing around our camp.”

Glyn Harper travelled to Nepal in 2012 to do the trek of a lifetime – the Great Himalaya Trail with our trekking partner World Expeditions. He was expecting epic scenery on this five-month adventure across Nepal, but he wasn’t expecting this.

Five times, leopards followed the trekkers, but Glyn never saw them – probably for the best. “At the time, I thought it was very cool,” says Glyn. “Then later, I saw a snow leopard in a zoo and I realised how big they are…”

There are very few people who can say they’ve been hunted by leopards, but then there are very few people in the world who have walked all the way across Nepal. An incomplete database compiled with the help of Robin Boustead, who conceptualised the trek, only has a record of just over 100 hikers completing the Great Himalaya Trail between 1994 and 2023. Compare that to the tens of thousands of hikers who clamber through the Everest region every year.

The section of the Great Himalaya Trail route in Nepal is 1,700km long. Whilst there's not always a marked official trail, the route that most expeditions takes crosses Nepal’s highest navigable passes. It runs close to all the country’s highest mountains and traverses its famous walking areas, including Annapurna, Manaslu and Everest. The literal high points include vertiginous passes like Sherpani Col (6,097m), Larkya La (5,106m) and Tilman Pass (5,320m).

There is also a low or 'cultural' route across Nepal. This doesn't reach the same high altitudes and can be completed in a shorter time.

The Great Himalaya Trail puts the length of northern Nepal on a map. Just knowing that it can be traversed should inspire travelers to think outside the tried and tested trekking regions. “The beauty of the trail is that you encounter a huge variety of scenery,” says Glyn. “I think that’s the great strategic role the GHT can play in Nepalese trekking.”

Walking between areas heightens their differences, and their unique beauty. The Dolpo region, which sits in the rain shadow, is an extraordinary desert. It contrasts with the high snow-capped peaks of Makalu and Manaslu, and the protected forests around Rara Lake, in Rara National Park in the far west.

It’s difficult, of course, to steer travelers away from ‘bucket list’ places like Everest Base Camp, especially if they’re only planning to come to Nepal once in their lifetime. Nepal’s tourism is concentrated on Everest and Annapurna. After 50 days of trekking, passing no one but curious yaks and goats, it’s a shock to enter the Everest region.

“All of a sudden there were hordes of tourists,” says Glyn. “We had to follow the rucksack in front of us.”

Not everyone who does this trek does it in one go. Some solo trekkers who hike this track have been known to come off the trail for weeks at a time – getting off at a village, bussing to a town and then on to Kathmandu to resupply and rest – before taking on the next section. Glyn and Agnes had to leave the trail after Agnes became ill crossing Sherpani Col. They rejoined the trail at a later point, and Glyn returned the following year to complete the section they had missed.

Trekkers joined the group for particular legs – like the dramatic, snowy trek in the Kanchenjunga massif in the far east in February, or for Langtang and the Tilman Pass, replenishing the trek not just with new supplies, but also bringing new porters and new conversation.

People are an important part of any journey – their conspicuous absence, meetings, farewells, reunions. On a supported expedition, trips start with porters and guides – at any one time on the trek there were between eight and 20 supporting Glyn’s group. In the west, as the landscape changed and became lower, mules carried the bags.

There are villages on this trek where a trekking caravan arriving is something of an event – there won’t have been another visitor in weeks.

Glyn, who learnt a bit of Nepali, was able to share his thanks with the porters when they finished their leg of the trek. It is telling too that, when asked of the many photographs he took, which was his favorite, Glyn plumps for those with people in them, and villages – which became more frequent in the less remote west.

Later in the trek, the trail passes into the warm forests and the temperature climbs – to 30°C or more. “There was some scat from a Bengal tiger on the path,” Glyn says.

From snow leopards to tigers – or out of the frying pan, into the fire – there aren’t many treks where you cross between the territories of the rarest big cats.

This is an encyclopaedic encounter with a country. And when it ends, its influence lives on.

“I did a major career change after the GHT,” says Glyn. “I’m now an author.”

“I think doing the GHT affected that,” says Glyn. “When you set off and you look at a map of Nepal and you realise you’ve done 1cm along the map and there’s all the rest of Nepal to go – that’s a bit like writing a novel. You write your first word and you have another 80k to do… There were a lot of similarities to the GHT – the psychology of it.”

From snow leopards, glacier crevasses and unbroken snow slopes to a green, yellow and white-iced cake baked to celebrate finishing at the Tibetan border. This trek might be extraordinary in its variety, but you don’t need to be extraordinary to do it.

In Glyn’s parting words: “If you’re thinking of doing all or part, don’t overthink it – it’s very easy to convince yourself that you can’t do something like this. But, actually, the people who do it are not hardcore mountaineers or super athletes; they just want to have an adventure of a lifetime.”