Shey Phoksundo & Dolpo

The lake

Shey Phoksundo is the deepest lake in Nepal and the colour is the thing nobody is prepared for — a saturated turquoise that looks wrong in photographs and wrong in person. It has almost no aquatic life, which is part of the explanation: very little organic matter, so very little to scatter the light differently.

It sits at 3,611 m inside Shey Phoksundo National Park, Nepal's largest. A waterfall of over 160 m falls near its outlet. For many people the lake alone justifies the journey, and a shorter Lower Dolpo trek that goes no further is a legitimate trip in its own right.

Beyond the lake: Upper Dolpo

Continuing north means crossing the Kang La and Numa La passes, both above 5,000 m, into country that is culturally and geographically Tibetan. This is where the trek becomes an expedition: no lodges, no shops, no road, no reliable phone signal, and evacuation measured in days rather than hours.

Shey Gompa sits beneath Crystal Mountain, a peak circumambulated by pilgrims each summer. This is the area Peter Matthiessen wrote about in The Snow Leopard, and the landscape he described has changed remarkably little.

Bon

Dolpo is one of the few places where Bon — the religion of Tibet that predates Buddhism — is still practised as a living tradition rather than a survival. In practice you will notice it in reversed circumambulation: Bon practitioners walk anticlockwise around shrines and spin prayer wheels the other way. Getting this right matters locally, and it is the opposite of what you will have learned everywhere else in Nepal.

A monsoon trek

Like Upper Mustang, Dolpo lies behind the main Himalayan chain in rain shadow, so the season is inverted relative to the rest of the country. May to early October is the window, which makes this one of very few serious treks available during the monsoon.

The passes are snowbound outside that window, and Upper Dolpo is genuinely not attemptable in winter.

What "camping expedition" means practically

A full crew: guide, cook, kitchen staff, and mules or porters carrying food for the entire route. Tents every night. No resupply. This makes Dolpo substantially more expensive per day than a teahouse trek, and the cost is almost entirely logistics rather than margin.

It also means the group is committed. There is no shortening it halfway.

Permits and who this is for

Upper Dolpo carries one of the higher restricted-area fees in Nepal, charged per person per week, plus national park entry. Guide mandatory, agency-issued, two-person minimum.

This is for experienced trekkers who have done multi-week routes before and are comfortable with three weeks away from any road. It is not a first trek, a second trek, or a trip to book because the photographs are good.

Where to go next

• Rara Lake — Nepal's largest lake, ringed by pine forest at 2,990 m in the far west
• Upper Mustang — A former Tibetan kingdom in the rain shadow north of the Annapurnas
• Kanchenjunga — Three weeks into Nepal's far eastern corner to the base of the world's third-highest mountain

Related activities: Trekking in Nepal, Mountaineering Expeditions.

Or see every trip we run: all trekking and tour packages.