Makalu Base Camp Trek

The fifth-highest mountain, and almost nobody at the bottom of it

Everest Base Camp takes tens of thousands of trekkers a year. Makalu Base Camp, beneath the fifth-highest mountain on earth and a two-day walk from Everest as the crow flies, takes a few hundred.

The difference is entirely logistical. Khumbu has an airstrip at Lukla that puts you in the mountains in forty minutes. Makalu has a flight to a Terai airstrip at Tumlingtar, a jeep to a roadhead, and then six days of walking with three passes in the way before you reach the valley you came for.

What you get in exchange is a base camp at 4,870 m where the 8,485 m south face fills an entire horizon, and where on most days your group will be the only one there. If you want that experience with lodges every night and a road never far away, Everest Base Camp is the trek to book instead — this one is for people who have already done that and want the version without the traffic.

The approach is the trek

This is the thing to understand before booking. On most base camp treks you follow one valley upwards. Here you cannot: the Barun valley is separated from the approach by a high ridge, and the route has to climb over it.

Pass	Height	Where it sits
Kauma La	about 3,760 m	First of the three, above Khongma Danda
Shipton La	about 4,220 m	The main crossing into the Barun
Keke La	about 4,170 m	Immediately after, before the descent

All three are crossed in a single long day from Khongma Danda, which is the hardest day of the approach and the one that decides how the rest of the trek feels. It is exposed, frequently snowbound in early spring, and there is no shelter between the start and the descent on the far side.

Shipton La is named for Eric Shipton, the British mountaineer and explorer who mapped much of this country in the 1950s. Walking it, you understand why the exploration took as long as it did.

How hard, and who this is for

Challenging. Nineteen days, of which fourteen are walking, mostly six to eight hours. You sleep above 3,500 m for a week and above 4,000 m for four consecutive nights. There is no technical ground and no equipment beyond boots, poles and warm clothing — but the sustained nature of it is the point.

The honest filter: if you have completed Everest Base Camp or the Annapurna Circuit and found them manageable rather than desperate, you are ready for this. If you have not done a long high trek before, this is the wrong one to start with, and we would rather say so now than at Khongma Danda.

Accommodation, and where it stops being lodges

Basic teahouses exist as far as Tashigaon. Above that the settlements are seasonal herders' huts and the accommodation ranges from very simple lodges to tents, depending on the season and what is open.

We carry camping capability from Khongma Danda upwards. In peak season parts of the upper valley have functioning simple lodges; outside it, they close. Rather than promise you a bed that may not exist at 4,800 m, we bring the alternative and use the lodge when there is one.

Food above Tashigaon is dal bhat, noodles, potatoes and eggs, and increasingly what our own kitchen cooks. Nothing up here is carried by road, so everything is carried by someone.

The Barun valley is the other reason to come

Makalu Barun National Park protects a valley that has never been logged or grazed at the intensity of most Nepali hill country, and the forest on the approach is genuinely exceptional — old growth oak, fir and rhododendron, hung with moss and lichen, with an understorey most trekkers in Nepal never see because it has long since been cleared elsewhere.

Red panda are present in these forests. So are Himalayan black bear and, at higher elevations, snow leopard, though seeing either is a matter of luck rather than planning. The birdlife through the middle elevations is among the best in the country.

It rains here more than in Khumbu, and that is precisely why the forest looks like this. Expect wet days on the approach even in a good season.

What you actually see from base camp

The base camp sits at 4,870 m on moraine at the head of the Barun glacier. Makalu's south face rises directly in front of it — a single unbroken wall of rock and ice that is difficult to take in, because there is no intervening ridge to give it scale.

From the slopes above camp, on a clear morning, Everest and Lhotse appear over the ridge to the west. Standing in one place with the fifth and first highest mountains in the world both in view is not something many treks offer, and it is the single image people come back with.

We schedule two nights at base camp for exactly this reason. One night means one chance at the weather.

Permits

• Makalu Barun National Park entry permit
• TIMS — Trekkers' Information Management System card
• A rural municipality entry permit, checked at Chichila on the way in

This is not a restricted area, so there is no agency-only permit and no minimum party size imposed by government. We set a two-person minimum ourselves because the trip requires a crew and the economics do not work otherwise.

The flight to Tumlingtar, and planning around it

Domestic flights in Nepal are weather-dependent and Tumlingtar is no exception. A cancellation costs a day, and on a nineteen-day itinerary with a fixed international flight at the end, days matter.

We build a spare day into the return in Kathmandu. We also strongly advise not booking your international departure for the morning after you are due back. If the Tumlingtar flight goes wrong on the way out, the alternative is a very long drive, and that is a better problem to have if there is slack in the schedule.

Season

Late September to November is the most reliable: clearer skies, the passes open, and the upper valley lodges running. March to May is beautiful in the forest, with rhododendron through the middle elevations, but the three passes frequently hold snow into April and the crossing day can become serious.

We do not run this trek in winter — the passes close — or in the monsoon, when the Barun approach is leech-ridden, landslide-prone and entirely cloud-bound.

Where this trek goes

• Kathmandu Valley — Seven UNESCO Monument Zones within an hour of each other

Related activities: Trekking in Nepal, Photography Tours in Nepal.

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