Mohare Danda Trek

A trail the villages own outright

Plenty of trekking companies talk about community benefit. On the Mohare Danda trail the lodges are the community's property — built, owned and staffed by village committees in Myagdi, with the surplus going into local institutions rather than to a lodge owner in Pokhara.

The trail grew out of work by Mahabir Pun, a teacher from the village of Nangi who returned home after studying abroad and spent years building schools, a wireless network across the ridges, and eventually a set of community lodges he called the Communities Eco-Lodge Trek. He received the Ramon Magsaysay Award in 2007 for that work, largely for connecting remote Myagdi villages to the internet using improvised equipment.

What you get as a result is not a better bed. It is a different transaction: your room charge and your dinner are village revenue, and the committee decides what it funds. That is the honest version of "sustainable trekking" — unglamorous, accounted for, and visible in the school buildings you walk past.

Dhaulagiri, from the seat opposite

Mohare Danda sits on the ridge dividing the Kali Gandaki from the Modi valley, and its particular gift is Dhaulagiri I (8,167 m) directly across the gorge — not glimpsed past a shoulder, but filling the western sky from base to summit.

That is unusual. From Poon Hill, three hours further east, Dhaulagiri is impressive but further off and partly foreshortened. Here the Kali Gandaki — the deepest gorge on earth by some measures, running between Dhaulagiri and Annapurna I — does the work of clearing the foreground for you.

Peak	Height	From Mohare Danda
Dhaulagiri I	8,167 m	Due west, unobstructed, dominant
Annapurna I	8,091 m	North-east
Annapurna South	7,219 m	East
Nilgiri	7,061 m	North, above the gorge
Machhapuchhre	6,993 m	East, in profile
Tukuche Peak	6,920 m	North-west, on the Dhaulagiri massif

Why this route rather than Poon Hill

This trek ends over Poon Hill, so it is not a choice between the two so much as a question of how you get there.

	Mohare Danda route	Standard Poon Hill route
Trekkers on the trail	Very few until the last day	Busy throughout
Highest point	3,300 m at Mohare	3,210 m at Poon Hill
Lodge ownership	Village committees	Private, mostly non-local
Accommodation standard	Simple; homestay on night one	Comfortable, with choice
Poon Hill at sunrise	Reached from the west, with the crowd	Same
Repeated ground	None	None

The practical difference is the first two days. You spend them on a trail where you may not see another foreign trekker, in villages that are not organised around your arrival — and then you rejoin the main route at the end, which is when the company appears.

If you want the classic version with better lodges and no homestay, take Ghorepani Poon Hill. If you want the quiet approach and the community model, take this.

What the walking is actually like

Four days, around 40 km, and a shape that front-loads the effort.

Day	Distance	Walking	Height change
1	about 8 km	5–6 hrs after a 2 hr drive	Steady climb to 1,450 m
2	about 12 km	6–7 hrs	+1,850 m to 3,300 m
3	about 9 km	5–6 hrs	Over 3,210 m, down to 2,874 m
4	about 11 km	4–5 hrs, then a drive	−1,800 m to the road

Day two is the day. Around 1,850 m of ascent, beginning with roughly two hours of stone staircase before the trail settles into forest. It is the biggest single climb on any of our four-day treks and the reason this is graded moderate rather than easy. Nobody finds it trivial; almost everybody finishes it.

Day one is gentler than the distance suggests — a long, steadily rising path rather than a climb, which is why it works as a first walking day straight off a drive.

Lespar, and what a homestay night involves

Lespar is a Magar village at around 1,450 m and you sleep in someone's house. That is worth being specific about, because expectations cause more disappointment here than conditions do.

You get a room with a bed and blankets, an outside or shared toilet, a bucket of hot water if you want to wash, and dinner cooked on the family's stove from what the family grows — rice, lentils, seasonal greens, pickle, possibly chicken if it has been arranged. You eat when the household eats. There is no menu and no bar.

In exchange you are in a working Magar house in Myagdi with people who are hosting rather than serving. If that sounds like the good part, this trek is for you. If you would rather have a lockable door and a hot shower, say so at booking and we will route you through lodge accommodation instead where it exists.

Mohare Danda itself

The ridge-top accommodation is a community eco-lodge at 3,300 m — proper rooms, a dining room with a stove, solar power and a view from the windows that most hotels charge four figures for. It is the most comfortable high-altitude night on any of our short treks, which surprises people who assume community-run means rough.

There is a small tower on the ridge for the full panorama. Sunset is usually the better light here: Dhaulagiri faces west, so it takes the last of the sun full-on while Annapurna has already gone into shadow.

Kokhe Danda and rejoining the crowd

Day three traverses east along the ridge over Kokhe Danda and on to Poon Hill, dropping to Ghorepani for the night. It is a fine ridge walk with the whole Dhaulagiri–Annapurna arc on your left, and for most of it you will still be on your own.

Then you reach Poon Hill, and in October there will be a few hundred people on it. This is not a flaw in the itinerary; it is the reality of the most accessible sunrise viewpoint in Nepal. Having spent two days with the same mountains to yourself, most of our clients find it more funny than annoying.

If solitude matters more than ticking Poon Hill, the Muldai View Point trek reaches a higher, emptier viewpoint in the same four days.

Permits

Both included and arranged by us in Pokhara:

• ACAP — Annapurna Conservation Area Project entry permit
• TIMS — Trekkers' Information Management System card

Bring your passport and two passport photographs. Checkpoints on this route are at the ACAP post near the start and again at Ghorepani.

Season

October and November are the clearest and Dhaulagiri is at its best. March to May adds rhododendron through the forest belt on day two and warmer nights in Lespar. December works well — the ridge lodge is heated in the dining room and the air is exceptionally clear — but expect hard frost at 3,300 m.

We do not run this in the monsoon. The day-two staircase is dangerous when wet, the views are the whole point, and the lower forest has leeches.

Where this trek goes

• Pokhara — A lakeside town at 820 m with the Annapurnas 30 km away

Related activities: Trekking in Nepal.

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