Upper Dolpo Trek

The most committing trek in Nepal that is still a trek

Upper Dolpo is twenty-five days, four passes above 5,000 m, and roughly three weeks in a tent on the Tibetan plateau behind the main Himalayan chain. There is no road, no lodge network, no helicopter you can walk to and no village for days at a time.

It requires no climbing skills, no rope and no crampons. In that narrow technical sense it is easier than Dhaulagiri. In every other sense — duration, remoteness, altitude, the sheer distance from help — it is the biggest thing we sell.

It is also, for people who care about this sort of thing, the most extraordinary. Dolpo is where Tibetan culture and the pre-Buddhist Bon religion survived more or less undisturbed, and where the landscape is genuinely Tibetan rather than Himalayan: high, dry, enormous and almost empty.

Shey Gompa and the Crystal Mountain

Shey Gompa, at around 4,500 m, sits beneath a peak of folded, fossil-bearing rock that pilgrims call the Crystal Mountain. Both Buddhists and followers of Bon walk a circuit around it, and for centuries this has been one of the more significant pilgrimage sites in the western Himalaya despite being about as hard to reach as anywhere inhabited.

It is also the destination of Peter Matthiessen's The Snow Leopard, written after he travelled here in 1973 with the zoologist George Schaller, who was studying blue sheep and looking for the cat. Matthiessen never saw one. Neither, in all likelihood, will you — but the population here is real, and the reason Schaller came is the reason the habitat still exists.

Phoksundo, and the colour of it

Phoksundo Lake at 3,611 m is the deepest lake in Nepal and a colour that photographs badly because nobody believes it. It sits in a steep-sided basin inside Shey Phoksundo National Park, with a Bon monastery at its southern end and a trail cut along a cliff ledge above the western shore that is the single most photographed section of trail in Dolpo.

We spend a rest day here. It is the last comfortable place before the high country and it is worth more than a lunch stop.

A camping expedition, in full

You should know what you are buying.

	Upper Dolpo
Nights in a tent	Around twenty of twenty-five
Crew	Guide, cook, kitchen crew, porters or a mule train — often 12 to 18 people
Food	Carried in from Juphal and cooked by our kitchen throughout
Washing	A bowl of warm water outside your tent
Resupply	Effectively none — what leaves Juphal is what you have
Longest stretch without a village	Three to four days
Evacuation	Helicopter only, weather-dependent, expensive, slow

The crew is large because everything — tents, kitchen, twenty-five days of food, fuel — has to move with you over four high passes. In places we use mules rather than porters, which is how goods have moved on this plateau for centuries and is still the practical answer.

The passes

Four above 5,000 m, and they are the structure of the trek rather than incidents in it.

Pass	Height	Where
Kang La	5,350 m	Between Phoksundo and Shey Gompa
Saldang La	about 5,200 m	Shey Gompa to Namduna and Saldang
Jeng La	about 5,090 m	Crossing towards the Tarap valley
Numa La	about 5,190 m	Leaving Do Tarap southward

None is technical. All are long, high, exposed and cold, and crossing four of them inside three weeks while camping at altitude is the reason this trek is graded expert. The nights between them are frequently above 4,500 m.

Who this is for

• Right for you if you have done a long high trek before, you have camped at altitude, you can be out of contact for three weeks, and you want the remotest inhabited country in Nepal.
• Wrong for you if you have not slept in a tent in the cold, or you need to be reachable, or twenty-five days is more holiday than you can comfortably commit.
• Worth a conversation if you have done Everest Base Camp or Annapurna and want to know whether you are ready. We will give you an honest answer, and we have a shorter Upper Mustang trek that scratches a similar itch in thirteen days with lodges every night.

The permits, which are the most expensive in Nepal

• Upper Dolpo Restricted Area Permit — the highest restricted-area fee in the country, priced per person for a fixed period, agency issued only
• Lower Dolpo Restricted Area Permit — for the approach section before you enter the upper zone
• Shey Phoksundo National Park entry permit
• TIMS card

A licensed guide and an agency-issued permit, as with every restricted area. The two-trekker minimum that used to apply was dropped in March 2026, so a solo traveller can be permitted. All permits are included in the price, and on this trek they are a large share of it.

The one trek where monsoon is the season

Dolpo sits behind the Himalaya in the rain shadow, which inverts the Nepali trekking calendar. The window is May to early October, and June to August — the months that close most of Nepal — are among the best here, with the passes clear of snow and the high pastures in flower.

The complication is the approach. Getting to Juphal means flying to Nepalgunj in the Terai and then on to the Juphal airstrip, and the Terai leg is genuinely monsoon-affected even if Dolpo is not. Delays of a day or two at Nepalgunj are common in July and August.

Outside the window, the passes hold snow and the plateau is brutally cold. We do not run this between November and April.

Flights, and the margin we build in

Two domestic flights each way — Kathmandu to Nepalgunj, then Nepalgunj to Juphal — and the second is a small aircraft into a hill airstrip with all that implies.

We build two spare days into the itinerary for this reason. On a trip of this length and cost, losing the Juphal flight at the start and having no slack would mean cutting the trek short at the far end, which is the outcome the spare days exist to prevent. Do not book an international flight for the day after you are due back.

Where this trek goes

• Shey Phoksundo & Dolpo — Nepal's deepest lake, and beyond it the Bon heartland of Upper Dolpo
• 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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