Dhaulagiri Circuit Trek

We meet you at the airport and take you to your hotel. The afternoon is yours. In the evening we go through the route properly, because this is not a teahouse trek and what you carry and what you have trained for both matter more than usual. We check your kit against the list and hire what is missing.

Twenty five minutes by air, or six to seven hours by road along the Trishuli if the weather is against the flight. The afternoon is spent on the last of the shopping and on splitting loads between what goes on a porter and what you carry. There is nowhere to buy anything after tomorrow.

A long morning in a jeep up the Myagdi Khola to Darbang, on a road that stops being tarmac early and stops being reliable later. From the roadhead we walk two or three hours through terraced fields to Dharapani and pitch the first camp. Subtropical, green, and warm enough that the tents feel unnecessary.

Up through Magar villages where the houses are stone and slate and the children are unbothered by walkers, because very few come this way. A long climb to the ridge at Naura and a traverse into Muri. This is still farmed country and you will be handed cucumber more than once.

The day the valley closes in. The trail drops to the Myagdi Khola and then works along the north bank on exposed sections that have been cut and recut after landslides. Seven hours, a good deal of up and down, and the last houses of the valley at Boghara.

Past the last permanent settlement at Lipshe and into forest: oak, then bamboo, then rhododendron. The path crosses the river on log bridges that the crew often rebuild on the spot. Dobang is a clearing rather than a place, and from here on nobody lives in this valley at all.

Deep forest all morning, wet underfoot, with the river loud below and Dhaulagiri occasionally visible through the canopy in a way that stops the conversation. Sallaghari is a pine clearing at the top edge of the trees. It is the last camp with firewood and the last one that feels sheltered.

Out of the trees and into the moraine. A short day on purpose, four hours, because the ground under your feet changes today and so does the air. Italian Base Camp sits in a meadow below the west face with the mountain filling the head of the valley. Most people come out of the tent at dusk and stay out.

A rest day that is not really a rest. We walk two or three hours up the side of the valley and come back down to sleep, which is exactly what the body is asking for. Your guide takes everyone's oxygen saturation morning and evening from today and writes it down, so a slide is noticed rather than argued about.

The narrow part. The trail squeezes along the Chonbarden gorge on scree and slabs with loose ground above it, and helmets go on before we start and stay on. We step onto the glacier in the afternoon. Glacier Camp is pitched on moraine at 4,200 m and the mountain cracks and shifts all night.

Four hours up the Chonbarden glacier, roped where the crew judge it necessary, to the shelf under the north face. Dhaulagiri Base Camp at 4,740 m is a serious place: Tukuche Peak on one side, the north face of an 8,000 m mountain on the other, and an amphitheatre of ice that never stops making noise.

The second acclimatisation day, spent partly on the ice learning what your crampons do and how an ice axe is held, whether or not you have done it before. A short walk up towards the icefall in the afternoon. Tomorrow is the hardest day of the trek and there is no point starting it cold.

Away before light. Snow slopes at a moderate angle for most of the morning, then the cairns and the prayer flags of the French Pass at 5,360 m, and a view that takes in Dhaulagiri I and II, Tukuche and Sita Chuchura. The descent is on snow into Hidden Valley, which is flat, closed on every side, and utterly silent.

Kept back on purpose. If snow closed the French Pass, or somebody needed an extra day, or the weather turned while we were at base camp, this is the day that absorbs it. If none of that happened, the fit and the willing go up towards Dhampus Peak for the morning and the rest of us do very little at 5,050 m, which is work enough.

The longest and hardest day of the trek, and everybody is warned about it twice. A four hour traverse on snow and rock to the Dhampus Pass at 5,240 m, with Nilgiri and the west end of the Annapurnas opening ahead, and then a descent of more than 1,500 m on scree that punishes knees. Nine hours to the grazing ground at Yak Kharka.

Down through juniper and then apple orchards into Marpha, which is whitewashed, flagstoned, and after eleven nights in a tent feels like a city. There is time for the distillery and a proper lunch before the short walk or drive on to Jomsom. A bed with a roof, a hot shower and a door that shuts.

The Jomsom flight leaves at first light because the Kali Gandaki wind closes the strip by mid morning. Twenty minutes down the deepest gorge in the world to Pokhara, then on to Kathmandu by air or by road. The evening is a dinner where everybody eats a great deal.

A free morning and a transfer to the airport three hours before your flight. If the Jomsom weather cost us a day, this is the day that pays for it, and we will have been talking to your airline before you ask.