Rasuwa · 26 August 2026
A valley we know welllost more than we can count
On the morning of 26 August a slab of glacier roughly 600 metres wide broke away above the Lhende Khola, fell some 1,200 metres, dammed the river and then let go. Downstream the gauge at Galchchi rose nine metres in thirty minutes.
In the first days nobody could say why. That has since been settled: an international rapid hazard assessment found the failure was of bedrock beneath the ice near Langtang Lirung, and that the earthquake signal recorded at the time was produced by the collapse rather than having caused it. Roughly a fifth of a square kilometre of rock and ice let go at about 5,200 metres.
The hardest part to read came later. Analysing European Space Agency Sentinel-1 radar from January through 18 August, Virginia Tech geophysicist Manoochehr Shirzaei found the glacier and the rock beneath it had been creeping downhill at around ten millimetres a month, accelerating, and visible from orbit in the weeks before it went. Nobody was watching that particular mountain. ICIMOD’s Prashant Baral called the collapse “significantly larger scale than what we have seen in the recent past”.
We are a Pokhara company. Rasuwa is not where we guide, but it is our country, and some of the people carrying loads and cooking dal bhat in that valley are the same people we work alongside everywhere else in Nepal.
Figures from ICIMOD with Nepal’s Department of Hydrology and Meteorology, the Department of Roads, and consolidated police reporting. They are provisional and have risen daily. Our live regional status is kept at Nepal trekking conditions right now.
Give to the government fund. Not to us
We could put a donate button on this page and forward the money on. We are not going to, and it is worth saying why.
A trekking company in the middle adds nothing except a step you cannot audit — and it asks you to trust a stranger with money at the exact moment when trusting strangers with money is the thing to be careful about. The state fund is audited and its spending is restricted by law. Send it straight there and cut us out entirely.
Official channels only.Nepali press have warned that disaster fundraising draws scams within the first 48–72 hours. An account number in a forwarded message or a social post is worth nothing on its own — and that includes any number quoted as coming from this page. Use the link below and pay on the government portal, so the only site that ever holds your card details is the government’s own.
Prime Minister's Disaster Relief Fund
Government of Nepal · pmdrf.nchl.com.np
It can only be spent on rescue, treatment, relief, rehabilitation and infrastructure restoration. Not on anything else.
The accounts are published, so you can check where it went — more than most disaster appeals will ever offer you.
Directly on the government portal, from any country. No bank transfer, no SWIFT code, nobody in the middle.
Opens pmdrf.nchl.com.np — the Government of Nepal portal, operated by Nepal Clearing House. We receive nothing and we see nothing.
If you would rather give to a relief organisation than to a state fund, these two are working in the affected districts and are the only others we will vouch for.
Nepal Red Cross Society
More than 200 staff and volunteers in the affected districts running evacuations, search and rescue, emergency supplies and transitional shelter. They had reached roughly 5,000 people in the first days.
DonateIFRC
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies released emergency funding behind the Nepal Red Cross response, with regional teams able to scale it.
DonateCome anyway. That is not a sales line
The flood struck one corridor in northern Rasuwa — the Bhote Koshi, the Tibet border crossing, and the road that serves the Langtang valley. As of 10 October, Everest, the Annapurna trails, Pokhara and Kathmandu are open. Late-September storms damaged the roads into Mustang and Manang and the trail near Samagaun on Manaslu; those are being repaired.
Langtang is the one region we are not selling yet: the road reaches Syabrubesi again, but the bridge that links it to Kathmandu was still being installed on 9 October. If you had Langtang planned, talk to us before you cancel anything — we will tell you what we actually know rather than what we would like to sell you.
And the unglamorous truth: after a disaster, the second wave of damage to Nepal is the season nobody books. Guides, porters, teahouse families and jeep drivers lose a year of income to a flood that never touched their valley. Cancelling an Annapurna trek helps nobody in Rasuwa.
We will keep this page updated as the official picture changes, and we will take it down when it stops being useful rather than leave it up as decoration.
Status updated 10 October 2026; the casualty figures are as dated on each one. They are provisional and official sources currently disagree with one another — where they do, we quote the lower attributed number and say “at least”. The barrier lake that formed north of the border and prompted evacuation warnings on 28 August drained through the following days and was largely empty by 30 August; a second lake remains at high altitude near the collapse site.
Travel Himalaya Nepal · Pokhara · est. 1998