Nepal is open for the autumn season, and glad you are coming.
Everest, Annapurna and Thorong La are open. Langtang treks stay paused while the Rasuwa road is rebuilt; Mustang and Manang roads are still being repaired.
Nepal News
Summits, records and the people of the Himalaya.
136 stories
Records & People
Apple’s new film Tenzing sent Tom Hiddleston and co-star Genden Phuntsok trekking to Everest Base Camp before filming, here’s the real 1953 story.
Records & People
With altitude symptoms you sleep no higher tonight. The NHS rules, the signs that mean descend now, and what a guide watches that you cannot see in yourself.
Records & People
A 2017 survey reportedly found a lower spot than the one Nepal had used for decades, which makes the gap between jungle floor and Everest summit even harder to believe.
Records & People
No one publishes an official count by nationality. Here are the American deaths that can be documented since 1963, and what the record actually shows.
Records & People
Lau Wee Seng, 50, died on 17 September near 6,000m while descending from Camp II on an acclimatisation rotation. He is the second death there this season.
Records & People
Forty-one people summited K2 in 2025. In 2026, nobody did. Heavy July snow, a hot August and the fewest permits in two decades, and what it tells climbers.
Records & People
The Icefall Doctors fix the ladders and ropes through the Khumbu Icefall each spring, and in 2026 a 28-metre serac made it the latest route opening in years.
Records & People
Nepal shares five of its eight giants with a neighbour, and all eight were first climbed within a single decade, starting with Annapurna in 1950.
Records & People
The shaggy pack animal hauling your duffel bag below about 3,500m almost certainly isn't a yak, but a dzo, a yak-cattle hybrid bred because real yaks can't handle the heat.
Records & People
The number on every map, 8,848.86 metres, only became official in December 2020, after two countries spent a decade measuring the same mountain.
Records & People
Nepal's national flower isn't grown in a garden bed — it's a forest tree that turns entire hillsides red for about six weeks a year, and the bloom climbs the mountain in a predictable wave.
Records & People
Six sacred glacial lakes above Everest sit higher than almost any freshwater on Earth, and the colour that makes trekkers stop mid-stride comes down to stone ground fine enough to float.
Records & People
Every campfire story about the kukri insists a Gurkha must draw blood before sheathing it again — actual Gurkhas, and two centuries of British Army history, say otherwise.
Records & People
Phoksundo's turquoise water and no-fishing custom are real, but Nepal's own hydrology surveys put the actual depth record on a different lake entirely.
Records & People
Geologists say the ground beneath Kathmandu's temples and guesthouses sat underwater for the better part of a million years, and the same soft lakebed sediment is a documented reason the city shakes so hard when an earthquake hits.
Records & People
The river that destroyed the Rasuwagadhi border crossing in August 2026 and the river carrying Nepal's oldest bungee jump share a name but nothing else.
Records & People
Sir George Everest never set foot near the mountain, never wanted his name on it, and wasn't even the one who proved it was the tallest on Earth.
Records & People
Priya Adhikari has flown over 1,000 Himalayan rescues. In the week after the Bhote Koshi flood she flew about a hundred, into places with nowhere to land.
Records & People
The China-Tibet Mountaineering Association has kept Cho Oyu and Shishapangma shut to foreign teams for autumn 2026, and Manaslu absorbs the whole overflow.
Records & People
The greater one-horned rhino nearly vanished from Nepal twice in living memory — and the same country then built one of Asia's strictest anti-poaching operations to bring it back.
Records & People
At 22,943 feet, Machapuchare towers over the Annapurna Sanctuary, and by Nepal's own law, no one has legally set foot on its true summit since a British team turned back 150 feet short of it in 1957.
Records & People
For most of the year the jet stream sits on Everest’s summit. It lifts for a few weeks in May as the monsoon pushes it aside, and only then can anyone climb.
Records & People
Everest has over 12,000 ascents; Annapurna I and Kangchenjunga barely a few hundred each. The gap between the eight-thousanders is not about height.
Records & People
In 2019 a record 381 permits funnelled onto Everest during just two good-weather days put hundreds of climbers in a single queue above 8,000 m. Eleven died. The crowd, not the mountain, was the danger.
Records & People
K2 is 238 m shorter than Everest but kills roughly one climber in ten — a dimension-by-dimension comparison of height, technical difficulty, weather, rescue and death rate, and why K2 is “the Savage Mountain.”
Records & People
On 10–11 May 1996 a storm caught climbers high on Everest and eight people died. The sequence, the names, and the lessons that reshaped guided climbing — recounted with respect.
Records & People
Why a guided Everest expedition runs from about US$35,000 to well over US$100,000 — the permit, the oxygen, the Sherpa team and the logistics, line by line, with real 2026 numbers.
Records & People
How Nirmal 'Nims' Purja climbed every 8,000-metre mountain in 189 days in 2019, shattering a record that had stood almost eight years — and how the speed record has fallen twice since. Every date and time sourced.
Records & People
By deaths per summit, Guinness ranks Annapurna I the deadliest mountain in the Himalaya. The numbers behind it, next to Dhaulagiri and Everest.
Records & People
From the 2014 Khumbu Icefall to the earthquake that swept Everest Base Camp in 2015 — the deadliest avalanches in Nepal's mountains, their causes and tolls, recorded with respect.
Records & People
Mount Everest's verified record book — who has summited most, who was oldest and youngest on top, and the fastest ascent ever timed, with every name, number and year sourced.
Records & People
A 2024 Nature Geoscience study found a river capture 89,000 years ago is still lifting Everest by up to about 2 mm a year, on top of the tectonic uplift.
Records & People
Every brochure calls Tilicho the world’s highest lake. At 4,919m it is spectacular, but the real record sits more than 1,400m higher, inside a volcano.
Records & People
In 1957 a British team stopped 150 feet short of Machapuchare's summit and kept their word never to finish it — Nepal has banned every climber from trying since.
Records & People
Five storeys high and packed with ancient remains, manuscripts and monastic cells, Upper Mustang’s sky caves are still one of archaeology’s open questions.
Records & People
A certified 56-degree drop makes Pokhara’s ZipFlyer the steepest zip line on Earth. What a 1.8-kilometre descent from Sarangkot actually involves.
Records & People
The summit of Everest is 450-million-year-old limestone from a tropical seafloor, packed with fossils. How it got there, and where trekkers can see it.
Records & People
At 3,762 metres in Mustang, natural gas keeps a flame burning beside a spring at Muktinath, a shrine Hindus and Buddhists have shared for centuries.
Records & People
Updated 2 October. A record 493 climbers held Manaslu permits, but storms closed the season on 22 September with no summit reported and four deaths.
Records & People
For nearly 70 years, climbers who reach Kanchenjunga have stopped a few feet short of the true top, a promise kept out of respect for a sacred mountain.
Records & People
Rope-fixing, a solo push, a client summit, then solo again: Nepali guide Tashi Gyalzen Sherpa's four ascents in May 2025 are now the certified record for the most Everest summits in a single season.
Records & People
Weeks after Nirmal ‘Nimsdai’ Purja died on Broad Peak, his home municipality wants Annapurna renamed in his honour. It still needs Kathmandu’s sign-off.
Records & People
The animatronic Yeti at Disney World has run stuck in place since 2006. The Sherpa monastery guarding the scalp said to have inspired it has kept its own mystery going a lot longer.
Records & People
Between two 8,000-metre peaks, the Kali Gandaki has carved a gorge over three times the depth of the Grand Canyon, and a trekking trail runs along its floor.
Records & People
Nepal flies the only national flag that is not a rectangle. Its shape is set by a construction in the constitution, and the result is an irrational ratio.
Records & People
Sagarmatha National Park stretches from 2,845 metres to Everest's 8,848-metre summit — and after a roughly 40-year absence, snow leopards are being seen inside it again.
Records & People
A 52-year-old Everest guide vanished at 24,600 feet after losing his client on the descent. Six days later, a garbage-collection crew spotted him crawling down the Khumbu Icefall — barely alive.
Records & People
The Tenzing-Hillary Everest Marathon drops 1,920 vertical metres over 26.2 miles from the base of the world's tallest mountain — and a Nepali runner's course record has now survived twenty straight years of attempts.
Showing the 48 most recent of 136 Records & People stories.
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