A French-Canadian Just Walked the Length of Nepal — 1,700 Kilometres, 20 Districts, 143 Days

On August 1, a French-Canadian trekker named Stephane Champoussin walked into Hilsa, a village on Nepal's remote western border with Tibet, and finished something barely 130 people have ever completed: a full crossing of the Great Himalayan Trail, the entire length of Nepal, on foot.

He had started 143 days earlier, on March 17, in Yamphudin, a village in Taplejung district in Nepal's far east, in the shadow of Kanchenjunga, the world's third-highest mountain. In between lay roughly 1,700 kilometres of trail through about 20 Himalayan districts: the Rolwaling valley, the high country around Makalu, the Manaslu Circuit, and finally the wind-scoured trans-Himalayan plateau of Humla, where the trail ends at the Tibetan border rather than a road.

The Great Himalayan Trail is less a single marked path than an idea: a corridor stitched together from existing trekking routes, herding trails and, in its wildest sections, no trail at all, running the full length of Nepal's mountains from Kanchenjunga in the east to the Tibetan plateau in the far west. The first person to walk it end to end was the late Apa Sherpa, the 21-time Everest summiteer, who led a team through in just 99 days back in 2012 — a benchmark the trail's own custodians deliberately don't formalise into a speed record, since, as GHT founder Robin Boustead has put it, every crossing takes a different line through the mountains.

Champoussin's own account, carried by Kathmandu-based The Tourism Times, describes glacier crossings, snowstorms, rockfall and river crossings at altitudes near 6,200 metres — terrain associated with the GHT's tougher ‘high route’, which strings together high passes between valleys rather than dropping to the lower, faster trails available on some sections of the corridor. “For fit trekkers, don't underestimate the Himalaya,” Champoussin said of finishing, framing the difficulty itself as what turns a crossing into something worth remembering.

Nepal's tourism authorities do not issue a single GHT permit. A full crossing means stacking together TIMS and every regional permit the route touches — Kanchenjunga, Makalu-Barun, Manaslu and the restricted-area permit for Humla — one practical reason full crossings stay rare even as individual sections of the trail get busier every season. For everyone else, the three regions Champoussin walked through remain some of the best multi-week treks in the Himalaya entirely on their own.

Source: The Tourism Times.

Cover photo: Santanu Upadhyay via Pexels (Pexels License).