The Sacred Nepal Peak No One Is Allowed to Climb — Even Though a Team Got Within 150 Feet

In 1957, two British climbers stood roughly 150 feet below the top of a Himalayan peak — closer to a summit most people will never see up close in their lives — and then turned around and climbed back down. They had permission to go no further. Nearly seventy years later, nobody has legally gone higher. Machapuchare, the 6,993-metre "Fishtail" peak that towers over Pokhara, is one of the only major mountains on Earth that has never been officially summited — and Nepal intends to keep it that way.

The story starts with a British expedition led by Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Roberts — the same Roberts often credited with inventing commercial trekking in Nepal. Climbers Wilfrid Noyce and A. D. M. Cox worked their way up the north ridge and reached an altitude of about 6,947 metres, a stone's throw from the true top. King Mahendra had granted the expedition permission to climb the mountain on one condition: they were not to set foot on the actual summit. They kept their word, turned around, and descended. Nepal's government has not issued a permit for the peak since. (Unverified reports claim a New Zealand climber may have summited illegally in the early 1980s, but there is no confirmed, permitted ascent to this day.)

What makes the ban notable is that Machapuchare isn't even one of Nepal's giants. It sits thousands of metres below its 8,000 m neighbours — yet those peaks have been climbed hundreds of times each, while Machapuchare has zero confirmed legal ascents:

The reason isn't technical difficulty — it's the mountain's meaning. For the Gurung communities of Chomrong and the wider Annapurna region, Machapuchare is believed to be the home of Shiva, and its double summit (the source of its "fish tail" name) is treated as inviolable. Local herders make offerings to the peak, crediting it with warding off disaster in the valleys below. When Nepal's government formally closed the mountain after the 1957 expedition, it wasn't bureaucratic caution — it was a decision to protect a living religious site, in a country where several peaks (including nearby Kailash-adjacent summits) carry the same untouchable status.

Nepal has quietly kept a handful of peaks off-limits for reasons like this — a reminder that not every summit in the Himalaya is for sale. Machapuchare remains the most visible example: a 6,993-metre mountain, watched by thousands of trekkers every season, that no living person has a legal claim to having stood on top of.

Source: Wikipedia — Machapuchare

Cover photo: Abdul Kayum via Pexels (Pexels License).