Everyone Calls This Nepal's Deepest Lake. A Government Survey Says It Isn't.
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.
At a glance
- Published
- TopicRecords & People
- Verified againstWikipedia (Dept. of Hydrology and Meteorology survey data)
- Treks coveredLower Dolpo Trek, Rara Lake Trek — 12 Days, Upper Dolpo Trek — 22 Days
Open almost any guidebook to Nepal's far west and you'll read the same line: Phoksundo, the impossibly turquoise lake inside Shey Phoksundo National Park, is Nepal's deepest lake. It gets repeated on trekking sites, in blog posts, in park brochures. It isn't true — and Nepal's own government has the numbers to prove it.
Key facts
- Phoksundo Lake sits at 3,611m in Shey Phoksundo National Park, Dolpa district
- A 2004 survey by Nepal's Department of Hydrology and Meteorology (DHM) measured its depth at 145m
- A more detailed 2019 DHM bathymetric resurvey found only 136.2m
- Rara Lake, in Mugu district, has a measured maximum depth of 167m — deeper under both Phoksundo surveys
The mix-up is easy to understand once you've seen both lakes. Phoksundo is the one everyone photographs: a sheet of glass-clear turquoise pinned between cliffs at 3,611m, inside Nepal's largest and only trans-Himalayan national park. The colour comes from glacial flour — fine rock powder ground out by ice upstream and suspended in the water — and it peaks in autumn, once the monsoon melt has pushed the mineral concentration to its most intense and the water itself has gone still. A lake that looks that bottomless gets called the deepest one almost by instinct.
Rara, 3,611m becomes 2,990m and turquoise becomes a deep alpine blue, doesn't photograph with quite the same shock value, even though it wins on paper twice over. It holds Nepal's actual depth record at 167m, and it is also Nepal's largest lake by surface area — its own separate superlative, and the one it's usually credited for.
| Lake | Max depth | Elevation | District |
|---|---|---|---|
| Rara Lake | 167m | 2,990m | Mugu |
| Phoksundo Lake | 136–145m | 3,611m | Dolpa |
None of this makes Phoksundo less remarkable. Local Buddhist and Bon communities treat it as sacred ground, and guides who work the region consistently report the same detail: no one fishes the lake, and hasn't for generations — a custom held by belief, not by any park regulation. More than twenty stupas and a monastery ring its shores, and the water's colour genuinely does shift week to week as glacial flour settles and stirs, which is part of why the deepest-lake claim has proven so sticky. A lake behaving that strangely feels like it should hold a record.
What this means for trekkers
What this means for you
Both lakes sit in Nepal's remote far west, days from a road, and that is the actual draw. Phoksundo is reached on the Lower Dolpo trek or the longer, restricted-area Upper Dolpo trek, walking in through Shey Phoksundo National Park itself. Rara sits on its own route, the Rara Lake trek, through a national park with far fewer visitors than Everest or Annapurna see in a single week. Neither trail requires you to care which lake is technically deeper — but if a guide tells you Phoksundo holds the record, you'll now know why they're wrong, and why almost everyone else is too.
Sources: Wikipedia, citing Nepal's Department of Hydrology and Meteorology bathymetric surveys of Phoksundo Lake (2004, 2019); Wikipedia entries for Rara Lake and Shey Phoksundo National Park.
Cover photo: Ashok J Kshetri via Pexels (Pexels License).
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