The Nepali Village Building Its Own Glacier, One Freezing Night at a Time

In the high desert of Upper Mustang, where annual rainfall barely wets the ground and the region's glaciers are retreating year on year, one village has stopped waiting for the sky to provide water. Since 2022, farmers in Chhoser have been growing their own glacier — a cone of frozen irrigation water that melts on command each spring.

The idea is almost absurdly simple. In winter, when Himalayan streams still trickle but farmers have no crops that need the water, a pipe sprays that stream skyward. In sub-zero night air the spray freezes before it lands, building up, layer by frozen layer, into a vertical cone of ice that can stand for months. Because it grows up rather than out, the way a natural glacier spreads, it exposes far less surface area to the sun. By the time spring planting starts and water is scarce everywhere else, the stupa is still there, releasing meltwater exactly when the fields need it most.

Wangchuk built the first ice stupa in Ladakh in 2013 to fight a problem familiar to every high-altitude Himalayan farmer: meltwater arrives in early summer, weeks before seedlings are in the ground, then vanishes by July. The fix needs no electricity and no pump beyond gravity itself, just a pipe running downhill from a higher point. It worked well enough that the model has since been piloted in Pakistan, Kyrgyzstan, Mongolia, Switzerland, and now Nepal's own Upper Mustang, a rain-shadow desert on our Mustang trekking routes that is drier than most of the Sahara. Wangchuk himself is a minor celebrity well beyond engineering circles: he's the confirmed real-life inspiration for Phunsukh Wangdu, the eccentric inventor Aamir Khan played in Bollywood's 3 Idiots, and it's that same scrappy, do-it-yourself instinct that Nepal's Videh Foundation borrowed rather than waiting on a bigger glacier-engineering fix.

Nepal's first attempt hasn't been a clean success story. Chhoser's stupa has run into problems Ladakh largely solved a decade earlier: low water pressure on Mustang's steep, wind-scoured slopes, pipes that split in the freeze-thaw cycle, and irrigation channels too limited to spread the meltwater once it's released. Videh Foundation staff have said residents also need more hands-on training to keep the plumbing running through an unattended winter. None of that has stopped the idea from expanding: the Himalayan Institute of Alternatives, which now coordinates the global network, says its 34 stupas across six countries conserved roughly 90 million litres last winter alone, and Upper Mustang's is one of the newest members of that club.

What this means for trekkers

The bigger picture is one every Himalaya trekker should know before they go: glacial melt in this region is becoming less predictable year to year, and villages that once counted on it are now engineering their own backup supply. Ice stupas won't replace a real glacier's storage capacity, but they buy time, and they're a striking thing to walk past on the trail into Upper Mustang, a route we run as both a 12-day and a 15-day trek from Jomsom.

Source: The Farsight Nepal, with additional reporting from the World Water Atlas and the Ice Stupa project, Ladakh.

Cover photo: Aadil Mehraj via Pexels (Pexels License).