A Kanab, Utah, Trek Ten Years Ago Became an $800,000 Aid Mission to Nepal's Highest Villages

Ten years ago, a retired psychologist named Sky Chaney was trekking through the Nepali Himalaya when he noticed something most visitors notice and few act on: how brutal the winters must be in villages this high, this far from anything. Chaney, who had moved to the small desert town of Kanab, Utah, in 2004, didn't just donate on the spot and move on. He started Village Light — and a decade later, the Salt Lake Tribune reports the group's aid work in Nepal is now valued at roughly $800,000.

What began as warm clothing and reading glasses, carried up in duffel bags, has become a genuine supply chain. Every shipment still has to leave Kathmandu by truck, transfer to jeep once the pavement runs out, and finish the last stretch on porters' backs or mule trains — the only way in or out of villages that sit above where roads reach in this part of Gorkha district. What arrives at the other end now includes food for families through the lean pre-harvest months, seeds and greenhouse kits so villages can grow more at altitude, medicine for small clinics, stoves and plumbing installed in a school, solar lighting, and an emergency fund for crises that would otherwise mean a multi-day walk to the nearest help.

The project's most interesting piece isn't the aid itself — it's the attempt to make some of it self-sustaining. Women in Sama Valley now spin yak and mountain-sheep wool into handmade Tibetan rugs, sold through the group's own storefront rather than given away, turning a craft that already existed in the village into direct income instead of another line on a donation ledger. It's a small, specific answer to the question every aid group in remote Nepal eventually has to face: what happens to a village after the trekkers who started this go home.

What this means for trekkers

Sama Valley and Tsum sit inside the Manaslu Conservation Area, on the trail network used by the Manaslu Circuit and by dedicated Tsum Valley treks — a restricted region that, unlike Everest or Annapurna, still requires a licensed guide and a special permit for every foreign trekker. That keeps visitor numbers low, and it makes villages here more dependent on groups like this one between trekking seasons. Trekkers walking through Sama village toward Manaslu base camp, or turning off into Tsum toward its Tibetan Buddhist gompas, pass directly through the communities Village Light supplies.

Source: The Salt Lake Tribune; background from Voyage Utah Magazine.

Cover photo: Ashok J Kshetri via Pexels (Pexels License).