Mount Kailash: The Sacred Peak No One Has Ever Climbed, and Why Pilgrims Keep Getting Stranded in Nepal on the Way

Nobody has ever stood on the summit of Mount Kailash. Not because no one is strong enough — mountaineers who have soloed Everest without bottled oxygen have called it an easy scramble by comparison — but because four of the world's religions quietly agreed, decades ago, that some summits should stay untouched. In 2026 that reverence collided with something far more mundane: paperwork. Indian pilgrims travelling the Nepal route toward Kailash got stuck in Kathmandu this summer without the Chinese permits they needed to finish the journey, and New Delhi has just told parliament why.

Kailash sits in a remote valley of the Tibetan plateau called Ngari, just across the border from Nepal's Humla and Mustang districts. Tibet has no international airport near the mountain, so the great majority of foreign pilgrims — and nearly all Indian ones — fly into Kathmandu first, then travel on to the Chinese border. That single choke point is where this year's trouble started.

What makes the mountain unusual isn't its height. Several unclimbed 6,000-metre peaks still exist worldwide, mostly because no serious expedition has bothered with them. Kailash is different: it has been offered to climbers, and refused. In the 1980s, Chinese authorities gave Reinhold Messner — the first person to summit Everest solo and without supplemental oxygen — permission to attempt it. He turned it down flat. 'If we conquer this mountain, then we conquer something in people's souls,' he said, suggesting climbers go find something harder instead. In 2001, China issued a permit to a Spanish team anyway. Hindu, Buddhist and Jain organisations launched a coordinated worldwide protest, and within weeks Beijing withdrew the permit and formally banned mountaineering on Kailash for good. No government has granted one since.

Four religions, one mountain

In Hindu belief, Kailash is the seat of Shiva and his consort Parvati. Tibetan Buddhists identify it with Mount Meru, the axis at the centre of the cosmos. Jain scripture holds that Rishabhanatha, the first Tirthankara, achieved spiritual liberation on its slopes. In Bon, Tibet's pre-Buddhist faith, it is the axis mundi, the pillar linking earth and sky. The pilgrimage itself reflects that belief: devotees walk a 52km kora circling the base on foot, and completing the circuit — never reaching the top — is the entire point of the journey.

What this means for anyone travelling the Nepal route

The same principle runs through Nepal's own restricted areas — Upper Mustang, Manaslu, Dolpo, all a short flight or drive from where Kailash-bound pilgrims transit — where a licensed operator secures the permit before you fly, not after. For a country whose highlands sit this close to a border that isn't always predictable, that is the difference between a pilgrimage and an expensive layover in Kathmandu. Trekkers heading into Nepal's own trans-Himalayan desert in Upper Mustang cross the same rain-shadow geology that shapes the Tibetan plateau, without ever touching a border that can close without notice.

Source: The Tribune

Cover photo: Jean-Marie Hullot via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).