HAIL STORMS AND ONE HELLUVA VIEW
Stepping out into the predawn darkness, crunching across the icy remains of last night’s hailstorm, we picked up the rocky trail that led away from High Camp, shining head torches upwards into the mist. A threehour climb away at the end of this snaking, skinny ridge sat Mardi Himal, small and squat beneath the towering fishtail peak of Machhapuchhre.
After dark hours of airy, rugged walking we finally caught up with the sun, topping out to eyeball a stunning range of oh-so-close snowy peaks: Annapurna South (7219m), Hiunchuli (6441m), Mardi Himal (5587m) and Machhapuchhre (6993m), all lined up to create one of the best Annapurna vistas you can climb to without crampons.
While Machhapuchhre—the sacred peak of Shiva—waits patiently for the climbers who will never come, Mardi Himal attracts no such reverence; it’s small by Himalayan standards and largely overlooked by the 158,000 trekkers who converged on Nepal’s uber-popular Annapurna Conservation
Rather, Mardi Himal has a soft reputation. It’s marketed as a beginner’s climbing peak, one that didn’t even interest summiteers until 1961. But it’s the challenging, week-long wilderness route to its base camp that piques our interest, largely because it has yet to make its debut in Lonely Planet’s trekking guide. As a result, crowd-free Annapurna bliss is still on the cards.
The problem is that we had very little to plan our trip around. When a Nepali trekking pal first spilled the beans, sending us trawling the internet, we dug up little more than a few amateur blogs with snowy, winter photos that warned of sketchy trails and basic teahouses with thin walls and outside toilets. It sounded perfect, so—eager to get, packed our winter sleeping bags and along with our six-year-old daughter Maya, hit the trail. What we discovered was a magnificent, challenging, authentic trek, yet one that’s affordable, offers solitude and has easy trailhead access. It’s a wonder it has escaped the limelight for so long.
