Khopra Ridge
Dhaulagiri (8167m) from Khopra Ridge. We spent a few weeks in Feb/March 2023 tossing around ideas for a spring trek. This included a reprise of our 2011 trip to Annapurna Base Camp , which by all recent accounts, looked exceedingly commercial, hence was crossed off the list. The others included the more recently opened Mardi Himal trek, but that looked too similar to the ABC route. Pike Peak looked interesting, but we didn’t want to risk its unknowns when traveling with two children. We finally settled on a relatively new route called the Khopra Ridge trek. Even though it's quite mainstream, Khopra Ridge was new enough that our carefully preserved trekking map from 2011 had no sign of it. A little browsing showed that tour operators are working hard to popularize it and is now offered by several commercial outfits. Trekking infrastructure is so well developed in Nepal that ordinarily one can hike these routes independently. But regulations passed in early 2023 mandated that a...