The Himalayan peak off limits to climbers

Through the window of a bus one summer, I remember being awestruck by the faint outline of a giant triangular mass of rock and snow, shrouded in a swirl of clouds for a brief minute, towering over Nepal’s famous Pokhara valley and its eponymous city. Seeing an imposing peak dominate the skyline of a bustling town was unlike any other first glimpse of a Himalayan mountain I had experienced in my decade-long exploration in the Himalayas, either in India or in Nepal. I was quite amused that I didn’t have to trek for days to get a glimpse of the elusive beauty; I merely had to sit in a bus.

The mountain that inadvertently captured my imagination was neither Everest nor any of the country’s seven other peaks that are more 8,000m tall, but a relatively lowly peak whose height would easily betray its beauty. Turns out, I wasn’t alone in my obsession. Decades before me, another man also fell in love with this mountain – and left behind a rather quirky legacy.

Machhapuchhare – which translates to “fishtail” – is an iconic 6,993m mountain in central Nepal’s Annapurna range that contains three of the world’s 10 highest peaks. And yet, Machhapuchhare effortlessly steals the show, thanks to its position far from the much higher peaks of the Annapurna range, where it stands isolated and appears tall despite its humbler height.

The peak’s geographic position affords easy views of its different profiles from several places, and the stunning prominence of its vertical relief is inescapable from any angle or distance. Rising like twin spires twisting into each other, Machhapuchhare’s double summit is joined by a sharp ridge and has as much allure as the steep, symmetrical triangular tip – its other profile.

After that initial sight, I returned to Nepal several times and always made time to see my favourite mountain. Some days were spent in Pokhara, watching the sublime reflection of Machhapuchhare in Phewa Lake. Others were spent watching the early morning and late-evening sun cast glorious light on the pointed peak towering over the rural slopes around Begnas Lake. On other days, I gazed at the mountain from ridgetops like Sarangkot or Astam around Pokhara valley.

Turns out, I wasn’t alone in my obsession

One winter, I finally hiked to the basecamp of a smaller peak called Mardi Himal beneath Machhapuchhare. Established in 2012, the short five-day, 40km trek reaches a height of 4,500m and offers one of Machhapuchhare’s finest and closest views. Another 1,000m upwards to Mardi Himal summit is the closest anyone can get to the peak.

That’s because climbing Machhapuchhare is forbidden, a rarity in a country like Nepal that has embraced mountain tourism so enthusiastically that even the world’s highest point – Mt Everest’s 8,848m summit – gets overcrowded. But the reason Machhapuchhare remains a virgin peak – as well as the explosion of commercial trekking and mountaineering in Nepal today – can be attributed to one man: Lieutenant Colonel James Owen Merion Roberts (1916-1997).

Jimmy Roberts, as he was popularly known, was a celebrated British Army officer whose contributions to Nepal and Himalayan mountaineering are profound. Roberts was appointed as the first military attaché to Nepal in 1958. He used his position, passion and knowledge of the Himalayas to open up the country’s remote mountains for commercial mountaineering and trekking, an industry that has gone on to contribute significantly to Nepal’s economy and local livelihoods.

He not only pioneered a golden age of Himalayan exploration, but also made its beauty accessible to the rest of the world when he founded the country’s first trekking agency called Mountain Travel in 1964. He even co-opted and popularised the term “trek”, which has become synonymous with hiking in the Himalayas today. For that, he is still fondly remembered as the “father of trekking” in Nepal.

Roberts’ fascination with Pokhara and Machhapuchhare began after reading a dispatch from Nepal written in 1936 by an army officer, who wrote of the mountain and a curious town on the banks of a lake. “To see Pokhara and Machapuchare [sic] and the villages in which my men lived, and especially the Gurungs [one of the main Gurkha tribes in the Himalayas] soon became an obsession,” Roberts wrote in the preface to the book Climbing the Fish’s Tail by Wilfrid Noyce. “But in those days, the interior of Nepal was a forbidden land, more securely closed than even Mecca or Lhasa in their hey-day.”