After a fair bit of contemplation and research, we decided to go with The Mountain Company (@the.mountain.company, https://www.themountaincompany.co.uk/) . The Mountain Company probably isn't the cheapest way to do the Snowman, but given going to Bhutan isn't cheap anyway and make no mistake, this is a very remote environment, going with a company that at least has working Satellite phones (unlike another group we passed) seemed a good idea. I would highly recommend going with this company based on our experiences. They send a European guide (who was excellent) along with the excellent local guiding crew, the food was good, the tents were good, the organisation was good. basically given the nature of the trip I thought they were excellent. As an example of the care the company took to try and get us all across the high mountain passes safely, at the end of each day we all did finger blood oxygen level tests and went through the checklist for mountain sickness. Although I had no symptoms apart from being much slower than I should have been, the numbers told the story and my blood oxygen levels were dropping despite the extra acclimatisation days, so I started popping diamox and the numbers turned around almost instantly. The only downside was the group size which was initially 14 before 3 bailed out after about 10 days. Although we weren't generally walking as a group, I generally enjoy being away from people when I go for a walk, so having to sit in a meal tent with the group so many times without sticking a fork in someone, was quite a struggle.
A quick reality check on the remoteness of this trip. The highest camp is at about the same elevation as Everest base camp. At times you are quite a few days walk from the nearest road. Because the trail continually goes quite steeply up and down valleys, getting on a pony in the event of difficulty just isn't possible. Towards the end of the walk, one of the crew became quite unwell to the extent that the guides tried to helicopter him out. The helicopters are based quite some distance away and won't leave base after 3pm, and we had a low cloud ceiling and almost nowhere flat enough and clear enough for a chopper to land. The end result was the sick crewman had to walk 3 days to the nearest road where an ambulance was waiting for him!
Given you are only carrying day packs albeit with enough warmer clothing to cope with the colder passes and waterproofs in case of precipitation, the main degrees of difficulty are the duration, the continual high altitude, the remoteness and the relentless steep up and down. We were doing training walks of 1000 meters up and 1000 meters down each week before we went, and although the days aren't all as much as that, realistically given the lower training altitude, if you can't do that for 2 days in a row, you probably need to train some more. You don't need to be fast, just capable.
To the walk (and photos). Given the maximum attachment limit of 10, I'll do 3 posts with 10 photos each to try and do justice to the length of the trip. I'm sure someone will tell me if that's a problem.
- First up for the acclimatisation after arriving in Paro was the obligatory Taktsang monastery (Tigers Nest) visit. At a touch over 3000 meters, it's well worth the effort and a good start at walking uphill at altitude for those of us that live virtually at sea level.
- Before getting going on the actual walk we spent 2 nights in the Haa Valley for acclimatisation and went on an excellent nice day walk.
- The Chele La on the way to/from the Haa Valley is at 3800m, so a good place to go for walk around and the prayer flags and mist make it quite spectacular.
- A bit of shenanigans with the photo, but there are lots of water powered prayer wheel around the mountains. I took quite a liking to them.
- Yak. The yaks often had coloured markers, presumably indicating whose they were. Yaks are very precious for the nomads in the mountains that rely on them for milk, cheese etc. Having tried the cheese - while palatable, I won't be choosing it in preference to a nice piece of washed rind or Comte.
- Stupa at Chomolhari base camp. On a nicer day, you can see the peak of Chomolhari, but for most of our walk we had the mist. If you can't tolerate the fickle nature of the weather gods, just stay in front of the TV.
- Blue sheep - not really that blue, but they they are the favourite food of snow leopards which we unfortunately didn't see.
- One up, one down?
- A wooden cantilevered bridge - another of my favourite things. These are designed to have strong foundations so that in the event of floods in the steep sided valley, the bridge can be fairly quickly replaced.
- Our first rest day was at Laya, a very nice remote mountain village.
