Travel & Tourism

Young Kidron, a young Israeli citizen in his twenties, has been missing in Nepal Himalayas for the past eight months. Police records show he entered Nepal in August last year and was last seen at Soti Khola along Manaslu trek route on September 21, 2021. His whereabouts are not known and search to find him alive or dead continues to this day.

Yeonhee Lee, 50, a South Korean national from Seoul, arrived in Nepal earlier this year in March, and she was last seen in Namche Bazaar, the gateway to Mount Everest on 20 March, 2022. She has remained missing ever since.

Indian medical professional Chandra Mohan Shivnath, of Bengaluru, arrived in Nepal in May, after which he travelled to Khumbu where he was last seen trekking on May 19. Thereafter, he went missing, and little is known about him despite an intense search and rescue mounted by the police and local people.

Every year, several trekkers go missing in the Himalayan region, and - barring few lucky ones - most continue to remain missing with little information about their whereabouts – alive or dead. In the past 12 years, about 18 trekkers have gone missing in the Himalayas, including the three that went missing in recent months.  

And the main reason why their whereabouts are unknown is this: solo trekking in a completely unknown and geographically hostile terrain.

DSP Tarka Raj Pandey, who heads the Tourist Police Office at Bhrikutimandap, Kathmandu, lays out the scenario for trekkers going missing in the Himalayan region thus: “Often, FITs (Free Independent Traveller), or the solo trekkers, are the ones who go missing in remote mountainous routes. Generally, the solo trekkers are not familiar with the routes and geography of the area. With nobody around to help, they often go contactless.”

Babu Sherpa, a guide who was recently involved in the mountain clean-up campaign initiated by the Nepali Army, agrees: “Most of the missing trekkers are the ones who travel without a guide and are not at all coordinating with an agency. But if the trekker is with an agency or guide or even porter, he will never go missing.”

In 2015, the government introduced a rule requiring all trekkers to register themselves into a new system called TIMS (Trekkers Information Management System) which makes it easier to track movements and locations of trekkers traveling in remote Himalayan regions. But police say there are still some trekkers who flout this regulation, complicating search and rescue efforts in the event of them going missing.

The President of the Trekking Agencies’ Association of Nepal (TAAN) Khum Bahadur Subedi is angry that no-solo-trekking rules are being violated: “It has been our organisation’s consistent request to the government that they disallow solo treks, because lonely trekkers are the ones who go missing and who don’t get any help when needed.”

Now as worried family members and friends of the missing trekkers wait for some good news, questions arise: where are the three trekkers who went missing in Nepal Himalayas in recent months?

Young Kidron

The circumstance leading up to Kidron’s disappearance, according to MissingTrekker, a website which helps find lost trekkers in Nepal, was this: “The guide requested him to stay with them, but he decided to continue by himself, saying he wanted to walk faster.”

Kidron was last seen at Soti Khola along Manaslu trek route on September 21, 2021.

Kidron’s last traceable activity, the website indicates, is this: “The guide checked the checkpoint at Philim in Manaslu region and saw that he signed in, but he never saw him again.” MissingTrekker also relays the Israeli Embassy’s confirmation that Kidron has not left Nepal. After Nepal, he was planning on leaving for Thailand.

Yeonhee Lee

According to the Tourist Police Office, Yeonhee Lee, a South Korean trekker from Seoul is known to have passed through Namche via the Sagarmatha National Park checkpoint at Jorsalle on March 20, 2022.

Despite intense search and rescue operation in the Khumbu area, little is known about her whereabouts after that.

The Tourist Police were informed of her missing by her family, and also by the South Korean Embassy in Nepal. A taskforce had been deployed to trace her. But she remains missing – and quite mysteriously so, with park authorities and local Sherpas clueless as yet.

Chandra Mohan Shivnath

Another lost trekker, Chandra Mohan Shivnath, an Indian medical professional from Bengaluru, is known to have arrived in Kathmandu on May 3. He set out on his solo trek from Namche on May 19, but was reported missing to the Tourist Police by family members after he went incommunicado.

We were informed by the TIMS card counter at Nepal Tourism Board, that Shivnath hadn’t registered for or taken a TIMS card. And, stacking up the odds against himself Shivnath had neglected to hire a guide or a porter for his trek into the unknown, into the wilderness of the highlands of Everest region.

Shivnath’s family friend, Deepak, told NepalMinute that he was an experienced trekker, “having trekked in Uttarakhand and Himachal as well”. However, he wasn’t sure as to why Shivnath chose to trek the Everest route, known to be quite challenging and unpredictable, solo.

He said Shivnath’s last known location was traced at Tengboche, on May 21. He speculated: “From what I have analysed he had reached Phungi Thenga check-post on May 21, 2022, at 12:30 pm.” Tengboche and Phungi Thenga are 2.6 km apart, and Google map estimates it would take 56 minutes to get to Phungi Thenga hill southwest of Tengboche.

Dissatisfied by the search and rescue mounted by Nepali authorities, Shivanath’s family is understood to have hired its own search team. A family member continues to remain in Nepal for the search until the first week of July.

Furthermore, Nepal Police too has mobilised a team of police and Sherpa to know the whereabouts of Shivnath and Yeonhee, the missing South Korean female solo trekker.

The solo trek trouble

TAAN has been lobbying for a complete prohibition on solo trekking for nearly a decade. However, TAAN’s stance that presence of guides should be compulsory on all treks hasn’t been taken kindly by the solo trekkers, most of whom remain high on energy but low on budget.

Besides, some trekkers allege that the no-solo-trek rule is a “money making scheme cooked up by trekking agencies”. MissingTrekkers, the website which has been contributing in search and rescue of missing trekkers, is itself opposed to any mandate that would require compulsory guides for trekkers.

In its 2020 annual report, the website issued a scathing characterisation: “Nobody went missing because few went trekking. This didn’t stop the propaganda machine of wealthy trekking agents and hoteliers who wanted to ban independent trekking though. They continued on with their information bombardment of saying independent trekking needed to stop in Nepal.”

TAAN officials reject such accusations. Khum Bahadur Subedi: “Our position to ban all solo trekking is for the safety and security of the trekker, for job creation and increased employment opportunity for local Nepali guides and porters, and so that the government can benefit from the tax raised through agency sanctioned treks.”