WHY KYASHAR?
The Mountain Behind the Name
Every name carries a story. Ours belongs to a mountain most people have never heard of — one that found me decades before I ever stood beneath it, and one I still mean to climb.
A PHOTOGRAPH, NOVEMBER 1988
Where It Began
I was a young man leafing through a National Geographic magazine when a photograph stopped me. Somewhere in the Khumbu, among a cluster of peaks I’d never heard named — Kyashar, Thamserku, Kangtega and Tawoche, rising inside Sagarmatha National Park — one summit held my eye longer than the rest.
I couldn’t have told you why, not then. Something about its shape, perhaps, or the way it stood apart from the mountains around it — unclaimed, largely unknown, and entirely out of reach. Whatever it was, Kyashar found me first. It would be years before I found my way back to it.
National Geographic, November 1988 — the photograph that started it all.
NEPAL, 1995
Seeing It For Real
Seven years later, I went looking for the mountain in that photograph. In 1995, I travelled to Nepal with a group of university friends — among them Kenton Cool, long before he became one of the world’s most accomplished high-altitude climbers — to attempt a new route up the north face of Kusum Kanguru.
It was there, among the glaciers and the early starts and the slow, deliberate business of climbing, that I finally saw Kyashar for real. Not as ink on a page this time, but as rock, ice and weather — every bit as remote, and every bit as untouched, as it had promised to be.
STILL UNCLIMBED
Left Alone
Kyashar stayed unclimbed for a long time afterwards — until around 2022, I think, though I’ve never been entirely certain of the date. For a mountain of its size, in a range as thoroughly explored as the Khumbu, that’s a rare thing: a summit simply left alone for the better part of three and a half decades.
I’ve always found something fitting in that. Kyashar was never trying to be climbed by everyone. It was waiting for the right attempt — much like the people who come to us are often waiting for the right moment to stop, breathe, and begin again.
ONE DAY
What Started on a Page
I still think about that photograph. The mountain that captivated a younger version of me, and that I finally stood beneath in 1995, is the same one whose name now sits above everything we’ve built. One day, I plan to climb it properly — to finish what started on a page of a magazine nearly four decades ago.
Until then, Kyashar is more than a name to us. It’s a reminder of how far a single moment of being captivated can carry you, if you let it.
Kyashar from the west, with the Kyashar Glacier in the foreground.