Himalayan Calling

I was a bike-addicted fifteen year old when I first saw Nepal in a National Geographic left on my grandparent’s coffee table. It was in a story about Mount Everest, and while I didn’t care much for the words, the photos showed people hiking on alpine singletrack. It struck my teenage brain that these particular trails happened to be located on the biggest mountains on earth, and it was infinitely logical that I must go there and ride. And it also dawned on me that there had to be trails all over the world. In countries and mountain ranges that I’d never heard of. They might be made for walking and they might be really hard or even unridable. But they were out there. And I could go. I should go.

Twenty years later, I found myself restless on a wooden bunk in the cold midnight shadows of a drafty stone hut, high in the Annapurna Himalaya. I’d been riding across the