Machapuchare: The Fish Tail (Revised and Expanded)

"Machapuchare, the Fish Tail, must be one of the most spectacular mountains in the world. At 23,000 feet it stands alone, erect and serene, supremely beautiful. It dominates Pokhara and Central Nepal, featuring in almost all the photographs of that region. So steep are its slopes that in 1956 no one had ever attempted to climb it. It was a virgin peak, a real challenge for mountaineers." ~ Charles Wylie, The Fish Tail - The Machapuchare Expedition 1957.

Every year, over 50 thousand people travel to Nepal to embark on the various trekking circuits around the Annapurna region in Nepal's Gandaki Province. Most trekkers tackling the Annapurna Base Camp trek will fit in a sunrise ascent of Poon Hill (Nepali: पून हिल Pun Danda) a lovely hill station situated above the Magar village of Ghorepani, a frequented hamlet that has experienced the foot traffic of innumerable tourists. At 3,210m above sea level, Poon Hill would be considered a major peak anywhere else in the world. Here in the Himalaya, it is absolutely dwarfed by towering masses of ice and rock in a part of Nepal that hosts 3 of the world's 10 tallest peaks. Looking northwest, one can behold the Dhaulagiri (8,167m), the 7th highest peak in the world, like a distant iceberg floating above a sea of greenery. To the northeast, the Annapurna massif looms reverently above the beholder, separated from the Dhaulagiri by the deepest gorge in the world cut over eons by the meandering path of the Kali Gandaki River. In the east, a gigantic triangular mass of rock and snow stands in isolation like an island emerging from the ocean. This is Machapuchare, the fish's tail.

Machapuchare as seen from Poon Hill.

Machapuchare and the Annapurna massif as seen from Sarangkot, Pokhara. Machapuchare towers 6,000 vertical meters above the Pokhara valley below.

    Machapuchare (Nepali: माछापुच्छ्रे lit. 'fishtail') rises to an altitude of 6,993m over the verdant subtropical green of Nepal's Pokhara Valley. Like most other Himalayan mountains, Machapuchare was formed by the subduction of the Indian continental plate under the Eurasian landmass in an epic process of orogeny that began 50 million years ago. Its towering walls of stone once constituting the bedrock of the ancient Tethys Sea, one can find the remnants of oceanic sands and the fossilised remains of marine creatures that lived on the seabed millions of years ago. Located only 25km away from the provincial capital of Pokhara (822m asl) and forming an isolated southerly outcrop of the Annapurna massif, Machapuchare commands an extremely dramatic vertical relief against the low-altitude terrain adjacent to it. Rising a full 6,000 meters above the city of Pokhara, Machapuchare frames its backdrop, making for picture postcard views as seen from the lakeside city. Its steep, pointed profile, which locals reckon vaguely resembles a fish's tail, makes it a particularly striking peak. Despite its considerably lower altitude than many of its neighbouring peaks, Machapuchare has effortlessly earned itself the appellation as the most spectacular peak in the Annapurna range, and one of the loveliest peaks in all the Himalaya.

The Modi Khola gorge from near Machapuchare Base Camp, the gorge is enclosed by the peaks of Machacpuchare and Hiunchuli (6,441m) and is over 3,600m deep.

Machapuchare as seen from Annapurna Base Camp.

    Continuing along the Annapurna Base Camp trek, one makes a long two-day ascent up the spectacular Modi Khola Gorge to reach the Annapurna Sanctuary. Beginning in dense subtropical forests of cane, rhododendrons, bamboo, and oak, the lush vegetation gradually gives way to subalpine, then alpine scrub and grasses as one travels up the valley. On either side of the valley towers the peaks of Machapuchare and its shorter and much less impressive neighbour Hiunchuli. This is ethnic Gurung country, inhabited by a Tibetic minority group who live in a network of villages that cascade downhill from the Modi Khola Gorge. The Gurungs are multi-confessional, professing a syncretic mish-mash of belief systems that combine Hinduism and Buddhism with their native animistic and shamanistic beliefs. The mountain is so imposing that for the Gurungs and other neighbouring peoples within view of it, it acts as a magnet, drawing to it whatever deity or divinity that local peoples regard as the highest and most potent. The Gurung most commonly regard the summit of Machapuchare as the abode of the Hindu God Shiva, though the mountain is also variously associated with the Hindu God Vishnu, the Tibetan Buddhist goddess Tara, the Amitabha Buddha and various other local deities, in a religious landscape absent of dogma. Regardless, all locals consider the peak to be so holy that no mortal foot should ever step upon it. To do so would be to invite disaster in the form of divine retribution.

The finest and most up-close views of Machapuchare can be seen from the relatively new Mardi Himal trek, established in 2012.

    There has only ever been one official attempt to climb the mountain. In 1957 a British team led by Lt. Col. J.O.M. Roberts was given permission by King Mahendra of Nepal to climb the mountain, with the caveat that they refrained from standing on its summit. True to their word, on 2 June 1957, climbers Wilfrid Noyce and A.D.M. Cox climbed to within 50m of the summit and turned back. Needless to say, the Gurung villagers of Chomrong, the last village before Machapuchare, were not pleased by the hubris of these foreigners who sought to step on the head of their holiest of holies. Expedition leader Roberts seemed to agree. After the expedition, Roberts made a rather uncharacteristic request of the Nepalese government: that all further climbing on Machapuchare be banned. It was thus surprising, and somewhat contradictory, that a government that allowed and even welcomed the economic incentives of foreign mountaineering expeditions on many other peaks sacred to local ethnic groups, that they would agree to Roberts' request. Exactly why the Nepalese government agreed to Roberts' request remains a mystery. But suffice it to say that Roberts was utterly enchanted by the beauty of the mountain, and that he felt a strong sense of kinship and respect towards the Gurungs and their beliefs. Recalling in an article written in 1983:

Poor Pokhara has taken a bit of a hammering in the past 26 years, but I have not changed the opinion I formed then, there is no other mountain view in the world to equal Machapuchare and Annapurna hanging there in the sky above the green Pokhara plain. ~Jimmy Roberts, "How It All Began," Himalayan Journal 64.

Roberts' concerns regarding Pokhara in the 1980s were well founded. The boom of the adventure tourism industry in Nepal especially after the 1970s had utterly transformed the landscapes and cultures of Nepal. Once-isolated valleys and mountaintops are now trodden upon by the footsteps of millions of trekkers and mountaineers, introducing a range of environmental and ecological risks. Even local livelihoods have been transformed: many rural communities that once supported themselves on sharecropping and small-scale trade, have transformed into service towns that exist primarily to accommodate and service travelers. The Nepalese poet Minbahadur Bista calls attention to the absurdity of Nepal’s over-reliance on foreign tourists in a satirical work aptly titled "Thus a Nation Pretends to Live" (Nepali: यसरी एउटा राष्ट्र बाँच्ने नाटक गर्छ Yasarī ē'uṭā rāṣṭra bām̐cnē nāṭaka garcha):

Honoured friend,

this is Machapuchare, that is Annapurna,

over there stands the Dhaulagiri range.

You can see them with the naked eye,

you do not need binoculars.

Here shall I open a three-star hotel:

would you kindly make me a loan?

Nevertheless, if there is any proof that even travelers are capable of treating the natural environment with respect, one needn't look any further than Roberts' commitment to protecting and conserving Machapuchare. It remains to this day unclimbed, one of the few places left on earth reserved only for the gods.

Machapuchare from Poon Hill

Sarangkot Annapurna Himal vista.