from $7,450* per person	22 Days	September
Boutique accommodations		Exertion level: 4
Operator: Geographic Expeditions		18 people max

Of Everest’s three faces, the east—or Kangshung—is unquestionably the most beautiful and least visited (this catalog’s lucky writer led seven treks to the Kangshung and only once saw another trekking party, far in the distance). Most experts consider the hike up to the Kangshung one of the two or three finest treks on earth.

We begin with a visit to Lhasa, then make the phenomenal drive along the Lhasa–Kathmandu road to Gyantse, Shigatse, and Shekar, where we meet our Nepalese Sherpas. (We employ Sherpas, as well as Tibetans, up here, bringing the full amenities of Nepalese trekking to Tibet.) From Shekar we drive south to Kharta and begin trekking in alpine desert, our gear carried by laconic yaks. Soon we’re reveling in that surprisingly uncommon Himalayan commodity: true wilderness, headed to what we think of as Our Own Private Everest. Crossing a 16,000-foot pass, we suddenly enter a delicate subtropical forest, gazing up at the ice citadels of Makalu and Chomolonzo. This salmagundi of alpine sceneries, from typically Tibetan dryness to lush forest, all of it topped off with towering ice peaks, is one of the Kangshung trek’s great attractions.

A few days later we enter the Kangshung Valley and the aura of Everest. We spend a couple of days hiking and catching rays of mountain beauty at our high camp, flanked by looming peaks, including Everest itself, front and center, a 10,000-foot palisade of ice and snow. You will search the world in vain for a more heart-stoppingly gorgeous spot (or one more remindful of the words of explorer H. M. Stanley, who relished “the sweet and novel pleasure of indifference to all things earthly” that camp life offers, and which is “one of the most exquisite and soul-lulling pleasures a mortal can enjoy”).

We loop back to Kharta and the Tibetan rainshadow (after having been out of sight of human habitation for 10 or 12 days) and drive to a night by the fabled Rongbuk Monastery, set exquisitely beneath Everest’s North Face, and then spiral down from Central to South Asia and the relative comforts of the Tibet-Nepal bordertown of Zhangmu, before hopping across the border and making the sweet, lush, welcomely warm drive to Kathmandu.