Langtang after 2015: a valley that rebuilt itself

Before 2015 Langtang village was the heart of the valley: a long settlement of stone houses, lodges, yak pens and water-driven prayer wheels at about 3,430 m, a day's walk below Kyanjin Gompa. The people, often called Langtangpa, are of Tibetan descent and are usually counted among the Tamang, though their speech is close to Tibetan. They herded yaks and chauri, grew potatoes and barley, made cheese and, from the 1970s onward, ran lodges for trekkers.

The valley had been known to outsiders since the British explorer Bill Tilman walked up it in 1949. In the 1950s a cheese dairy was set up at Kyanjin with Swiss help, and in 1976 Langtang became Nepal's first Himalayan national park. By the 2000s it was one of the country's most popular treks, close enough to Kathmandu for a week's holiday and beautiful enough for people to come back.

At 11:56 on a Saturday morning, a magnitude 7.8 earthquake struck central Nepal, with its epicentre in Gorkha district to the west. Across the country nearly 9,000 people died. In the Langtang valley the shaking released a huge mass of ice, snow and rock from the slopes high above the village. It fell more than a kilometre and hit the valley floor with such force that the air blast flattened forest on the far side of the river.

Langtang village was buried almost entirely in seconds. Hundreds of people died in the valley that day, including villagers, lodge staff, Nepali guides and porters and foreign trekkers. Survivors in the upper valley and at Kyanjin were cut off for days, until helicopters could fly them out. Many families lost several generations at once. Those who lived through it spent the following months in temporary shelters in Kathmandu, far from their animals and fields.

What happened next is the reason Langtang is open today. Within months, groups of villagers walked back up the valley to look at what was left, to bury and remember their dead, and to decide whether to return. Most did. With their own savings, loans, help from relatives and support from many organisations and individual trekkers, families cleared the trail, built new lodges and houses on safer ground along the path beside the debris, and reopened, a few at first and then more each season.

Today a memorial wall near the village carries the names of those who died. The new lodges are clean and comfortable, often run by the same families who ran lodges before. Walk through and you see daily life again: children going to school, yaks heading up to pasture, women spinning wool in the sun. People are not defined by the disaster, but almost everyone you meet lost someone, and the landscape still shows the scar.

If you knew the valley before 2015, the biggest change is at Langtang village itself: the old cluster of houses is under the debris field, and the settlement now runs along the trail beside it. Lower down, some lodges at Lama Hotel, Riverside and Ghoda Tabela were also rebuilt, and a few trail sections were rerouted around landslide scars. Higher up, Kyanjin Gompa's lodges and cheese factory are working again.

The road from Kathmandu was also hit hard, and landslides on the Pasang Lhamu Highway remain a fact of life, especially in the monsoon. Mobile coverage and wifi have improved, which helps both lodge owners taking bookings and trekkers calling home. Many new buildings use lighter timber and metal-sheet roofs instead of heavy stone and slate, a quiet lesson from 2015 that you will see across the earthquake-hit hills of central Nepal. Langtang remains a national park, and since April 2023 foreign trekkers have had to walk with a licensed guide; check current status before you travel.

Spend a night in rebuilt Langtang and the rhythm of the place soon shows itself. Before dawn, the first lodge stoves are lit and juniper smoke drifts along the trail. Children set off for school in tracksuits and sandals, while older men lead yaks and chauri up to the pastures. By mid-morning the first trekkers arrive from Lama Hotel, red-faced from the climb past Ghoda Tabela, and the lodge kitchens start on dal bhat and noodle soup.

Through the day, people move between lodge work and the older work of the valley: carrying fodder, mending stone walls, turning the soil for potatoes in spring, churning butter and pressing curd for cheese in summer and autumn. Water-driven prayer wheels turn in the streams as they did before the earthquake, and the long mani walls between the village and Kyanjin are still added to. In the evening, the dining room is the warmest place in the house, and it is where you will hear the family speak to each other in their own language, switch to Nepali for the porters and to English for you.

The simplest thing you can do for Langtang is to go there. Tourism is the main income for the valley, and every night you spend in a family lodge, every meal and every hot shower supports a household that chose to come back. Beyond that, a few habits make a difference.

• Stay and eat in locally owned lodges, and buy cheese, tea and small crafts in the valley rather than in Kathmandu.
• Stop at the memorial wall, read some of the names and spend a quiet minute; it is not a photo stop.
• Do not ask people directly what they lost. If someone wants to tell you their story, listen without hurrying.
• Hire porters and guides from Rasuwa where you can, so wages stay in the district.
• Tip fairly and carry out your rubbish, especially plastic bottles and batteries.

It would be easy to write about Langtang only as a place of loss. That is not how people there talk about it. They talk about yaks that need new pasture, children who have gone to school in Kathmandu, prices of rice and fuel, and which lodge has the best apple pie. The valley is still one of the finest short treks in the Himalaya, with forest, glaciers and a living Buddhist culture within a day's drive of the capital.

Coming here after 2015 adds a layer most treks do not have. You see what a mountain community does when the ground gives way, and you see how much a visitor's presence counts. Walk up, stay a while at Kyanjin, eat the cheese, climb Kyanjin Ri at dawn. Then, on the way down, stop again at the memorial. Most people who do this trek say it is that second stop they remember longest.