A 33 km route from Kimri, through Chhayanath and Chitaikuna, to Pulu , climbing to 4,820 metres along the way. That’s the simple description of Chhayanath Trail Ultra, Nepal’s first high-altitude race through this sacred stretch of Mugu district. It doesn’t come close to explaining what it took to get there, or what it meant once runners actually crossed that finish line.
I’m Sanjaya Adhikari, Executive Director of the All Nepal Sports Foundation (ANSF) and Race Director for this event. This is the full account of how Chhayanath Trail Ultra 2026 came together , for more on my background directing events like the Women in Sports Conclave and the 4th Mt. Everest International Taekwondo Championships, see my full event portfolio.
The results
Dhir Bahadur Budha took the men’s title in 3:57:25, ahead of Dal Bahadur Kunwar (4:02:10) and Chandra Bahadur Rawat (4:05:00).
Sunmaya Budha won the women’s race in 5:25:50, followed by Rammaya Budha (5:26:40) and Kalpana Budha (5:35:20).
These times were set on a course that doesn’t forgive inexperience or poor preparation — a route reaching 4,820 metres, through terrain most trail runners will never see in person, let alone race on.
Why Jestha and why we couldn’t have taken more time
The obvious question is why we didn’t simply give ourselves more runway. Why eight weeks, and not eight months? The honest answer is that Jestha wasn’t a scheduling choice , it was the only viable window, bounded on both sides by things no organizing committee controls.
Before Jestha, the route itself didn’t exist as a rideable course. The high sections of the trail, including the passes above 4,000 metres, remained under snow deep enough to make the route both untraceable and genuinely dangerous. Running an ultra through terrain still locked in winter snowpack isn’t an ambitious first edition , it’s a safety failure waiting to happen. We had an alternate lower-altitude route planned specifically in case snow conditions didn’t clear in time, and we were prepared to use it rather than compromise on safety.
After Jestha, the valley empties out. Jestha 1 to 30 is yarshagumba season , the annual harvest of Ophiocordyceps sinensis (caterpillar fungus) that draws much of the local population, including many of the very community members we’d need as volunteers and porters, up into the high pastures for weeks at a time. Right behind that comes the monsoon, which makes the trails unsafe in an entirely different way , landslide risk, swollen river crossings, and cloud cover that grounds any helicopter evacuation option. And behind the monsoon sits the end of the fiscal year, which closes the administrative and budgetary window for a municipality-partnered event like this one.
So the real constraint wasn’t “how much time do we want.” It was a genuine window , after the snow releases the route, before yarshagumba pulls the workforce into the mountains, and before the monsoon makes the whole valley unsafe to operate in. Jestha was not our preferred timeline. It was the only one that existed.
Building to a standard, not just to a date
Working inside a window that tight could easily have meant cutting corners elsewhere to compensate. We made a deliberate choice not to. From the outset, the event was structured around the same priorities ITRA and World Athletics ask of any race seeking international credibility: environmental responsibility, equality, and athlete safety, alongside the standard technical requirements.
In practice, that meant route planning that minimized ecological disturbance to a landscape that had just become a national park; equal prize structures and equal seriousness given to the men’s and women’s fields rather than treating one as the “real” race; and a safety architecture — the checkpoints, the medical staffing, the alternate route contingency , built to hold up against international scrutiny, not just local expectations. An eight-week build timeline was a reason to plan more rigorously, not a justification to plan less. Our technical partner on these standards was the Nepal Adventure Running Federation, whose involvement gave a first-time organizing team a credible framework to build against.
Chaitra 9 to Jestha 3: eight weeks, one road-less valley
The first time I stood in Pulu, it was Chaitra 9. The race happened on Jestha 3. Between those two dates sits roughly eight weeks , and the fact that those eight weeks were even enough is something I still find hard to fully explain to people who haven’t worked in Mugum Karmarong.
Mugum Karmarong has no road access. Everything — every tent, every stretcher, every oxygen cylinder, every kilogram of rice for a volunteer camp, every piece of communication equipment — moves in on foot or by mule, over passes that don’t care about your event timeline. There is no truck you can send in a week before race day with the things you forgot. Whatever you need on the mountain, you carry in advance, or you don’t have it.
That first Chaitra 9 visit wasn’t a formality. It was the only way to actually understand what an eight-week build would require: where a checkpoint could physically be sited given the terrain, how far apart aid stations needed to be given realistic evacuation times, which sections of trail would still hold snow in Jestha, and what Mugum Karmarong’s own community could contribute versus what had to be brought in from outside. Every one of those answers shaped a plan that then had eight weeks , not eight months to become real, in a place where “real” means physically transported, on foot, across some of the most demanding terrain in Nepal.
Building a medical system from nothing
You cannot run a race to 4,820 metres on hope. Altitude sickness, cold injury, and traumatic injury on technical terrain are not edge cases at this elevation , they are the baseline risk profile of the event. So alongside the route, the checkpoints, and the volunteer logistics, we had to build an entire medical response system for a valley that had never needed one before.
By race day, that system looked like this:
- More than 100 volunteers across the full length of the course and its support network
- 37 medical volunteers, including 2 MBBS doctors, distributed along the route rather than concentrated at start and finish
- 8 medical checkpoints, spaced to keep evacuation time from any point on the course within a manageable window
- 4 of those checkpoints equipped with oxygen and stretchers — the minimum we judged necessary to stabilize a serious altitude or trauma case before any further evacuation could happen
- Mobile health volunteers moving with the runners themselves, not fixed to a single checkpoint, so no stretch of trail was ever truly unmonitored
None of this existed in Mugum Karmarong before Chaitra 9. All of it had to be recruited, trained, equipped, and physically positioned along a road-less high-altitude route in the same eight weeks that everything else was being built.
Seven days in the snow, for one race day
Here is the detail I keep coming back to. The volunteers staffing the higher checkpoints didn’t hike in the morning of the race and hike out that evening. They went up days ahead, established camp in the snow, and stayed there — through cold, through isolation, through whatever weather the mountain sent — for seven days, so that on the one day it mattered, someone would already be exactly where a runner in trouble would need them to be.
That’s not a detail I include for effect. It’s the actual mechanism by which this race was safe. Every safety statistic I can quote — zero serious incidents, full recovery of every runner, a race that delivered on every safety commitment we made — traces back to people who chose to spend a week of their lives in a snow camp on a mountain, for runners they had never met, in a place most of them had never had reason to visit before this event asked them to.
That is what “more than 100 volunteers” actually means on a race like this. Not a headcount. Seven days, in the snow, so a stranger crossing a 4,820-metre pass would not be alone if something went wrong.
Why the route matters as much as the race
Chhayanath Trail Ultra doesn’t pass through its namesake site by accident. Chhayanath Dham is a place of deep spiritual significance to communities across Karnali , respected in both Hindu and Buddhist tradition. Runners on this course move through a landscape that has been a site of pilgrimage for generations, near the edge of the newly established Chhayanath National Park.
That park is itself new to the world stage. Declared in August 2025, it’s Nepal’s 13th and youngest national park — carved out of roughly 843 square kilometres previously managed as part of Shey-Phoksundo National Park, plus a 177 square kilometre buffer zone. It sits close to the Nepal-Tibet border and is home to snow leopards, blue sheep, the Tibetan wild ass, and Nepal’s national bird, the Danphe. The park was created in part to solve a real problem for local communities in Mugum Karmarong Rural Municipality, who previously faced multi-day treks just to reach park administration under the old Shey-Phoksundo boundaries.
So when a runner crosses the finish line at Pulu, they’ve moved through more than a race course. They’ve moved through a landscape that is simultaneously sacred, ecologically significant, and newly protected , most of it unseen by outsiders until now.
What it took to get 58 runners to that finish line
Fifty-eight runners started this race , 46 men and 12 women. Every one of them finished. That outcome , a full field, zero serious incidents, on a route reaching 4,820 metres with no road access anywhere in the valley is the actual headline of Chhayanath Trail Ultra 2026, even though it’s the one number that never makes it onto a results sheet.
None of the finishing times above happened in isolation. They happened because of what was built, on foot, in eight weeks, in a place with no road to shortcut any of it.
The closing ceremony
When the last runners came in at Pulu and we gathered for the closing ceremony, what stood out wasn’t the prize-giving, joyful as it was. It was the volunteers , people who had carried equipment over mountain passes, staffed checkpoints in the cold, and managed the unglamorous, essential work that makes an event like this survivable for its athletes. It was the community members who lined the route to cheer runners home, in a place that had never hosted anything like this before.
What this was really for
Chhayanath Trail Ultra 2026 was an inaugural edition, and inaugural editions are, by definition, first attempts , full of decisions made in real time, without a template to check against. But the systems held. The route is mapped. The safety protocols are tested. The name Chhayanath now has a place in the international trail running vocabulary, alongside a national park that most of the world is only now learning exists.
For Mugum Karmarong, for Mugu district, and for Karnali Province more broadly, this race was never only about who crossed the line first. It was a demonstration of what a rural municipality, an independent sports foundation, and a technical running federation can build together, in one of Nepal’s most remote and least-visited regions, when they commit to doing it properly the first time.
The trail is open. The next edition starts from a very different place than this one did.
Sanjaya Adhikari is Executive Director of the All Nepal Sports Foundation (ANSF) and was Race Director of Chhayanath Trail Ultra 2026, organized by Mugum Karmarong Rural Municipality in collaboration with ANSF, with technical support from Nepal Adventure Running Federation. He is an RRCA Certified Race Director.
Related reading:
- Chhayanath Trail Ultra 2026 event page — full race details, route map, and results
- My full event portfolio — Women in Sports Conclave, Mt. Everest Taekwondo Championships, and other events I’ve directed