PRIVATE
Sacred valleys to the high Himalaya
The activities on this trip are rated as moderate and suits a wide range of interests and physical fitness levels. The hikes on this trip can range from moderate to challenging, depending on your abilities. Trip members should be in good health and comfortable standing or walking for extended periods of time and confident navigating mixed and steep terrain that may include rocky trails, slippery conditions and, or, steps and stairs. Daily activities include city walking tours, hiking to and entering monasteries, temples and fortresses, driving over winding mountain roads and easy to moderate hiking with some strenuous options where possible. The general elevations in the valleys will mostly range from 6,800 ft to 9,000 ft, with drives that will take us over higher passes before descending to the average elevations mentioned above. The final hike to Tiger's Nest Monastery is 10,000 ft.
Accommodations
The high-end accommodations on this journey feature traditional Bhutanese style with modern elements. The lodges are handpicked for regional character, comfort, and hospitality, including our beautiful family lodge in the central highlands of Bhutan, the Mountain Resort (see more on the Mountain Resort below). In peak season, depending on availability, we may use lodges comparable to the ones we have listed or advertised.
Expedition Staff
Every expedition is curated by expert native-born guides and trip leaders who also facilitate meetings and learning experiences with other locally knowledgeable people along the way. Our experienced team shares valuable insights and local expertise to ensure a culturally rich adventure of discovery through the Himalayan landscape and traditions of Bhutan.
The activities on this trip are rated as moderate and suits a wide range of interests and physical fitness levels. The hikes on this trip can range from moderate to challenging, depending on your abilities. Trip members should be in good health and comfortable standing or walking for extended periods of time and confident navigating mixed and steep terrain that may include rocky trails, slippery conditions and, or, steps and stairs. Daily activities include city walking tours, hiking to and entering monasteries, temples and fortresses, driving over winding mountain roads and easy to moderate hiking with some strenuous options where possible. The general elevations in the valleys will mostly range from 6,800 ft to 9,000 ft, with drives that will take us over higher passes before descending to the average elevations mentioned above. The final hike to Tiger's Nest Monastery is 10,000 ft.
Accommodations
The high-end accommodations on this journey feature traditional Bhutanese style with modern elements. The lodges are handpicked for regional character, comfort, and hospitality, including our beautiful family lodge in the central highlands of Bhutan, the Mountain Resort (see more on the Mountain Resort below). In peak season, depending on availability, we may use lodges comparable to the ones we have listed or advertised.
Expedition Staff
Every expedition is curated by expert native-born guides and trip leaders who also facilitate meetings and learning experiences with other locally knowledgeable people along the way. Our experienced team shares valuable insights and local expertise to ensure a culturally rich adventure of discovery through the Himalayan landscape and traditions of Bhutan.
The activities on this trip are rated as moderate and suits a wide range of interests and physical fitness levels. The hikes on this trip can range from moderate to challenging, depending on your abilities. Trip members should be in good health and comfortable standing or walking for extended periods of time and confident navigating mixed and steep terrain that may include rocky trails, slippery conditions and, or, steps and stairs. Daily activities include city walking tours, hiking to and entering monasteries, temples and fortresses, driving over winding mountain roads and easy to moderate hiking with some strenuous options where possible. The general elevations in the valleys will mostly range from 6,800 ft to 9,000 ft, with drives that will take us over higher passes before descending to the average elevations mentioned above. The final hike to Tiger's Nest Monastery is 10,000 ft.
Accommodations
The high-end accommodations on this journey feature traditional Bhutanese style with modern elements. The lodges are handpicked for regional character, comfort, and hospitality, including our beautiful family lodge in the central highlands of Bhutan, the Mountain Resort (see more on the Mountain Resort below). In peak season, depending on availability, we may use lodges comparable to the ones we have listed or advertised.
Expedition Staff
Every expedition is curated by expert native-born guides and trip leaders who also facilitate meetings and learning experiences with other locally knowledgeable people along the way. Our experienced team shares valuable insights and local expertise to ensure a culturally rich adventure of discovery through the Himalayan landscape and traditions of Bhutan.
The activities on this trip are rated as moderate and suits a wide range of interests and physical fitness levels. The hikes on this trip can range from moderate to challenging, depending on your abilities. Trip members should be in good health and comfortable standing or walking for extended periods of time and confident navigating mixed and steep terrain that may include rocky trails, slippery conditions and, or, steps and stairs. Daily activities include city walking tours, hiking to and entering monasteries, temples and fortresses, driving over winding mountain roads and easy to moderate hiking with some strenuous options where possible. The general elevations in the valleys will mostly range from 6,800 ft to 9,000 ft, with drives that will take us over higher passes before descending to the average elevations mentioned above. The final hike to Tiger's Nest Monastery is 10,000 ft.
Accommodations
The high-end accommodations on this journey feature traditional Bhutanese style with modern elements. The lodges are handpicked for regional character, comfort, and hospitality, including our beautiful family lodge in the central highlands of Bhutan, the Mountain Resort (see more on the Mountain Resort below). In peak season, depending on availability, we may use lodges comparable to the ones we have listed or advertised.
Expedition Staff
Every expedition is curated by expert native-born guides and trip leaders who also facilitate meetings and learning experiences with other locally knowledgeable people along the way. Our experienced team shares valuable insights and local expertise to ensure a culturally rich adventure of discovery through the Himalayan landscape and traditions of Bhutan.
Celebrating Eliza's birthday on trails and temples across Bhutan
On this journey we seek to share the essence of Bhutan fold by fold, layer by layer, each day more resonant than the last.
Your journey begins in Bumthang, the spiritual heartland. Here, the ancient walls of temples and monasteries that have remained at the center of Himalayan spiritual life through the centuries whisper their secretes to us. We contemplate the insights of the enlightened masters whose work continues to inform the traditions that survive into the present day. In such sacred surroundings, we attend the Gesar Tshechu Festival — one of Central Asia's great oral epics performed in sweeping, costumed spectacle. We walk the restored corridors of 19th-century Wangduechhoeling Palace, now a world-class museum, where the architecture itself is a kind of memory, encoding the kingdom's founding myths in timber and stone, preserving them for the future generations.
Finally, take the turn west, and west of the known itineraries, above the tree line, and beyond the reach of the ordinary, we make the trek to Treasure Lake. At 13,900 feet, the silences are immense, as are the mountain spaces, and charged with the particular lightness of high places near sacred borders. The lake's surface, still as polished obsidian, reflects surrounding mountains that have endured long before humanity, and will continue to do so long after we’re gone. In this natural amphitheater of the high Himalayas, Bhutan shows what it has held in reserve, giving us an opportunity to glimpse the true meaning of all our journeys and our deepest yearnings.
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ITINERARY
VIEW DAY BY DAY
DAY 1 : PARO
The plane descends between ridgelines so close the wingtips seem to brush the prayer flags strung across the slopes. Paro's runway is one of the most demanding on earth, and only a handful of pilots in the world are certified to fly it. This is your introduction to Bhutan's essential character: extraordinary beauty, approached through commitment. You have arrived. The kingdom awaits.
Lodge: The Grande Dame of the once-nationalized Bhutanese hotels, the Olathang, or comparable. We stay in their much coveted cottages surrounded by forests of pine, overlooking the rice fields, farms and a view of Paro town.
DAYS 2 THROUGH 4: BUMTHANG
A short mountain flight carries you eastward, over fold after fold of Himalayan terrain, to Bumthang — the spiritual heartland of a nation that has always kept its most sacred things at altitude. The valleys here are wider, the air thinner, the silence more substantial, a region where Bhutan's deepest stories were written.
You arrive in time for the Gesar Epic folk opera, the performances are hours long, loud, gorgeous, and ancient — brocade and brass and percussion and the kind of storytelling that preceded literacy in Central Asia by centuries. This is Homer performed on a courtyard that has seen the footfalls of centuries.
Bumthang,'s center, Jakar Valley, holds its history lightly — a dzong here, a sacred spring there, farmers moving through fields with the unhurried confidence of people who have never confused busyness with meaning. You explore at the pace the landscape demands, which is always slower than you expect, and always exactly right.
Then comes the Tang Valley. A hike into its upper reaches offers something increasingly rare in the modern world: genuine quiet. The trail climbs through meadows gilded with late-season light, past mani walls and solitary Buddhist shrines, into a silence so complete it begins to feel like a conversation. This is Bumthang's final offering — not spectacle, but stillness. Something you feel you can almost carry within you when you leave.
Lodge: Our family run Mountain Lodge, the storied Swiss Guest House or comparable
DAY 5: BUMTHANG TO PARO/PARO TO HAA
The morning flight returns you west to Paro, retracing in 25 minutes the terrain that took weeks to cross as recently as the 1960s. Paro appears below, the valley a patchwork of rice terraces. In the early afternoon, we climb along the winding raod that leads into the Haa Valley — one of Time magazine's designated 'greatest places on earth,' and among the least visited in Bhutan.
Tucked against the Tibetan border, Haa Valley moves at a lower frequency than usual, which is refreshingly wonderful in this age of distraction. There is nothing here that demands your attention, but everything here is here worth paying attention to.
Lodge: The Zingkha, a former regional governor's country home, with a small, neatly maintained square of green, rosebushes that flower in late season, a small traditional water wheel, a formal, full-fledged Buddhist shrine in the main wing, and the best hot stone bath alongside its private stretch of a frigid mountain stream, perfect for dips in between soaks.
DAY 6: HAA
A full day to breathe it in. Traditional farmhouses painted in the old style. Hike along the Haa Panoramic Trail that winds through blue pine forests that open suddenly onto views of snow-capped ridges. The White and Black Temples, ancient and unhurried, standing where they have always stood, and a secret cliffside shrine.
By evening, the gear is laid out. Tomorrow, at road's end.
Lodge: The Zingkha
DAYS 7 THROUGH 11: TREK TO TREASURE LAKE
Above Haa, the asphalt gives out and the mountain takes over. The trail climbs through rhododendron and fir, past the last herder's hut and the last prayer flag strung at a reasonable altitude, into the open high country where the world simplifies itself to rock and sky and the cold that arrives with the dark.
At 13,900 feet, Treasure Lake appears — a body of still water cradled in a glacial bowl near the Tibetan frontier, sacred in ways that predate the religion that eventually named it. The surface reflects peaks of such scale that the human figure beside them becomes, rightly, diminutive. Camp is made in that particular silence that exists only above the tree line, where sound travels differently and the stars, unobstructed by atmosphere or ambition, appear in numbers that the lower, more developed valleys don't always permit.
These are the journey's most austere and most luminous hours. There is nothing between you and the Himalaya. You sleep in that fact, and wake inside it, and carry it down the mountain when the time comes.
Overnights: Our fully-supported Bhutan Himalaya Expedition Trekking Camps, with Mountain Hardwear's expedition-grade subzero sleeping bags and tents and all other camping gear and trekking crew provided by us. On the last day of the trek we hike back down the mountain, and after a midday meal, drive to Paro, to the Olathang for our final farewell dinner and overnight in Paro before your departure.
ACCOMMODATIONS
PEACE OF MIND
PRACTICAL DETAILS
DATES & PRICES
WHAT'S INCLUDED
WHAT'S INCLUDED
WHAT'S NOT INCLUDED
TRIP PHOTOGALLERY
| RECOMMENDED POSTS
ACCOMMODATIONS
All local lodges & Bhutan Himalaya camps included; Luxury lodges additional
PRIVATE
REGION
Haa, Bumthang and Treasure Lake
ACTIVITY LEVEL
Hikes, cultural experiences, challenging trek
Or call 1-855-4-BHUTAN (248826)
TRIP TYPE
DURATION
12 days
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Travel Logistics Organizer for CBS 60 Minutes 2024 special report on Bhutan
“First, thank you for making my trip to Bhutan run smoothly. Second, for explaining your culture and customs to me and our team in a way that helped our 60 MINS story come alive. Third, for making the visit seriously fun!”
~ Lesley Stahl, Correspondent, CBS 60 Minutes, September 2024
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