Almost every enquiry that has reached my desk this month begins the same way. Someone has a journey to the Khumbu held for October, they have seen footage from Nepal on a news bulletin, and they would like to know whether the mountain they have been thinking about for three years is still standing where they left it.
It is. As of 5 September, the Everest region — Base Camp, Gokyo, the trails, the lodges and the flights into Lukla — is operating normally, and the domestic flight network is running without interruption. That is not a hopeful reading of a difficult situation. It is the status of a valley that the flood of 26 August never reached, and the fuller account of what did happen, where, and to whom, is set out in our report from after the Rasuwa flood, which I keep current.
What I want to do here is narrower and, I think, more useful. I want to give you the map rather than the reassurance.
Where Rasuwa is, and where the Khumbu is
Nepal is a country roughly the length of the Greek mainland laid on its side, with eight of the world's fourteen highest mountains stood along the top of it. When something happens at one end of that ridge, it is not news at the other end. It is weather in a different country.
Rasuwa is the district directly north of Kathmandu, pressed against the Tibetan border. On 26 August a mass of ice and rock came away from the glacier beneath Langtang Lirung, dammed the Lhende Khola, and then released down the Bhote Koshi and into the Trishuli. The water ran west and south, through Nuwakot, Dhading, Gorkha, Tanahun and Chitwan.
The Khumbu — the valley that carries you to Everest Base Camp — lies some 150 kilometres east of that, on the far side of Kathmandu, in a different range, above a different river system entirely. No water from the Lhende Khola has ever run through Namche Bazaar and none ever could; the valleys do not connect. The trail from Lukla to Base Camp climbs alongside water that comes off the Khumbu glacier and drains east and south, nowhere near the corridor that was struck.
This is the fact that never survives a news bulletin, and it is the only one that actually governs your October. A country is not a single place. A disaster in one valley of the Himalaya tells you as much about the next valley as a landslide in Epirus tells you about the road to Sounion.
I write this from Pokhara, where I live. On the morning the flood came down, a hundred kilometres from here, nothing happened. The lake was flat, the shops were open, the flights went out on time. I have never found a way to say that without it sounding like salesmanship, and it is simply what the day was.
What has not changed
The trails
The route into Base Camp is exactly the route it has always been. Lukla, Phakding, Namche, Tengboche, Dingboche, Lobuche, Gorak Shep. The bridges over the Dudh Koshi are the bridges that were there in the spring. The acclimatisation days are in the same places, for the same physiological reasons, and no one has found a shortcut around them.
The lodges
They are open and they are staffed. The families who run them spent the monsoon doing what they always do in the monsoon — repairing, restocking, waiting — and they are now sitting in front of the quarter that pays for their entire year.
The flights into Lukla
Running normally. The Lukla flight is the part of an Everest journey that has always demanded patience, and it demands exactly as much patience this year as it did last year: it is a mountain airstrip, it answers to cloud, and a well-built itinerary carries a spare day at each end because of that. The variable is the weather, as it always was.
The season
October and November are the finest weeks of the Nepali year. The monsoon withdraws, the air is rinsed clean, the trails dry out and the horizon goes hard and blue in a way that photographs never quite manage. Nothing about what happened in Rasuwa has altered a single thing about the autumn air over the Khumbu. Our guide to the seasons explains why this window is the one we build around, and this year is no exception.
What has changed
Four things, and I would rather you heard all four from me than discovered two of them at an airport.
The country you are walking into is in mourning
This is the change that has nothing to do with logistics. As of 5 September, more than 1,340 people had died and close to 4,900 remained missing, on the Nepal Police count; the disaster authority's tally a day earlier stood at 1,287 dead and 5,083 missing. Fifteen municipalities have been declared disaster zones for three months. These figures are provisional, they come from the authorities, and they were still moving when I wrote this.
Many of the people you will meet in the Khumbu are from elsewhere in Nepal, and some of them will know someone in those numbers. You do not need to do anything with that except carry it. Ask, if it seems welcome. Do not perform sympathy. Nepalis are exceptionally good at reading the difference.
Some journeys have moved here from somewhere else
Langtang and Gosaikunda are closed, and will be for some time; the road to Syabrubesi no longer exists. Travellers who had those valleys booked are being moved, and Everest is one of the three places they are being moved to. The practical consequence is that the good guides and the good lodge rooms on the classic Khumbu dates are being spoken for earlier than usual.
There is a better version of that substitution, and it is worth saying plainly because it costs you nothing: if you are moving a Langtang journey, keep the guide and keep the local operator. Move the route, not the person. The Langtang guides have lost an entire season through no act of their own, and a client who insists on bringing them east has done something no donation can do.
The road question, and why it barely touches you
The Kathmandu–Pokhara highway is closed at Krishnabhir, where roughly 200 metres of road subsided after the Trishuli undercut the slope beneath it. Since 4 September the Department of Roads has been cutting a 350-metre temporary track into the hillside above the collapse; the site engineer expects seven to ten days and the government is targeting a reopening within September. Until that reopening is official, we treat the road as closed.
For an Everest journey this is largely academic, because the Khumbu is reached by air from Kathmandu and not by that highway at all. It matters only if your October was going to pair Everest with Pokhara and the Annapurnas, which a great many of our journeys do. In that case the answer is the one we would have given you in an ordinary year anyway: fly it. Twenty-five minutes, and a variable removed. This is one of the reasons our Premium journeys lean on domestic aviation even when every road in the country is behaving.
We build in more margin
Where a road is questionable we use a helicopter, because a helicopter converts an unknown into a schedule. That is the machinery behind our Ultimate journeys, and this autumn it is doing more work than usual. Every traveller carries insurance with helicopter evacuation and high-altitude cover — we insist on that in a normal year and this year it is not open to discussion — and we work only with licensed guides and local operators, who are the people who actually know which trails moved and which did not.
Questions I am being asked this week
Is Everest Base Camp open in October 2026?
Yes. As of 5 September the Everest region, including Base Camp and Gokyo, is open, with trails, lodges and flights to Lukla operating normally.
Was Everest affected by the Rasuwa flood?
No. Everest lies in a different range, some 150 kilometres east of Rasuwa, on an entirely separate river system. The flood ran down the Bhote Koshi and the Trishuli, west and south of Kathmandu. The Khumbu was untouched.
Which parts of Nepal are closed?
The Rasuwa district including Syabrubesi, Timure and Rasuwagadhi; the Langtang valley; Gosaikunda; the banks of the Trishuli and Bhote Koshi; and the land crossings into Tibet at Rasuwagadhi and Tatopani, with only Korala in Mustang working, and that for freight rather than travellers. Kathmandu, Pokhara, Chitwan and the Everest, Annapurna and Manaslu regions are operating normally, accurate as of 5 September 2026.
Are the flights running?
Yes. Domestic flights are normal and without interruption, including the services into Lukla.
Should I feel comfortable coming while the country is grieving?
Yes, and I would go further. Tourism is 6.6 percent of this economy and autumn is the quarter the entire mountain economy lives on. After the 2015 earthquake the world watched the footage and cancelled, arrivals fell by roughly a third in the year Nepal needed them most, and the donations that arrived instead were spent and gone. The money a journey puts into a valley reaches the guide, the porter, the driver, the lodge family and the woman selling apples where the trail turns, and it reaches them this week rather than next year. Coming is not indifference to the disaster. In the districts that were not hit, it is the most durable help available.
How we are designing October in the Khumbu
Very little of what we do changes. The itinerary is the itinerary: Kathmandu, the flight to Lukla, the walk up through Namche and Tengboche with the acclimatisation days where they belong, Base Camp, Kala Patthar at first light, and — on most of the journeys we build — the return by helicopter rather than back down the same trail, which returns three days to a life.
What changes is the margin. We hold the spare days at Lukla rather than hoping. We route nothing through Rasuwa, the Langtang corridor or the Trishuli, at all, for any reason. We fly Kathmandu to Pokhara if your journey includes both. And we ask, before every departure, the question that no website can answer: what did the guide who came down yesterday say about the trail?
If you want to see how the Khumbu fits into a longer journey, our Everest Base Camp in luxury piece sets out the walk itself in detail, and our destinations will show you what else belongs alongside it in October.
Come, if you were coming
I am not going to tell you that travel repairs a country. It does not. What it does is smaller and more reliable: it keeps a season from disappearing for people who have only one season, and it tells a place that it has not been written off. Nepalis remember that for decades. They will tell you about it twenty years later, on a trail.
If Everest was already in your October, keep it. If it was on a list of someday journeys, this is the autumn that someday is most useful. A journey of this kind is costed only once it is designed, because no two are the same — if you would like a figure, that conversation begins on our design a journey page, and I read every enquiry that comes through it.
And if you would like to know why a Greek is writing to you about the Khumbu from a house in Pokhara at all, the story is on the founder page.
The mountain has not moved. Neither should you.
