My First Time Climbing Manaslu A Beginner’s Story

I had climbed Mera Peak the year before. At 6,476 metres, it was the tallest I had ever stood, and standing on that summit wind biting, lungs tight, the Himalayan giants spread across every horizon I felt like I had finally understood what mountains were. I thought I was ready for more. I thought Manaslu would feel like a natural next step.

I was wrong. Manaslu does not feel like a next step. It feels like a different world.

At 8,163 metres, Manaslu peak is the eighth highest mountain on Earth. I knew that number before I came here. But numbers mean nothing until you are standing beneath the mountain in the village of Samagaon, staring up at a wall of ice and rock that disappears into cloud, and realising quietly, with a cold feeling in your chest that you have committed to climbing that. Numbers do not prepare you for the reality of it.

The acclimatisation rotations were harder than anything I had done on Mera. On Mera, the altitude had been uncomfortable headaches, slow steps, the need to pause and breathe more than you think you should. On Manaslu, the altitude was punishing.

Above 6,500 metres, even carrying a cup of tea from one side of the tent to the other required a conscious decision, a gathering of will. I lay in my sleeping bag at Camp II one night listening to my own laboured breathing and thinking: I am not built for this. I do not belong here.

That voice the one that tells you to turn back, that whispers you have come too far too fast gets louder the higher you climb. On Mera expedition, it had been easy to silence. On Manaslu, it was a constant companion. Every morning I woke up and chose, deliberately, to ignore it.

Summit day began at 1 AM. We left Camp IV in darkness, a line of headlamps moving slowly against a vast black slope. The stars were out, but the wind was already picking up from the northwest, the kind of wind that has nothing gentle in it.

By 7,800 metres, it had become something else entirely. It arrived as a wall, not a gust a physical force that drove me sideways into the slope and frosted my goggles over in under a minute. I could not see the climber ahead of me. I could not see anything except white and dark and the faint orange cone of my headlamp catching drifting snow.

I stopped moving. I do not know for how long. Time does strange things at altitude it stretches and compresses at the same moment. My sirdar Nima looked back at me through the blizzard. He did not shout encouragement. He did not give me a speech. He simply said, in Nepali: “Ek kadam. Bas ek kadam.”

Just one step. Only one step.

I took one step. Then another. Then I stopped thinking about the summit and started thinking only about my feet, one in front of the other, crampons biting ice, rope taut, breath ragged. That is all climbing is, in the end one step, repeated until there are no more steps to take.

The summit came without announcement. The slope simply flattened. I looked up and there was no more mountain above me only sky, impossibly blue after the grey and white of the storm below. Annapurna rose brilliant to the south. Dhaulagiri floated in the west like something painted rather than real. The entire roof of the world was laid out in every direction, and I was standing on top of a piece of it.

I started crying. I could not help it and I did not try to stop it. My tears froze on my face before they could fall properly a strange sensation, the cold turning grief and joy into the same thing. I stood there for perhaps three minutes before the wind forced us to move down. Three minutes for two months of preparation, years of dreaming, and a lifetime of wondering whether I was capable of something like this.

Mera Peak showed me that I loved mountains. Manaslu showed me what I was made of when everything in me wanted to stop. Those are two different lessons, and I needed both of them.

I am a beginner. I still am, even now, even after this. But I understand something now that I did not understand before: being a beginner does not mean you are not ready. It means you are still learning and the mountain, if you listen to it carefully enough, is always willing to teach.