Juggernaut Timilsina

Jagan Nath Timilsina has summited Mt Everest, won the Great Himalayan Race, climbed rock faces. He now runs multiple tourism businesses and spends his summers teaching in Alaska. 

Born and raised in Sarangkot, surrounded by the spectacular panorama of the Annapurnas, Timilsina would hike for hours to school every day. 

Timilsina wanted to start working as early as possible. At age 13, he went to India to look for a job but was too young to work security. So he came back to Nepal and became a trekking porter at age 14. 

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Ambitious and resourceful, he took advantage of the government’s English language and training programs for trekking guides. Timilsina started out as a guide at Himalayan Encounters in 2004, and covered more than 100 trails in Nepal and Tibet over the next 11 years.

“Many porters become guides and stop,” notes Timilsina. “But I always want to take the next step. So I set my sights on mountaineering and climbing.”

He completed courses offered by the Nepal Mountaineering Association and the Khumbu Climbing Center (KCC), learning about avalanche safety, ice climbing and rescue training. Soon after, Timilsina summited Mt Everest. Since then he has scaled 25 other peaks, often leading expeditions.

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Timilsina wanted to take his education further, so on the recommendation of teachers he met at the KCC, applied to the National Outdoor Leadership School (NOLS), a non-profit outdoor education school founded in Wyoming. On his second attempt, he got into a 15-person course for instructors.   

Timilsina's acceptance into the program was conditional: NOLS were stricter with candidates from Nepal, given the country's poor reputation regarding safety. He was surprised with a test about Wilderness First Aid, which Timilsina had passed in Nepal. This time, he failed.  

According to protocol, Timilsina should have been sent home, but the instructors decided to give him a second chance: he could go on with the course, but would be retested after. “The course kept me busy from 6AM to PM, so I would study at night by headlamp, getting by on three hours of sleep,” recalls Timilsina. 

The second the course finished, Timilsina was whisked away to give his retake. He needed at least a 75 to pass - he got a 99. 

The deal was that the best-performing student in the course was offered employment at the institute. Timilsina had a job starting the very next day, and he has kept it, teaching in Alaska every summer. 

He uses his experience to run outdoor education courses in Nepal too, including teaching wilderness skills to children with disabilities.

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“Once, the children were caught in a heavy downpour and I was worried,” recalls Timilsina, “but they assured me that it was nothing compared to what they deal with on the daily basis.”

In 2017, Timilsina won the first edition of the Great Himalayan Race, covering 1,600km in 46 days. 

“Much of the race was very easy for me. I would get done with the day’s racing early, and spent the rest of the day taking in the beauty of the untouched valleys and cultures along the route.”

Timilsina now splits his time between Pokhara and Kathmandu, running his travel company Freedom Adventures, his non-profit Freedom Social Foundation, and organising races and training through Himalayan Trail Running. 

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Harder than juggling all these ventures is navigating Nepal’s labyrinthine bureaucracy. Timilsina says: “It is frustrating to work in Nepal. To trek to Manang, for example, you need permits from four different entities.” 

Outdated laws and arbitrary regulations have made things worse. Adding to the challenge is the phenomenon of outmigration of the young Nepalis, who are often only holding jobs as they wait for visas to be approved. 

Despite all this, Timilsina is still optimistic about the future of Nepal’s tourism. He says: “There is endless potential here, but our attitudes around discipline and hard work need to match our ambitions.”