The people who guide and organize your Everest Base Camp trek

These are the people behind the Everest Base Camp trek as we run it. Our parent company already publishes each of them on its own site, with a photograph and a bio page. The photographs below are those photographs. The lines under each name are the parts of each bio that can be checked: a year, a qualification, a language, a region, a job1.

The rest of each bio stays on the parent site. Praise does not come across, and neither does experience given as a count of years with no start date, because nobody can check a count like that and it is out of date the year after it is written. Every card links to the full bio page, so you can read what we left out.

The cards are split by the job title itself. A role whose own title contains the word guide is in the first group. Everything else is in the second one. That is the whole of the sorting rule.

Two of those job titles mean different things and the difference matters to you. A trekking guide is the person who walks the route with you, day after day, and makes the calls about your health and the weather. A city guide works in Kathmandu, on the days at the start and the end of the trip. If you are reading a team page anywhere and cannot tell which kind of guide you are looking at, ask.

One person in that second group has a guiding career behind it. The founder’s job title on our record is the one you see, and his dated career is on his card and in the table further down. We sort by the title the record holds rather than by what we happen to know about a person, because the moment we start sorting by judgment the page stops being checkable.

You will meet some of that second group before you ever reach Nepal. The reply to an inquiry, the itinerary, the quote and the invoice come from people on that list, at a company you can look up. Who owns this site and which company you would be dealing with is set out in full on the about page, and every license and registration number the company holds is on the licenses page with the body that issued each one.

What this page does not do is tell you which of these people is assigned to your departure, because that depends on your dates and we are not going to guess it in public. Ask us before you travel and we will tell you who it is and confirm that person’s license, which is the same commitment the licenses page makes.

Here is how each card was made. We opened every person’s bio page on nepaluniquetreks.com on 13 September 2026, and we kept a dated copy of each page and each photograph. We then wrote every checkable line into our fact store, with that bio page as its source. The card reads those lines back. Nothing on a card is typed onto this page, not even a person’s name.

Guide license numbers stay off this page. Two trekking guide license scans are among the company’s documents, but the numbers are inside the images and nobody has typed them out yet. A number copied wrong from a scan would be worse than no number at all. Ask us before you travel and we will send the license of the guide assigned to you.

If you want more detail about a person than a card holds, ask for it directly. Write to us and we will answer in writing. What happens to the details you send when you do that is set out in our privacy notice, which is short and says what the code actually does.

Three of the people above have a guiding start year on our record. Dil Bahadur Gurung has guided in Nepal since 2004, Buddhi Lama since 2004, and Partap Gurung since 2004. Three names, three dates, and you can put each date to a face on the cards above.

Read the two middle columns separately, because they are two different facts. The third column is a person’s own career and it goes with that person wherever they work. The fourth is a date at this company. Partap Gurung began guiding in 2004 and joined this company in 2017, years apart, and the table shows both rather than picking the flattering one.

Here is the rule that keeps those columns apart. A career belongs to a person and carries that person’s start year. A founding date belongs to a business and carries the business’s. Neither borrows the other’s number. Why that matters so much on this particular site, and what our own older marketing got wrong before we fixed it, is set out on the page about who owns this company and when it was registered. This page only needs you to know that the years above are three people’s years and nobody else’s.

The other 7 people on this team do not have a guiding start year on our record. That does not mean they started yesterday. Their bio pages give no start year for a career, or give experience only as a count of years, so we hold a role for them and not a career date. Where a bio page gives the year a person joined this company, that year is on their card above. An estimate written into the gap would be the exact thing this site exists not to do.

Vetting is the part every operator claims and almost none of them evidences. The claim is cheap: hand picked, highly experienced, fully certified. So instead of a paragraph about how carefully we choose people, here is the list of what is actually on a record today, and the list of what is not.

Named qualifications. 6 people on this team have a qualification on their bio page, and each one is on that person’s card. 2 of them name the school that awarded it, which means the line can be checked with the school rather than taken from us: Arjun Gurung, Bachelor's in tourism, Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management, and Samyam Rumba, Graduate of the Nepal Academy of Tourism and Hotel Management1.

A named training. Samyam Rumba’s bio page records this: Trained by the Nepal government's tourism ministry. That is what the bio page says. We have not seen the training certificate ourselves, and we will not describe the course beyond those words.

The company’s own papers. The tourism license, the company registration, the tax registration and the trade association membership are all published as numbers you can compare against a register we do not control. The licenses page lists each number with the body that issued it2. Those are company documents though, and a company document is not a statement about any person on this page. That distinction is the next section.

What is not on the record yet, stated plainly. We do not publish an individual guide license number, because the numbers sit inside document scans nobody has transcribed yet. We do not publish a first aid certificate per person, because holding a certificate for every guide, with the awarding body and the expiry date on it, is work we have not finished. Our own fact store marks that credential as only partly settled, and the guides and porters page shows you that half settled row itself rather than rounding it into a clean sentence.

And what we will not write at all. A vetting process we cannot show you. If we published a paragraph saying every guide is assessed against a named standard, you would have no way to test it and we would have no document to produce. When there is a written standard, it will be published with the date we adopted it, the way every other correction and addition on this site is handled under our editorial and corrections policy.

A trekking guide license is a government record attached to a named human being. It is not a certificate a company prints and it is not the same document as the license the company itself holds. A company license says a business may sell trekking. A guide license says one person may lead you. An operator can hold a complete set of company papers and still put an unregistered person on the trail with you, which is why the two questions have to be asked separately. The longer version of that argument, including what our own credential row says, is on the page about guides and porters on this trek.

How you check one, in the order that works. Ask for the name of the person who will guide your trip. Ask for that person’s license, either as a number or as a photograph of the document, and note how long the answer takes to arrive. When you land, compare the name on that document with the name of the person who meets you. On this team you can also compare the face with the photograph on this page. Those steps take a few minutes and they are the only sequence that tests the person rather than the company.

What a good answer sounds like. A name, then a document. What it does not sound like is a reassurance that all of the company’s guides are licensed. That sentence is true of almost every operator and it is a claim about a policy rather than about the person walking behind you. If an operator cannot connect a specific trip to a specific licensed person, they have told you something useful.

Run it on us. Ask us for the name and the license before you travel and we will send both. We can do that today, person by person, even though this page publishes no license number, because sending a document to the customer it concerns is a different act from publishing it to the open web. Whether a guide is required on this route at all is a separate question with a genuinely unsettled answer, and it is handled on the page about trekking without a guide.

Team pages in this market often carry a passage about Sherpa culture, written by the company rather than by anybody from that community. We are not going to add another one. Sherpa is the name of a people who live in the valley this trek walks through, and it is also a family name. It is not a job title, and on this site the jobs have job names: trekking guide, assistant guide, porter, climbing guide. Why that usage spread and what it does is explained properly on the page about the people who guide and carry on this trek.

We also do not attach an ethnicity to any member of our staff anywhere on this site. That is a person’s own to state, not ours to publish about them. The cards above carry a job, a year, a qualification, a language and a region, and nothing about where a person’s family comes from. It is not an oversight and it will not be quietly filled in later.

What is useful and checkable for your planning is smaller and more concrete. The villages you sleep in are lived in and run by the people of that valley, and the page about the tea houses and villages on the route describes each of them.

Every number above is listed here with the body that publishes it and the date we last read it. If a figure has changed since, write to us and we will correct the page and say that we did.