Nepal Geography, Climate & Nature

Nepal's defining fact is vertical. The land rises from about 60 metres in the southern plains to 8,849 metres at Everest's summit across a span of roughly 200 kilometres — no other country compresses that much altitude into that little distance, and almost everything else about Nepal follows from it.

It falls into three bands. The Terai in the south is flat, hot, fertile and where most Nepalis actually live — it is the northern edge of the Gangetic plain and looks nothing like the postcard. The mid-hills in the middle hold Kathmandu and Pokhara, terraced and densely farmed. The Himalaya forms the northern border with Tibet.

The range is still rising, because the Indian plate is still pushing north into Asia. That makes Nepal seismically active: the 2015 earthquake killed around 9,000 people and damaged a great deal of the Kathmandu Valley's heritage architecture, much of which has since been rebuilt.

North of the main range the land falls into rain shadow and turns to high desert — Mustang and Dolpo are geographically and culturally part of the Tibetan plateau rather than of monsoon Nepal.

Altitude matters more than latitude here. The Terai is subtropical and can pass 40°C before the monsoon; the mid-hills around Kathmandu are temperate and rarely uncomfortable; above about 4,000 metres it is alpine, and above 5,000 it is permanently frozen. All of that stacks within a day's travel.

The monsoon runs roughly June to September and delivers most of the year's rain. Trails turn to mud and leeches, road landslides are common, and the mountains spend most of the time inside cloud.

Behind the main Himalayan range the monsoon largely fails to arrive. Mustang and Dolpo are arid, and their good season is precisely when the rest of the country is wettest.

Winter in the Kathmandu Valley is mild by day and cold at night, and the Valley's bowl shape traps pollution — air quality from roughly December to February is genuinely bad, and anyone with a respiratory condition should factor that in.

Nepal runs from about 60 metres above sea level to 8,849, and the whole span fits inside roughly 200 kilometres north to south. Because the climate varies from tropical to arctic across that distance, the country carries a very large variety of plants and animals — and wildlife tourism is a major part of Nepali tourism as a result. Some species are unique to Nepal, the spiny babbler among them, and the country hosts many rhododendron species.

The protection framework

The National Parks and Wildlife Conservation Act of 1973 — 2029 in the Nepali calendar — created the system. There are four classes of protection, from national parks and nature reserves through to wildlife and hunting reserves, and by 1992 Nepal had established seven national parks protecting over 893,200 hectares.

Chitwan, and the rhinos that nearly went

Chitwan was Nepal's first national park, established in 1973 as Royal Chitwan National Park and made a World Heritage Site in 1984. It covers 952.63 square kilometres of the Terai, from about 100 metres in the river valleys to 815 metres in the Sivalik Hills.

Its history is the clearest conservation story in the country. Chitwan had been a favourite hunting ground for Nepal's ruling class since the late nineteenth century — camps set up for feudal big-game hunters who stayed for months, shooting hundreds of tigers, rhinoceroses and elephants. In 1950 the forest and grassland covered more than 2,600 square kilometres and held about 800 rhinos. Then the area was opened for settlement, poaching became rampant, and by the end of the 1960s 70 per cent of the jungle had been cleared, malaria had been eradicated with DDT, thousands had settled — and only 95 rhinos remained. The government's response was the Gaida Gasti, a rhino reconnaissance patrol of 130 armed men with guard posts across Chitwan, and then the national park itself. Nepal's first conservation law, in 1957, had already been for the rhinos and their habitat.

The vegetation shifts constantly: seasonal bushfires, flooding and erosion produce an ever-changing mosaic of riverine forest and grassland along the banks, with catechu and rosewood on fresh alluvium, then kapok with rhino apple trees — whose fruit the rhinos particularly like.

Sagarmatha, which is mostly rock

Sagarmatha National Park was established on 19 July 1976 and in 1979 became Nepal's first natural World Heritage Site; a buffer zone of 275 square kilometres was added in January 2002. It holds the upper catchments of the Dudh Kosi and Bhotekoshi rivers and the Gokyo Lakes, and ranges from 2,845 metres at Monjo to 8,848 at the summit of Everest, with Lhotse, Cho Oyu, Thamserku, Nuptse, Ama Dablam and Pumori above 6,000 metres.

The land-use figures explain what a trek there actually crosses: barren land above 5,000 metres is 69 per cent of the park, grazing land is 28 per cent, and everything else is the remaining 3 per cent. The forest is a thin band at the bottom.

208 mammal species have been reported in Nepal, including 28 found outside the protected areas and excluding four known to be extinct. The list is the Himalayan cross-section: Bengal tiger, Indian rhinoceros, Asiatic elephant, snow leopard, clouded leopard, red panda, marbled cat, Indian and Chinese pangolin, Bengal fox, corsac fox, Tibetan fox and Tibetan wolf.

The yak that came back

The single best fact about Nepali wildlife: the wild yak, thought to be regionally extinct in the 1970s, was rediscovered in 2014. Forty years of absence, then a confirmed animal.

Birds, which is what Nepal is really for

There are over 900 bird species — the 2012 count — of which 30 are globally threatened, one is endemic and one introduced, across about 27 Important Bird Areas. The endemic one is the spiny babbler, found nowhere else. The national bird is the danphe, a pheasant. Also present: eight stork species, five more pheasants, six minivets, seventeen cuckoos, thirty flycatchers and sixty species of warbler, which is the number that tells you what a gradient from jungle to ice does for a bird list.

Where the big animals are

Chitwan, in the Terai, is the place for rhinoceros and tiger — the park that was created in the 1970s when only 95 rhinos were left. Sagarmatha is the high-altitude counterpart and an Important Bird Area in its own right, holding 208 bird species including the Impeyan pheasant, the bearded vulture, snowcock and alpine chough. Its ungulates are Himalayan tahr, Himalayan serow and musk deer; the snow leopard lives above 3,500 metres and the Indian leopard in the forests lower down. A snow leopard sighting is a matter of luck measured in weeks, not days.

Reptiles, fish and the small stuff

Reptiles run from pit vipers to monitor lizards — Bengal monitor, yellow monitor, the Himalayan pit viper Gloydius himalayanus, the elongated tortoise — with a number of species unique to the country. The rivers hold their own endemics, including the Nepalese minnow, the Nepalese snowtrout, the Pharping catfish and the very large goonch catfish. Even the insect list carries Nepal's name repeatedly: Cychropsis nepalensis, Nepalocaryanda latifrons, Andrena kathmanduensis.

One practical note

Nepal has a large free-roaming dog population and rabies is present. Any bite, scratch or lick on broken skin needs immediate medical attention, and pre-exposure vaccination is worth discussing given how far treatment can be from a trail.