I Fell in Love with a Mountain Dog (And My Guest Couldn’t Take Him Home, So I Did)

I was not supposed to become a dog owner on a Tuesday morning at 4,730 metres.

That is not how I planned my life. I was twenty years old. I was working as a trekking guide. I had a small room in Kathmandu and a backpack that went everywhere with me. A dog made no sense.

But Khumbu made no sense either, and I had given my life to it anyway.

The Dog Had No Name

He appeared at the teahouse in Chhukung the same evening we arrived, our group, four guests from Switzerland, a cook, a porter, and me. He came around the side of the kitchen the way those high-altitude dogs always do. Not rushing. Not begging. Just appearing, the way mountains appear when cloud shifts: suddenly, completely, as if they had been there all along.

He was maybe two years old. Thick coat, the grey-brown of old rock. One ear that stood up and one that fell to the side, as if he had opinions about symmetry. He sat down beside the dining hall door and looked at us with the calm, serious expression of someone who has already decided he trusts you but is waiting to see if you deserve it.

Sandra, one of my Swiss guests, a woman in her fifties who had spent twenty years working in veterinary medicine before she retired, put her soup down.

“What is his name?” she asked me.

I asked the lodge owner. The lodge owner shrugged. He was just there. He had been there since spring. He was a good dog.

Sandra looked at me. “He needs a name.”

So we called him Bhotey. It means something like mountain person in the local dialect. He seemed to accept this with dignity.

Three Days

Three days at Chhukung. That was the plan, acclimatisation, a hike to Chhukung Ri for the views, rest days before Island Peak preparation.

Bhotey spent all three days with us.

He waited outside the dining hall in the mornings and walked with us up the moraine. He had his own system for the trail, not behind us, not in front, but beside, slightly offset, as if he was our colleague rather than our companion. He knew which rocks were stable and which shifted. More than once he stopped at a point where one of my guests was about to step on ice under a thin layer of gravel. He just stood there until they noticed and went around.

By the second day, Sandra was feeding him pieces of her dal bhat and asking me questions I already knew the answer to.

“Can I take him home?”

I told her the truth. It is not simple.

The Reality Nobody Tells You

Flying a dog out of the Everest region is one of the most complicated, expensive, and emotionally exhausting things you can attempt in Nepal’s mountains.

First: getting him to Lukla. That means carrying a dog or walking him down two days of trail. A dog that has never been leashed, that has lived free at 4,730 metres his entire life, that has never seen a road, a car, a city.

Then Lukla itself, a runway the size of a football pitch on the edge of a cliff. The cargo restrictions on those Twin Otter flights are strict. Getting a dog onto a flight requires advance arrangement, documentation, a carrier, health certificates from a registered vet. There is no registered vet in Lukla.

From Kathmandu, you are looking at international pet transport. Health certificates, rabies titration tests (which require a 90-day wait for most countries), import permits from the destination country, airline animal transport fees. Switzerland in particular has strict biosecurity protocols for dogs from South Asia.

The total cost, flights, vet fees, quarantine, import permits, carriers, documentation, runs to over $1,000 USD at minimum. Often $1,500 to $2,000. It can take three to six months of preparation before the dog actually boards a plane.

Sandra knew this before she asked me. She had spent twenty years in veterinary medicine. She knew.

She asked anyway because hope does that to you.

The Morning We Left

We were up at 5 AM for the descent. Cold, dark, headlamps. The kind of morning that is both beautiful and cruel.

Bhotey was already outside.

He walked with us for the first kilometre. Past the stone walls, past the frozen stream crossing, out onto the open moraine where the trail flattens before the long descent toward Dingboche. Sandra did not look back. I could see from the way she was walking that she was not looking back on purpose.

I looked back.

Bhotey had stopped. He was sitting in the middle of the trail, watching us go. Not howling. Not chasing. Just sitting, with that same serious, calm expression he had on the first night, as if he had understood from the beginning that this was how it would go and had decided to be dignified about it.

Sandra stopped walking. She still had not looked back. But she had stopped.

I walked up beside her.

“He stopped following,” I said.

She nodded once. Her jaw was set. “Good,” she said, in the way people say good when they mean something else entirely.

We stood there for a moment. Four thousand seven hundred metres. Dawn just starting to grey the edges of the peaks above us. A dog sitting in the trail behind us, watching.

Then she started walking again.

What I Did Next

I am not sure exactly when I decided. Maybe it was on the descent to Dingboche. Maybe it was later, in Namche, when Sandra gave me money for Bhotey’s food and asked me if I would check on him when I passed through again.

Maybe it was the next season, when I was guiding another group and I came through Chhukung and Bhotey was still there, still serious, still sitting beside the dining hall door with that expression of patient, calm intelligence, and I thought: he deserves better than another winter alone at 4,730 metres waiting for people who do not come back.

I talked to the lodge owner. He was not surprised. He said that dog always knew who his people were, he just had to wait for them to figure it out too.

Bringing Bhotey down was not simple. It took three trips through the area, proper time to walk him on a leash so he trusted it, a slow acclimatisation in reverse, the mountain dog learning the lower world in stages the way we learn the higher one. He was sick for two days in Namche. He stood at the edge of the Lukla airstrip and stared at the airplane with pure, focused suspicion.

But he got on the plane. He slept the whole flight to Kathmandu, his head on my foot.

What I Want You to Know

If you fall in love with a mountain dog, and you will, because the Khumbu is full of them, these serious, weatherproof, ancient-looking creatures who seem to understand altitude and patience and silence better than most humans, here is what is actually possible:

You cannot, realistically, adopt a lodge dog and take it home in the same trip. The timeline, the costs, the documentation, it is a months-long process that requires planning before you even leave for the airport. If you want to adopt a Himalayan dog, research international pet import requirements for your country before your trek. Speak to organisations like Himalayan Animal Rescue Trust (HART) in Kathmandu, who work with international adoptions and understand the paperwork.

What you can do on the trail: Leave money with the lodge owner for food. Ask the owner to note your contact details. Take photographs and the dog’s description. Contact rescue organisations when you get back to Kathmandu. Some international adoptions do happen, they just take time, planning, and patience.

What Bhotey taught me: Sometimes the connection you feel is real. Sometimes the thing that seems impossible is just difficult, which is different. The mountains taught me that difference. Four-thousand-metre passes, crevassed glaciers, summit days in zero-visibility, nothing about this work has ever been simple. Difficult is just difficult. You decide if it is worth it.

He is lying at my feet as I write this. He has two beds, one in my Kathmandu apartment, one at my parents’ house in Solukhumbu where he spends the summers. He still has the one ear that stands up and the one that falls to the side. He is five now and has the calm, serious expression of someone who always knew things would work out, and was simply waiting for everyone else to catch up.

Sandra sends him a package every December from Zurich. Treats that are apparently impossible to find in Nepal. He eats them very seriously, with great dignity.

He has never gone back above Lukla. Some things you leave in the mountains. Some things you bring down with you and keep.

I run Mount Everest Go, a trekking and expedition company based in Kathmandu. We take people into the Khumbu and all over Nepal now, every season. We always stop to let them say hello to the dogs. We never rush that part.

If you are travelling to the Everest region and want to support mountain dog welfare, Himalayan Animal Rescue Trust (HART) does extraordinary work across Nepal. You can donate, sponsor an animal, or enquire about international adoption, the right way, with paperwork that actually works. Or contact me.