Stories · 1999 — today
Summits, rescues, clean-ups and the people behind them — twenty-six years of field notes from the Kumaon border Himalaya.
Featured · 2024
In 2024 our Clean Himalaya Campaign was flagged off twice over — by IMF Director Col. Madan Gurung in Delhi, and on the trail by Fay Jane Manneras (UK) and Michelle Theresa Devorok (USA), with ADM Pithoragarh Dr. Shiv Kumar Barnawal.
What began in 2017 as a district clean-up is now a campaign that brings international volunteers to the high valleys — and takes sacks of trail waste back out of them.
A border-town society with no budget and borrowed gear set itself one rule: train hard, climb honest. Twenty-six years later, ICE members have stood on 25+ summits — Everest, Pumori and Dhaulagiri in the Himalaya; Kilimanjaro and Elbrus across the world. Among them, Everester instructor Manish Kasnyal, who now trains the next generation on the same crags where he began.
Four times in seven years, The ICE put down its ropes and picked up stretchers: the 2013 state floods, the Bastari cloudburst (2016), Timtiya, Munsyari (2019) and Taanga, Madkote (2020). It's why every guide we field is rescue-trained — and why 150+ village trainings matter more to us than any summit.
Six IMF cleanathon expeditions hauled trail waste out of the high Kumaon. The flag-offs tell the story of growing recognition: DM Pithoragarh (2017), Himachal minister Anil Sharma (2018), and in 2019 Union Minister Kiren Rijiju with IMF President Col. H. S. Chouhan.
The Birthi Fall Rappelling Expedition put ropes down the full face of Kumaon's great waterfall — flagged off by the District Magistrate and watched by half the valley. It remains our signature adventure programme, and the reason waterfall rappelling leads our training calendar.
From the high ridges above the Vyas valley, on a clear morning, Mount Kailash itself appears across the Tibetan plateau — a darshan without a border crossing. Our team photographed it from near Kalapani; ask about adding the viewpoint to your Adi Kailash yatra.
Every photograph on this page was taken by our members on routes we still run. Join a departure, and come back with a story of your own. Start planning →
