Chele La Pass

PeaksParo,Bhutan

The highest point any road in Bhutan reaches, a bare 3,988-metre saddle thick with tall prayer poles raised for the dead, Jomolhari on the skyline.

September·Quiet month

Aug–Sep

Nothing closes and the road stays open all monsoon, but August and early September sit under cloud and afternoon rain, the poppies are over and Jomolhari rarely shows; by late September the rain begins to pull back.

Year-round The manidhar flags, the wind and the drop into the Paro and Haa valleys are here every month; the flowers, the snow and the far snow peaks all come and go with the seasons.

Chele La Pass is the highest point any road in Bhutan reaches, a bare saddle at 3,988 metres between the Paro and Haa valleys in the west of the country, thick with tall white prayer poles raised for the dead, with the sacred peak of Jomolhari on the northern skyline, and it is driven up to from Paro on a stack of hairpins through pine and rhododendron and walked among the flags, with a footpath dropping to a nunnery wedged in a cliff. The thousands of poles crowd the saddle so thickly that the ridge reads as a texture from the road, and the tall white flags are manidhar, raised 108 at a time for a death to carry the prayers for the dead on the wind; at the northern lip on a clear dawn the two great summits stand over the treeline, Jomolhari at 7,326 metres and the needle of Jichu Drake, mountains that nobody may climb, since Bhutan closed its peaks to mountaineers as the homes of gods, and the air is clearest in October and November after the monsoon has washed the dust out. In April and May the slopes below the treeline burn red and pink with rhododendron, of which Bhutan has more than forty species, and in June and July blue poppies, the national flower, open in the rocks between the poles. A footpath leaves the pass and drops through fir and juniper to Kila Goenpa, where seven small temples and a row of retreat huts are wedged into a cliff face above the Paro valley, home to a community of nuns, and the scrub below the saddle is one of the more reliable places in the country to meet the Himalayan monal and the blood pheasant. The road drops on the other side into Haa, a valley that stayed closed to foreign visitors until 2002, longer than anywhere else in Bhutan. Chele La is a pass full of prayers for the dead, and the mountains it looks at are left to the gods.

Worth knowing

Good to know

Come up early — the ridge is usually clear at dawn and fogged in by mid-afternoon, and Jomolhari tends to show itself on clear mornings and be gone by lunch.
The saddle stands more than 1,500 metres above Paro — breathlessness and headaches are common at this height, so walk the ridge slowly and turn back if you start feeling worse.
Snow and ice close the road — from about late December to February the climb is the first route out of Paro to shut, so ask your driver before you commit the day to it.
You cannot go alone — Bhutan requires every foreign visitor to travel with a licensed guide and pay a nightly Sustainable Development Fee, and the pass is a standard half-day add-on from Paro.

Things to do

1
Walk into the forest of memorial flags
Thousands of poles crowd the saddle so thickly that the ridge reads as a texture from the road. Walking in among them, with the cloth snapping overhead, is the pass's defining half-hour, and each pole was planted for a particular person. A cluster of stupas and hand-turned prayer wheels sits just below the crest.
2
Scan the north skyline for the peaks nobody may climb
Walk to the northern lip of the saddle on a clear dawn and pick the two great summits out over the treeline: Jomolhari, at 7,326 metres, and the needle of Jichu Drake. Bhutan banned mountaineering above 6,000 metres, so this is a skyline you can find but no one is allowed to stand on. Come early — the cloud usually rises out of the valleys and swallows both by lunch.
3
Drive the switchbacks to the top of Bhutan's road network
The road climbs out of Paro through pine and rhododendron in a long stack of hairpins and tops out above the treeline, higher than any other road in the country. From the saddle you can trace the far side of it dropping west in the same folds into the Haa valley.
4
Walk off the ridge to the cliff nunnery at Kila Goenpa
A footpath leaves the pass and drops through fir and juniper to Kila Goenpa, where seven small temples and a row of retreat huts are wedged into a cliff face above the Paro valley. Nuns have kept the ledge as a meditation site since the 9th century. The walk down takes one to three hours and ends on the road, where drivers wait.

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Nearby

14 km