Story by Benny Lieber
Photos and Video by Alex Hansen
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On a blazing hot morning in the Terrai, we boarded an Otter plane bound for a Nepali mountain village near the border with Tibet. Alex Hansen and I had managed barely enough productive research to piece together how to get to a rarely-visited valley, our climbing plans based upon just a few photos.
But Alex and I had forged ourselves in the mountains together since 2016. On one particular tentbound trip to the Hayes Range, I realized, there was no one else I’d rather try to fulfill my Himalayan dreams with. So we trusted in ourselves, and just enough to go on.
“I want to go farther out. Like way out there!” Alex had said during our “planning.”
Out there was the unclimbed Changla Khang West (6233m).
My story began in the books. Tales of explorers and adventurers in far-flung corners of the world. Names like Herzog, Terray, Hillary, Hornbein. Page by page, I inhabited their worlds. I envied their adventures and their toughness. I dreamed of one day reaching the Himalaya, and of standing atop an unclimbed peak. But it all seemed far off for a normal guy from a small town in New Hampshire.
In college, still unable to shake those childhood visions, I began plotting my escape to the mountains. In early June 2016, school in the rearview, I threw away my belongings Christopher McCandless-style, and bought a one-way ticket to Washington. A rusty trailer at the foot of Mt. Rainier and six years of living in my car let me climb as much as possible, and hone my guiding craft with brilliant mentors. I felt like I was starting to inhabit the world I imagined as a kid.
Then I got the call.
It was the middle of the night during an expedition to Manaslu when I got the invitation to join the Mountain Hardwear Athlete Team. Holy shit! Joining such a legendary brand—the opportunity to wear the same logo and use the same boundary-pushing gear as Ed Viesturs and Ueli Steck, two of my climbing idols—felt like a surreal privilege, one that would get me that much closer to my goals.
Working as a mountain guide on high-altitude expeditions bloomed into one of the most meaningful corners of my life. I loved every aspect of it: flying across the world to a faraway land, gathering with a new group of friends, and heading off toward the mountain. Guides and clients become family, and I am able to help others achieve their dreams, just as I’m pursuing my own. My job runs the gamut from keeping them safe to decision-making to teaching technical skills to encouraging to life-coaching.
But guiding was one half of my mountain life. I still nursed my dream from a decade before, to summit an unclimbed Himalayan peak. I had tried a few times at that point but with disappointing outcomes. In 2023, I had lined up a “two-fer” combination of guiding an expedition to Manaslu and then exploring unclimbed terrain in India with my friends. It was brilliant fun, even if the latter half of the plan didn’t pan out perfectly.
So, in 2025, I decided to do it again. This time, after guiding a trip on Dhaulagiri (8,167 meters), I’d head out for an exploratory trip somewhere else in Nepal.
I called my pal Alex Hansen in July.
“How about we head off to Nepal in October?” I asked him.
“I’ll be there,” he said. No questions asked.
We were two climbers, two Nepali cooks named Santa and Indra, two donkey drivers, and 10 donkeys. My Mountain Hardwear Alakazam 45 pack was stuffed with water, snacks, extra jackets, headlamp, gloves, and other essentials. Fresh snow draped the steep rock faces above treeline. The trail was dry and smelled like autumn. An emerald green river bubbled and echoed at our feet. At times we’d cross above rapids on wobbling, cantilevered bunches of downed trees. We saw wild horses eating the last green grasses of the year and the remnants of nomadic camps. At night there was deep cold and unbroken silence. In the mornings, we pointed our boots north and walked. After four long days, we arrived in a sprawling basin beneath snowy peaks. Base camp, at last.
After a bit of reconnaissance of the surrounding peaks, we settled on Changla Khang West.
With a short window of fair weather and the end of the trip nearing, we headed out of base camp in a light snowfall for our gear cache below the mountain, a half day’s walk beside the Lachama Glacier. The next day we climbed up steep, loose gullies and ridge crests on the lower mountain, until we found a level nook to set up our Mountain Hardwear AC2 tent. It was cold as soon as the sun left the camp. High winds still ripped at the ridges above us and rattled the tent walls.
On the summit day, we got up in the dark, brewing coffee with cold hands. When I finally got out of the tent ready to go, the stars hung over the mountains like over-sized glow-in-the-dark stickers slapped on the ceiling of a child’s bedroom. We set off up steep snow chutes and scrambled upward. We passed through a delicate rising traverse on loose, fifth-class rock, and clawed our way onto the southwest ridge. The summit came into view, a perfect triangle of dark rocks against blue sky. But a harsh wind ripped across the crests of snow and ice, seemingly whispering, “Not today.“ My Mountain Hardwear Cloud Cipher jacket kept the wind out no problem, but higher up looked beyond the limits of safety.
We stopped to snack and enjoy the view. There would be more mountains, I told myself. And then the wind ebbed to nothing. Alex noticed immediately. Without missing a beat, he said, “Let’s go.”
The next few hours felt like they could have been lifted right from Conquistadors of the Useless or Annapurna. Only they were being written with each step Alex and I took. We breathed deeply in the thin air as we climbed along the snow arete, up a beautiful alpine-ice chimney, and onto the summit. On the top, we stood on a needle of snow, Tibet to one side, Nepal to the other. In the distance, Nanda Devi dominated the horizon. Endless mountains everywhere.
Four months later, the fire still burns. The memories of the mountains, the unknowns, the easy days and the hard ones—they frame my narrative and my relationship to the Himalaya. It’s a story, I realized recently, of my journey transcending from childhood fantasy to adult reality. The youthful dream goes on—redrawn and recalibrated, new visions and the next trip, becoming what you imagined you could be.
“Let’s go back again…”
This article was published in partnership with
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Go Higher: Watch the Climb
Follow Benny Lieber and visual storyteller Alex Joseph Hansen into far‑western Nepal for the first ascent of Changla Khang West.