Management Teams
Our management team plans every trip, runs the day to day of the company, and makes sure each traveller gets an honest answer, a fair price, and a well-organised trek from the first email to the last day on the trail.
Pawan Bhattarai
Co-founder and CEO
Pawan Bhattarai is a co-founder and the CEO of Spade Himalaya. His background is in technology, content, and SEO, and he started Spade to share Nepal’s mountains with travellers around the world in an honest, careful way. He leads the company’s strategy, builds and runs its website, and drives the deep research behind every trek guide we publish.
Before Spade, Pawan spent years helping businesses grow online, so he knows how to turn a real question into a clear, useful answer. That habit shapes the whole company. When a traveller asks about cost, safety, or the best season, they get a straight reply based on facts, not sales talk.
A keen traveller himself, Pawan is not a trekking guide, and he is the first to say so. On the ground, every Spade trip is led by licensed local guides who know the trails. His job is to plan each trip with care and make sure people enjoy the journey, not just finish it.
Anusha Mishra
SEO Content Writer
Anusha Mishra is an SEO Content Writer at Spade Himalaya, where she creates informative, engaging, and search-optimized content focused on travel, trekking, and tourism in Nepal. She researches destinations, trekking routes, travel experiences, local culture, and practical travel information to produce useful content that helps travellers make informed decisions and plan their journeys with confidence.
Her work combines travel research, content strategy, and SEO best practices to create articles and guides that are both valuable to readers and optimized for search engines. She focuses on developing well-researched content around Nepal’s mountains, trekking routes, landscapes, culture, and unique travel experiences, helping Spade Himalaya reach and connect with travellers from around the world.
Field Teams
Our field team is made up of government-licensed guides who grew up in these mountains, know the trails and the weather first hand, and put your safety and your experience first on every single day of the trek.
Avinab Khakurel
Senior Trek Leader · Government Licence No. 9784 · Guiding since 2012
Avinab Khakurel is a Senior Trek Leader at Spade Himalaya and a government-licensed guide (Licence No. 9784) who has worked in Nepali tourism since 2012. He guides in English and French, which is uncommon here and matters a great deal to our French-speaking travellers, who get their questions answered in their own language rather than through a second translation.
His range is unusually wide. Alongside the busy regions of Everest, Annapurna, Langtang and Manaslu, he works the remote west: Mustang, Dhaulagiri and Dolpo. Those are a different kind of trekking. Two of them are restricted areas with their own permit rules, the trails are rougher, the lodges are simpler or absent altogether, and help is a long way off. A guide who knows that ground knows how to plan for the days when something does not go to plan.
On the trail that shows up as judgement rather than pace. He watches how each person is actually coping, not how they say they are coping, and he would rather lose a day than lose a trek. He also reviews what we publish about the western regions, so the route detail, altitudes and timings you read for Mustang, Dhaulagiri and Dolpo are checked against ground he has walked himself.
Yubaraj Katel
Senior Trekking Guide · Government Licence No. 19827 · 10 years of experience
Yubaraj Katel is Spade Himalaya’s senior trekking guide, a government-licensed English guide (Licence No. 19827) with 10 years of experience on Nepal’s trails. He has led treks across the Everest, Annapurna, Langtang, and Manaslu regions, the four areas that shape most of our itineraries.
Ten years in the mountains teaches things no book can. Yubaraj reads the weather, knows where the safe camps and water points are, and spots the early signs of altitude sickness long before they turn serious. He sets a steady pace, checks each trekker’s health day by day, and adjusts the plan when the mountain asks him to.
He also reviews the trek guides we publish. Every route detail, altitude, and timing on this site is checked against what he has seen with his own boots, so the details you read match the trail you actually walk.