Fixed departures are a compromise. Go private!

A fixed departure is fine for a beach holiday. It's fine for a first, easy trek, or a few days away with a crowd. But trekking in the Himalayas isn't a vacation. It's a ritual. It's a spirit. It's time spent talking to yourself, and giving value to yourself. And when you give yourself value, you don't compromise.

If what you want is the buzz of a big, loud group, a fixed departure, or a good night out, will give you that. The Himalayas give you something else, and it only comes when the noise drops away.

Go alone, and you'll find a feeling you'll want more of for the rest of your life. Go with just one other person, your best friend, your brother or sister, your partner, your son or daughter, and you understand more than the Himalayas: the value of life, of the people you love, and of yourself. With that much quiet around you, you talk to yourself a great deal. Somewhere on the trail, you meet your own soul.

The Himalayas are a place of worship. You don't go there in a noisy group of twenty, twenty-five or thirty strangers just because it costs less. You don't compromise on what matters to you as a person, or on what you want from the mountains.

Landslides on the road, a storm over the pass, an emergency on the trail: the mountains change their minds without asking. A fixed departure has a calendar to keep, and usually turns you back.

A private team has more room. Many times over the years, our teams have held at a camp for one, two or three nights and kept trying, then summited and come home. We can use planned reserve time when conditions and logistics allow, and the big objectives have reserve days built into the plan. Nothing is ever promised, because the mountain decides. But a private plan gives the mountain time to change its mind.

In your own team, the pace is simply the team's pace. The leader knows each of you by the second morning. Camps are quieter. There's room for children and parents, food your group actually likes, and time for what matters to you: a photograph at the right light, an extra night at a lake, a long talk with a family in a village.

And because the trip is private, it can match the way you live: Lean, Standard or Premium, on the same trek, with the same safety in all three. A batch has one way of seeing the mountains for everyone. You can have your own. More in Lean, Standard or Premium.