Four programs, four locations, and the 15th chapter of a practice that has run without a gap since 2017.

Freedom Adventure will conduct its 2026 pre-Autumn training between the 18th of August and the 23rd of September, across four programs and four locations: Kathmandu, Bandipur, Pokhara, and Lukla. Together, these make up the 15th edition of our In-House Training, though this year it does not take the shape of a single gathering. It is a series, spread across five weeks, closing only days before our first Autumn departures leave Kathmandu.

The entire series is organized by the Freedom Social Foundation, with Freedom Adventure's support.

Roughly 60 members of our guiding and office team will take part in the Kathmandu and Bandipur sessions, the same core group, fifty guides and assistant guides alongside ten members of our Kathmandu office, that gathered this past January in Sarangkot for the 14th edition. Alongside them, several dozen support staff (porters) from our Annapurna and Everest region teams will take part in the two Porter Refreshment sessions in Pokhara and Lukla. By the close of the series, every guide, assistant guide, porter, and staff member working under the Freedom Adventure name this Autumn will have gone through training built specifically for their role.

Why This Training is Essential

Participation in this training is not optional at Freedom Adventure. It is the entry standard for anyone who works with us, and it has been since the first session in Kakani in 2017. The reason is straightforward. A trekking company's product is not a route or an itinerary; it is the judgment of the person leading a client through terrain that does not forgive carelessness. That judgment cannot be assumed from a resume or a certificate filed away and forgotten. It has to be tested, refreshed, and tested again, every single season, and this is where that happens.

Our guiding structure runs on two tiers. Every assistant guide holds Wilderness First Aid certification. Every lead guide holds the more advanced version, Advanced Wilderness First Aid. Holding a certification and being able to act on it without hesitation, under real pressure, on real terrain, are two different things, and this training exists to keep the second one as close to the first as possible. Every year, before the season opens, our guides return to this material because the work asks it of them, not because a form does. This year's series carries that same practice across every part of the company that puts a person on a trail, whether they are leading or assisting.

15th In-House Training

Kathmandu

This is the session every edition before it has been built around, guides, assistant guides, and office staff, in one place, for two days. It exists because a field team that moves through Spring in the mountains and an office team that moves through Spring at a desk in Kathmandu drift apart in small ways that neither side notices until a client does, a policy update one crew never heard, a lesson from an incident report that stayed in a filing folder instead of reaching the people who needed it. The first day looks back honestly at Spring, working through trip logs and real cases where something didn't go the way the itinerary promised. The second looks ahead, covering incident handling, professional conduct, inclusive travel, guest safety, client confidentiality, and anything that has changed in company policy since the last session. No one at Freedom Adventure is exempt from sitting in this room.

AWFA / WFA Training

Bandipur  

Five days in Bandipur, delivered with Outdoor Initiative, the longest and most technical program in the series. It exists because the responsibility a lead guide carries at altitude, with no road access and no quick way to a hospital, is not the same responsibility an assistant guide carries, and treating the two identically would leave a gap exactly where a gap costs the most. Mornings are spent on injury assessment, high-altitude sickness recognition, medication use, and emergency oxygen protocols. Afternoons move outdoors, onto the slopes above Bandipur, for rescue systems, anchor work, and litter evacuation, drilled until the sequence no longer requires conscious thought, and the final day is built entirely around CPR, practiced and assessed. Every lead guide leaves certified in Advanced Wilderness First Aid, and every assistant guide leaves certified in Wilderness First Aid.

Porter Refreshment Training

Pokhara

The In-House Training in Kathmandu is where we sit down with our guides and assistant guides once a season. This is the same idea, held for the porters who work with us regularly out of the Annapurna region. One day, in Pokhara, spent in the company of the men who carry our treks on their backs every season, most of whom we rarely get the chance to sit with outside of the trail itself.

Porter Refreshment Training

Lukla  

The same gathering, two days instead of one, for the porters who work the Everest region with us. The extra day reflects the terrain, the Khumbu asks more of anyone carrying a load through it, but the purpose stays exactly the same as it does in Pokhara: meeting the people who work with us regularly, hearing directly from them, and building the skills that keep every season safer than the last.

It is also, here as in Pokhara, where we look for the next assistant guide among the porters already proving themselves on the trail, and make sure they know we are looking.

Fifteen Editions, Since 2017

The first in-house training was held in the spring of 2017, in Kakani, Nuwakot, with roughly ten people. What follows is the record of every edition since, including this year's.

 A Note from the Founder, Jagan Timilsina

"Before this company existed, I spent several years instructing for the National Outdoor Leadership School, and the one thing that stayed with me from that work is how quickly a skill fades once it stops being tested. A guide can pass a course in April and still hesitate in October if nothing in between required him to use what he learned. That gap is the entire reason we started this training in 2017, and it is the same reason we have never let a season pass without it since. What has changed over fifteen editions is the shape of the training. What has not changed is the conviction behind it, that good judgment in the field is built, not assumed, and that building it is a responsibility we carry every single year, not just the years it feels necessary."

A Note from the General Manager, Himal Sharma Pandit

"Every season asks something different of us, and this one is asking us to prepare differently too. Four programs instead of one is not about doing more for the sake of it. It is about giving each part of this team, our guides, our medics, our porters, training that actually matches the weight of what they carry on a trail. That is not a new idea for us. It is the same one that has shaped every edition of this training since the beginning: readiness is not something you claim once and hold onto, it is something you rebuild every season, deliberately, without shortcuts. We ask a great deal of the people who carry the Freedom Adventure name into these mountains, and this is how we make sure what we ask of them is something they are genuinely ready to give."

Looking Ahead

What began with ten people in a forest outside Kakani in 2017 has grown, fifteen editions later, into a series that will move sixty guides and staff through Kathmandu and Bandipur, and several dozen porters through Pokhara and Lukla, before a single Autumn client sets foot on a trail with us this year. Each edition of this training has taken a different shape, a ten-day camp in the early years, a focused refresher in Sarangkot this past January, and now, for the first time, a series spread across four locations and six weeks. The shape changes because the needs of the company change, but the underlying commitment does not: that every person who carries the Freedom Adventure name into the mountains has earned the right to be trusted there. We will report on each stop in this series as it happens, beginning with Kathmandu in August, and we will close it out with a full account once the last group finishes in Lukla toward the end of September. For now, this is where things stand: four programs, four places, and a team already at work preparing for the season ahead of anyone who will walk it with us.