Makalu Barun National Park

I visited Makalu Barun National Park in autumn of 2010 and 2011 for collecting field data for my research project related to treeline dynamics. This is one of beautiful place I have visited so far. Merely, a thousand of people visit this place for tourism so tourist infrastructure are still in development stage. Most of the visitors hire professional trekking companies’ services for comfort. I will also suggests same if you can afford them. Tea house trekking is also an option but you have to hire local people as a guide and prepare everything in advance.

We visited there just after the Maoist party came into peace process. So army camps were not there. Even national park office was not in well function. We struggle to handover our research permit letter to warden. Park is remote and low volume of tourists might me the reason behind the weak presence of government here. This park is very reach in biodiversity and home of endangered species such as mush deer and snow leopard. Most of the time hunters try to take advantage of this situation. We observed many hunting traps in the forest.

We have established permanent plots and collected morphometry data from the treeline area, and collected hundreds of tree-ring cores to analysis age structure, and tree-ring climate response. We also established temperature and soil moisture loggers, and we still have to recover them.