The two who run it.

Mangal grew up in a farming family in Kakani, in the hills of Nuwakot north of Kathmandu. At fifteen he left school after ninth grade and came to the city to help support his family, working first as a labourer and night-taxi co-driver before his brother referred him to a bicycle workshop in Thamel. He worked three months unpaid as an apprentice mechanic, waking at 4:30 every morning to ride a basic bicycle down from Kakani and open the shop at dawn, before earning his first wage of a thousand rupees a month. He taught himself to race on borrowed workshop bikes before sunrise. When the shop owner threatened to dismiss him if he left to race in Sikkim, Mangal borrowed fifteen thousand rupees from his father and ten thousand from his brother to buy his own bike and went anyway. Over the next decade he competed in twenty-two national and international races and won ten titles — including first place in both Singles and Team at the Kanchenjunga Mountain Bike Expedition in Sikkim, third overall at the 2009 and 2010 Yak Attack, fourth in 2012, and Masters podiums at the 2023 Asian Enduro Series in Nagarkot and Pokhara. Alongside the racing, he has spent more than a dozen years guiding riders and film crews from Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom and North America through Annapurna, Manang, Lower and Upper Mustang, Solu, Langtang and the Kathmandu Valley. His guiding led Swiss adventure specialist Globetrotter to invite him and the Himalayan Enduro Team to race the Mondraker Enduro Team in Davos Klosters, and when the Global Cycling Network (GCN) filmed in Nepal, Mangal guided presenters Simon Richardson and James Lowsley-Williams over Thorong La and into Upper Mustang. In 2013 he founded El Yak Adventures; after the 2015 earthquake and the pandemic halted operations, he rebuilt the company with Pawan Dhakal. In 2022 he made the first solo traverse of the Great Himalaya Trail high route by mountain bike. Setting out from Kangchenjunga Base Camp on 1 April and reaching Hilsa on the Tibetan border on 16 July, he covered roughly 1,700 kilometres in 88 riding days across twenty-two passes above 5,000 metres, including the mountaineering cols of Makalu and Everest and the remote caravan passes of Dolpo and Mugu. Where the trail could not be ridden, he carried the bike on his back. In 2025, Mangal completed Nepal Mountain Academy's inaugural government-certified Mountain Bike Guide Training programme, becoming one of the first officially licensed mountain-bike guides in Nepal. He also holds British Cycling's Mountain Bike Leadership Award (2013) and NOLS Wilderness First Responder certification (2016).

Pawan was born in Panchamul, in Syangja, and grew up in Kathmandu. He studied physics and mathematics at Dartmouth College and physics at The Ohio State University, where his first-author paper on radar-meteor constraints on dark matter appeared in Physical Review D in 2023. He was teaching in the mountains before he was a physicist: science in Ghiling, Upper Mustang, in 2016, and maths, science, English and computing at Crystal Mountain School in Dho Tarap, Upper Dolpo, in 2017. Since 2021 he has advised Vision Dolpo on curriculum and school development at Crystal Mountain School. His work in Dolpo reaches the buildings too. He co-designed passive-solar, vernacular school buildings at Crystal Mountain School with the community, students and architects, and helped local leaders draft a 25-year roadmap for Dolpo Buddha Rural Municipality. He is a co-author of "Claiming Warmth: Thermal Sovereignty and Vernacular Resilience in Dolpo, Nepal", a study of vernacular building and thermal comfort that has been submitted to Studies in Nepali History and Society and is under review. On and off between 2018 and 2026 he worked at a national education NGO, rising from designer of interactive lessons to Senior Products Manager. His work was designing and implementing curriculum and learning materials for Nepal's public schools — interactive lessons and games among them — and making them accessible: offline-first, in several languages, and with Nepali Sign Language versions. He led an offline learning platform and its authoring tools, designed and secured funding for multi-year school programmes, ran field work and teacher training across Dolpo, Janakpur and Lalitpur, and built and led teams. In 2026 he founded the Himalayan Institute for Contextual Sciences (HICS), which builds open learning tools and science instruments for Nepali schools and studies how Himalayan buildings meet their climate. He met Mangal in 2015, on an earthquake-relief volunteer team building a temporary learning centre in Dolakha. In 2021, after Mangal's first partners had left the company, he joined it, and the two of them now run El Yak together. He designs the trips, handles the administration, and guides. He is a certified trekking guide and has led trips in Dolpo many times, for researchers, engineers, teachers and adventurers alike. He knows Mustang, the Annapurna region, Dolpo and the wider Karnali well, and, through his education work, other parts of Nepal too. During #ghtonwheels in 2022 he helped plan the high-route logistics and held the satellite emergency line for all 88 days Mangal was on the trail.