Mangal's line
Mangal Krishna Lama grew up in a farming family in Kakani, on the ridge north of Kathmandu. At fifteen he left school after ninth grade to help support his family in the city, working three months unpaid as an apprentice mechanic in a Thamel bicycle workshop and riding down from Kakani at 4:30 every morning so he could open the shutters at dawn. He taught himself to race before sunrise, borrowed twenty-five thousand rupees from his father and brother to buy his first bike when the workshop owner threatened to fire him for entering a race in Sikkim, and went on to compete in twenty-two national and international races, winning ten titles and standing on the podium of the Yak Attack. Alongside the racing, he spent more than a dozen years guiding riders and film crews — including the Global Cycling Network (GCN) and Swiss riders with Globetrotter — through Annapurna, Manang, Lower and Upper Mustang, Solu, Langtang and the Kathmandu Valley. He founded El Yak Adventures in 2013, and in 2025 became one of the first guides in Nepal licensed through the Nepal Mountain Academy's inaugural government Mountain Bike Guide Training programme. In 2022 he made the first solo mountain-bike traverse of the Great Himalaya Trail high route, from Kangchenjunga Base Camp in the east to Hilsa on the western Tibetan border. It took 88 riding days and roughly 1,700 kilometres across twenty-two passes above 5,000 metres — through Makalu, Everest, Rolwaling, Manaslu, Annapurna, and across the remote caravan passes of Dolpo and Mugu. The intimate route knowledge and trailcraft earned across those ranges inform every itinerary El Yak designs.