Ram Sharan Pathak

Ram Sharan Pathak co-founded Trekking Team in 1991 alongside his brother Hari Dev Pathak. The two of them started the company together, in a Kathmandu that had a fraction of today's trekking industry and none of its infrastructure, and Ram Sharan has been part of every decision the business has made since.

His role has always been the structural one. Where Hari Dev built the company outward, through clients, agents and the network of guides that still carries it, Ram Sharan built it inward: the licensing, the accounts, the staff contracts, the insurance, the unglamorous machinery that decides whether a trekking company survives its second decade. Most do not. Trekking Team is in its thirty-fifth year.

As Chairman he holds the things that do not change. The company remains family-owned and has never taken outside investment, which is why it has never had to choose between a quarterly number and a guide's wage. Porters are paid above the TAAN minimum and insured, guides are salaried rather than hired by the trip, and quoted prices are fixed, including when a government fee rises after a client has booked. Those are policies, not marketing, and they exist because Ram Sharan wrote them into how the company works.

He is the signatory on Trekking Team's registrations with TAAN, the Nepal Tourism Board and the Nepal Mountaineering Association, and he is the person clients rarely meet and always benefit from.