Poon Hill is a ridge of 3,210 metres above the village of Ghorepani, in the Annapurna region of Nepal. It puts two of the world's fourteen eight-thousanders in front of a walker who has only a few days to spare. Most of the way up to Ghorepani is a staircase. Thousands of stone steps climb through rhododendron and oak forest rather than open mountainside, the famously steep flight above Ulleri among them. They pass stone-and-slate Gurung and Magar villages with terraced fields dropping away below. Nothing about it is technical, and your legs remember all of it. The names along the way come from ordinary work. Ghorepani means horse water, a halt where the mule and horse caravans of the old hill trade routes stopped to drink, and the hill itself carries the name of the Pun, a Magar community who grazed their cattle up on the ridge.
Well before dawn you climb the last hour by headlamp and crowd onto the metal tower at the top, stamping against the cold with everyone else. When the sun clears the eastern ridges the whole wall lights up, and the tower goes quiet. What opens up is roughly 180 degrees: Dhaulagiri in the west, the Annapurnas across the middle, and the fishtail of Machapuchare in the east, which is two eight-thousanders in a single slow turn of the head. In March and April the forest below the village is worth as much as the summit, a tunnel of rhododendron in dozens of species. Tree-sized crimson blooms grow lower down, pale pink and white higher up. Machapuchare is the one that holds your eye, and nobody has officially stood on its twin summit. A British team climbed to within about fifty metres of the top in 1957 and turned back, out of respect for a peak held sacred as a home of Shiva. Nepal has issued no climbing permit since. Of everything this hill hands you in three days, that spire is the part that stays out of reach.