Bridge below Tengboche

The Himalayan Trust built a footbridge on the trail below Tengboche monastery in 1966, during the same early wave of Khumbu building that produced Khunde Hospital, the Lukla airstrip and the region's first schools. Trails in this part of Nepal cross fast, glacier-fed rivers that can rise quickly in the monsoon, and a reliable crossing mattered for anyone walking between villages.

Tengboche monastery is one of the most important religious sites in the Khumbu, and the bridge below it carries monks, villagers, porters and now trekkers heading toward Everest Base Camp. The Trust's early infrastructure work, schools, water supplies and bridges like this one, was built to make daily life and movement through the valley easier, not simply to serve trekking tourism, which was still in its infancy in 1966.