The backbone of Bhutan
For four centuries, the Trans Bhutan Trail was the backbone of a kingdom. Then highways made it obsolete. Now, after a decade-long resurrection, it’s redefining sustainable tourism worldwide.
For over 400 years, royal messengers raced across mountain passes with news that would shape a kingdom. Buddhist pilgrims walked hundreds of miles to reach sacred temples. Traders carried goods between villages separated by deep valleys.
All of these journeys followed the same route—the Trans Bhutan Trail, a 250-mile artery that connected a scattered collection of mountain communities into something much more powerful: a nation.
Then, in the 1960s, it started to disappear.
When Bhutan built its first highway in 1962, the ancient trail was abandoned. Forests reclaimed the stone steps. Bridges collapsed into rushing rivers. The trail became a story told by grandparents who remembered when walking was the only way to cross the kingdom.
For nearly sixty years, it seemed lost forever.
Yet in 2018, something remarkable began. The Bhutan Canada Foundation, working with King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck and local communities, started an archaeological resurrection. 18 major bridges rebuilt from scratch. Over 10,000 stone steps hand-carved and precisely placed. Hundreds of kilometers of footpath restored, connecting 400 cultural sites across nine districts.
When the trail reopened in September 2022, TIME magazine named it one of the “World’s Greatest Places.” But the real recognition came from communities who saw visitors returning to villages bypassed by the modern highway for decades.
Today, when you walk sections of the Trans Bhutan Trail, you’re following the exact footsteps of the garps—royal messengers who for centuries carried vital communications between dzongs (fortress-monasteries), helping to maintain the connections that would eventually enable Bhutan’s unification as a modern kingdom in 1907.
But you’re also part of something bigger. All tourism dollars flow directly back into trail maintenance and local communities that live along the trail, creating a model for travel that gives back more than it takes. Your presence helps preserve the world’s first carbon-negative country while contributing to a blueprint for sustainable tourism that other destinations around the world are beginning to follow.
The Trans Bhutan Trail is proof that the most meaningful adventures happen when exploration serves something greater than ourselves.
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