THE path is wide, the terrain easy, yet I keep losing my footing, tripping over stones and my own feet because I can’t watch the trail. My eyes refuse to leave the white mountain filling the sky before me, the 24,786-foot Himalayan peak Annapurna III. It dominates the horizon as surely as a sunset does, but with millenniums-old glaciers ringing its crest like a necklace of diamonds, it feels more dazzling than even the brightest setting sun.  Ethan-Todras Whitehill for The New York Times  In the Kali Gandaki Valley. In recent years, a road has been built along the river.  Just over a third of the way through the legendary 150-mile Annapurna Circuit trek, circling the Annapurna massif in Nepal, I have finally reached a height where no smaller mountains obscure my sightlines to the peaks. Ahead, four days on, lies Thorong La, a daunting 17,769-foot pass, the high point of the circuit and start of the trail back down. But I’ve already reached euphoria. Annapurna III is too everything  tall, close, imposing, beautiful  to be true.  Everyone who’s been to Nepal tells you the Himalayas are big. But nobody prepared me for the reality of breathing hard at altitudes already near those of some Rocky Mountain peaks, only to see a mountain rise another full height of the Rockies above me.  If my fiancée, Jen, and I had driven this same route in a jeep, my memories now and forever after would be a blur of trees and far-off villages, the mountains beautiful but remote, hardly more vivid than those seen in nature documentaries or computer wallpaper. Instead, as we approach the base of Annapurna III after a week of walking, my head is swimming with images seen close up: swaying footbridges over thunderous gorges; rocky footpaths jammed with goats, donkeys and water buffalo; terraced rice paddies thrusting green shoots against the olive hillsides; narrow stone Gurung villages filled with shrieking children, chatty shopkeepers and the low hum of chanting monks seeping out of brightly colored Buddhist monasteries.  And the mountains. Day by day, we’ve hiked in the company of the Annapurnas, admiring them from a distance in their shifting costumes of sun and shadow, sighing each time they hid behind clouds and cheering when they emerged. They feel like our mountains, our friends. Our Annapurnas.  It is a shame, then, that by 2012 a road will have been built on this path, destroying this experience and, according to many, placing the last nail in the coffin of what was once the greatest trek on earth.  Many walks lay claim to the title of World’s Greatest Trek  the Milford Track in New Zealand, Mount Kilimanjaro in Tanzania and the Inca Trail in Peru are a few. But none of those are epics through valleys surrounded by five-mile-high peaks, staying every night in teahouses run by local villagers and stocked with good kitchens, cold beer and Snickers bars. The Annapurna Circuit marries natural grandeur, cultural immersion and relative luxury in a union found nowhere else.  The circuit is a tale of two river valleys: up the steep, lush Marsyangdi, then over the pass and down the wide, arid Kali Gandaki. But in recent years a road, usable by buses and four-wheel-drive jeep-like vehicles, was completed that runs up the Kali Gandaki to the base of the pass. On that side, most trekkers now opt to ride in the jeeps rather than walk in their dust, and as a result, the time needed to complete the circuit has shrunk from 17 days to 11. In the coming years, with the road now being built on the Marsyangdi side, the undeveloped portion of the trek will shrink again, to just four days.  Roads are the bane of trekkers, most of whom  myself included  want to visit places where only their own two feet can take them. On trekking blogs and message boards, purists are already mourning Annapurna’s demise. So when I walked the Annapurna Circuit this past October, I decided to test this trekking prejudice: with Jen, a guide and a porter, I would walk the 17-day trail, even if it meant mingling with jeeps, and find out first-hand if all the doomsaying was warranted.  Thorong La is the highest altitude reached by many trekkers in their lifetimes, a few hundred feet higher than Everest Base Camp and eclipsed on the popular-treks list only by Kilimanjaro’s 19,331 feet. October, after the usual monsoon months, is prime trekking season because it is typically the driest month.  For pretty much every trekker in Nepal, whether headed to Annapurna, Everest or any of the other fabulously scenic regions, the preparation starts in the Thamel neighborhood of Katmandu, where every third storefront overflows with knockoff trekking poles, nylon pants and packs at prices half to a third of those elsewhere. (Our guide, a 30-something, thin-mustached Gurkha, called it “Chinese North Face.”) Thamel has no sidewalks, so our every foray into its streets was a tooth-and-nail battle with rickshaws, cars and mopeds.  ETHAN TODRAS-WHITEHILL is a frequent contributor to the Travel section.
The Annapurna Circuit is one of the world’s great treks. But a road is coming in, and vehicles’ dust may cloud the experience.