A group of foragers inched across a snowy slope in the Himalayas like ants, crawling on all fours from one thawed patch to another, inspecting every single blade of grass. Around five hundred others were doing the same on nearby slopes. They were all searching for the notoriously camouflaged yartsa gunbu, a fungus more expensive than gold. Once plentiful like grass, it guaranteed income for pickers. In recent years, however, yields had plummeted. Young men who once went to the mountains for “Himalayan gold” were now rushing to Saudi Arabia and Qatar. 

One of the harvesters, Rajdhani Pun, a thin man in his late twenties, had a Chinese smartphone pressed to his ear. Without warning, he let loose an avalanche of expletives. He hung up the call and sat silently, watching his three-year-old son play in a patch of melting snow. 

Yartsa gunbu (Tibetan: winter worm, summer grass) is a parasitic fungus that grows out of its host, a worm. A 15th century Tibetan text claimed that it gave “inconceivable advantages” to consumers. In traditional Chinese medicine, it’s a wonder herb, believed to treat asthma and jaundice, check cholesterol, and stem aging. Also known as “Himalayan Viagra,” the strange product is known to spike libido. 

While the mummified worm remains underground, the fungus breaks through its host’s head to emerge over-ground as a slender pedicel, long and thick as a toothpick. It is this that foragers must spot. It’s an eye-killing task because the rusty-black stem is identical in size and color to almost every other blade of grass next to it. Sometimes, people scour an entire hillside without finding one. Foraging is almost a form of surrender: humans on all fours, crawling toward a thing so hard to find that believing has to precede seeing.  

Until the 1990s, the fungus was like any other herbal remedy: considered miraculous by a few, largely unknown to most. That changed overnight in 1993, at the World Championships in Athletics in Stuttgart. At that meet, Chinese female runners, virtual nobodies in competitive long-distance running, won the 1,500-, 3,000-, and 10,000-meter races, setting championship records in the latter two. The Chinese clean-swept the 3,000-meter; six of the nine women on the podium in those events were Chinese. The performances were too stunning to be true. When the winners went on the customary victory lap, the audience jeered. Three weeks later, the Chinese broke the world records in the same events.  

Tests in Germany showed the Chinese were clean from performance-enhancing drugs. Later, Ma Junren, the dictatorial coach of the Chinese team, touted his unique training style as the reason for the successes. Ma, a self-proclaimed expert in Chinese herbal medicine, served his runners daily doses of fresh turtle blood and, allegedly, caterpillar fungus. It’s unlikely he mentioned caterpillar fungus by name, for he always maintained that a coach could never be expected to divulge details of their training. But in interviews he spoke of his dual approach of training at high altitudes and using “special Chinese medicines.” Since his favorite place for training was the Tibetan plateau, it’s probable that the herbs he served included yartsa gunbu. 

Whether Ma used the fungus or not, or if it actually powered his runners, is a matter of conjecture. Whatever the case, post-Stuttgart, the fungus emerged as a pharmaceutical star. A Chinese company bought Ma’s purported elixir for $1 million. Within a decade, the price of the herb shot up by 900 percent. Thirty years later, a kilogram of the caterpillar fungus sells for upwards of $100,000 in upscale stores in Shanghai or Hong Kong. 

Nepal is the second-biggest harvester of the fungus after Tibet. Since the herb grows between 3,000-5,000 meters above sea level, the villages nearest it tend to be hilly or mountainous backwaters with only rudimentary health and education facilities. Often without road access, they are cut off from the economic opportunities available in towns and cities. Yarsagumba, as it’s known in Nepali, is found in 27 of Nepal’s 77 districts. Eleven of those are in the top 25 of the nation’s poorest districts. The three districts with the highest yields are in provinces that are the most food insecure. For people in such corners of Nepal’s Himalaya, the yarsagumba fad also brought the power to treat poverty.  

Rajdhani was in the mountains with his wife and in-laws for the spring “harvest,” when entire villages camp in the mountains for weeks, hoping to make a fortune. Tangerine and cobalt blue tarpaulin sheets stretched over wooden and bamboo poles sprang on the dun terrain, vivid as lichens on rocks. People slept on dried alpine grass, hemmed in by stacks of firewood. Smoke from open hearth clung to the inside of tents and people’s bodies. Outside, money swirled. Conversations were about money. There were bets on volleyball games. One tent was a casino.       

Rajdhani and the 500 or so people in the camp were from Maikot, a village two days’ trek south. It’s a remote settlement in the rugged hills of north-western Nepal, inhabited mostly by ethnic Magars. It has always been a local powerhouse because it owned the biggest forests and mountain pastures in the region. Villagers from elsewhere have to pay for their forest products and grazing rights. The discovery of the fungus in their alpine meadows bolstered that standing. 

Until recently, Rajdhani had been an English teacher at the local school. When there was a change in the village committee, he and many other teachers were fired en masse. New teachers, people close to those in power, supplanted them. Unemployed, reeling from the injustice, and under pressure to provide for his two children, he had paid almost $1,000 to a manpower agent to arrange a visa for a blue-collar job in Poland. Months had passed but the promised visa hadn’t materialized. Rajdhani’s angry outburst had been at the agent.

Rajdhani stood out in camp, even from far away, because he was never more than a few feet away from his kid. When I asked him about leaving his son, he smiled sadly and said, “He can’t sleep without me. I guess he will have to get used to not having me around.”

Rajdhani wasn’t alone in making such a painful decision. Nepal’s political instability and economic stagnation force people, mostly men, to travel abroad for work. Between July 2022 and July 2023, over 771,000 Nepalis left, 134,214 more than the previous year. Last year, remittances accounted for almost a quarter of Nepal’s GDP. The $9.3 billion workers sent home not only provided for their families but propped up the ailing economy. With money coming in, successive governments have been happy to sit back and let people go where the jobs are instead of creating them. The result was a paradox increasingly common in rural Nepal: a good father had to be an absent father.     

Until five decades ago, the only people who camped for weeks in the meadows where the fungus is harvested today were Magar shepherds and Tibetan refugees. Only the latter collected it, for only they knew what it meant to the Chinese. To the Magars, it was just a kind of grass. Some even believed it was toxic, blaming the occasional death of their sheep on it. They left it alone.  

According to one origin story from Maikot, the Tibetans approached Magar shepherds when demand became too big for them to forage by themselves. In the early 1980s, the Tibetans offered the pastoralists rock salt in exchange for the fungus. The shepherds signed on gleefully. They were getting something for picking a thing that almost carpeted the ground. In trying to increase the seasonal yield, the Tibetans set up the first picker-buyer chain. They also opened the door for the Magars to enter the trade and, eventually, take it over completely.

Surrounded by immense forests bristling with game, mushrooms, and herbs; rivers teeming with fish; cliffs draped with gigantic beehives; and natural fibers and sheep wool to weave clothes from, the people of Maikot have always had all they needed. Buffered by this abundance, sons of Maikot seldom left for money’s sake, even as hundreds in neighboring villages migrated to cities or foreign lands for a better life. Money was almost unnecessary since people had all the food they needed, which was all they wanted. 

That’s why when shepherds first began to return to the village year after year with woolen sacks full of salt and explained how they had got it, no one asked to be taken along next spring. When the first Maikot residents began trading the fungus, circa 1990, the wealthy in the village mocked them, wondering what they hoped to earn by selling what was, essentially, grass. In those days, wealth in Maikot meant land and what it produced. 

Then traders began offering money instead of salt. In 1993, Dhaniman Pun had just done his tenth-grade national-level exams. Two of the earliest traders from his village asked him to go picking with them. It was an apprenticeship and excursion, with opportunities to earn money. Part of the deal was that the traders would buy all that the kids picked. This was so early on in the yartsa gunbu saga that even this golden offer attracted few takers. A hundred or so villagers went, most of them teenagers awaiting the start of a new school term. 

Dhaniman and his friends made small fortunes. He earned around 3,500 rupees that year (a piece sold for 2 rupees). He was, he recalled, one of the laziest pickers. Some of his friends dug out 2,000 pieces in a day. Back then, abundance deterred over-harvesting. Once, bored of picking after only a few hours, Dhaniman badgered his closest friend to stop as well. When that failed, he simply reminded his buddy that he’d be brushing mud off of hundreds of mummified worms that evening. The drudgery in that image got to his friend. He stopped.

Dhaniman’s recollections sounded like a page out of a religious text extolling heaven’s bounty. “Picking back then was exhausting because yarsagumba grew thick like herbs on a kitchen-garden bed. You could pick for hours and even then there was more. When you went back the next year to that very spot, it was still all there. We picked and took naps surrounded by it.” 

Three years after Dhaniman’s first trip, Maoists declared war on the Nepali state. Maikot was at its heart. People from other parts of Nepal who had joined the Maoist guerilla units learned about the pricey herb as they hid in the mountains from the state forces. Word soon spread that people were making fortunes by picking the fungus. By 1998, pickers got 30 rupees for a piece; people easily picked enough in a single day to make around 20,000 rupees.

Nepal’s civil war killed countless businesses, but it nurtured the yarsagumba trade. Eventually, the Maoist Party seized control of it. They sold the herb across the border in China and in Kathmandu. The sizable cash income went into buying weapons as well as into local schools. They held on to it even after the war ended in 2006. Greedy for revenues from permits, they made yarsagumba season a free-for-all. In 2011, a Nepali filmmaker found 7,000 people clogging the narrow mountain trails to get to the rangelands. 

Maikot’s people took back control of the trade from the Party in 2012. Five years later, they decided unanimously that they didn’t want to share their “worm mines” with other villages. Since then Maikotis go to the mountains an entire month before outsiders. Not surprisingly, the latter group no longer sees a point in risking snow blindness, avalanches, and altitude sickness to roam slopes that have already been picked clean.  

Fewer people go looking now also because there is much less of the fungus around. Over-harvesting seems the obvious reason for the decline. As people pick like there’s no tomorrow, fewer fungi are left on the ground to propagate and infect more larvae. 

Some blame climate change for the dip. Winter snow, old-timers say, is crucial: in years when it snows well, the fungus proliferates. That cycle has gone awry. Nepal has had below average precipitation in twelve of the past eighteen winters, with eight of those classified as droughts.

The causes are debatable, the effects undeniable. In the early 1990s, a single trader commonly had over a hundred kilograms of the fungus. The combined haul of all pickers in Maikot’s meadows in the past five seasons has not exceeded 63 kilograms; last year it fell to 42 kilograms. In 2020, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) placed caterpillar fungus in the ‘vulnerable’ category of its Red List of Threatened Species.

Three decades after his first trip, a really good day for Dhaniman was finding eight pieces of yarsagumba. And he got that by teaming up with his wife and 16-year-old daughter. As he sat in his tent, eyes watery from looking for too long at snowy slopes, and recalled those phantasmal quantities, people plodded past, drained after another ten-hour hike. Many had returned empty-handed. In a single generation, people had gone from tiring of picking to tiring of looking. 

In 2023, not even a thousand people went up from Maikot. Above all else, people have stopped going for the same reason they started going in the first place—money. “Making 200,000 rupees in a month and a half is amazing for someone from a place like Maikot,” said Dhaniman. “But the sum isn’t as large as it sounds once you remember that it has to last a family the whole year.” 

Also, Maikot is no longer the village of subsistence farmers who are content as long as they have enough food. Landowners no longer deride yarsagumba traders; they are envious of their wealth. “Families today want to send their children to schools in towns or cities, eat rice from the lowlands, and own smartphones and TVs,” explained Dhaniman. Even the caterpillar fungus – Himalayan gold – can’t buy such a lifestyle. There is little choice but to go see a manpower agent in Kathmandu. 

A year from that angry phone call from the mountains, Rajdhani was in Kathmandu, restless after learning his visa to Poland had been rejected. He phoned home daily, and his son begged him to come and get him. As we parted after a meeting in Kathmandu, I asked him where he was headed. “I’m going to the agent’s office,” he said. “I want to see if there is another country I can go to.”