The two who run it.

Mangal grew up in a farming family in Kakani, in the hills of Nuwakot north of Kathmandu. At fifteen he left school after ninth grade and came to the city to help support his family, working first as a labourer and night-taxi co-driver before his brother referred him to a bicycle workshop in Thamel. He worked three months unpaid as an apprentice mechanic, waking at 4:30 every morning to ride a basic bicycle down from Kakani and open the shop at dawn, before earning his first wage of a thousand rupees a month. He taught himself to race on borrowed workshop bikes before sunrise. When the shop owner threatened to dismiss him if he left to race in Sikkim, Mangal borrowed fifteen thousand rupees from his father and ten thousand from his brother to buy his own bike and went anyway. Over the next decade he competed in twenty-two national and international races and won ten titles — including first place in both Singles and Team at the Kanchenjunga Mountain Bike Expedition in Sikkim, third overall at the 2009 and 2010 Yak Attack, fourth in 2012, and Masters podiums at the 2023 Asian Enduro Series in Nagarkot and Pokhara. Alongside the racing, he has spent more than a dozen years guiding riders and film crews from Switzerland, Germany, the United Kingdom and North America through Annapurna, Manang, Lower and Upper Mustang, Solu, Langtang and the Kathmandu Valley. His guiding led Swiss adventure specialist Globetrotter to invite him and the Himalayan Enduro Team to race the Mondraker Enduro Team in Davos Klosters, and when the Global Cycling Network (GCN) filmed in Nepal, Mangal guided presenters Simon Richardson and James Lowsley-Williams over Thorong La and into Upper Mustang. In 2013 he founded El Yak Adventures; after the 2015 earthquake and the pandemic halted operations, he rebuilt the company with Pawan Dhakal. In 2022 he made the first solo traverse of the Great Himalaya Trail high route by mountain bike. Setting out from Kangchenjunga Base Camp on 1 April and reaching Hilsa on the Tibetan border on 16 July, he covered roughly 1,700 kilometres in 88 riding days across twenty-two passes above 5,000 metres, including the mountaineering cols of Makalu and Everest and the remote caravan passes of Dolpo and Mugu. Where the trail could not be ridden, he carried the bike on his back. In 2025, Mangal completed Nepal Mountain Academy's inaugural government-certified Mountain Bike Guide Training programme, becoming one of the first officially licensed mountain-bike guides in Nepal. He also holds British Cycling's Mountain Bike Leadership Award (2013) and NOLS Wilderness First Responder certification (2016).

Pawan grew up in Syangja, in the middle hills of western Nepal, and studied physics at Dartmouth College in the United States and at The Ohio State University. In 2016–17 he taught science and computers in village schools in Upper Mustang and Dolpo — the same trans-Himalayan valleys El Yak travels through today. He has continued working on community-rooted education in those regions since, including at Crystal Mountain School in Dho Tarap in Upper Dolpo, and leads the Himalayan Institute for Contextual Sciences (HICS). After first meeting Mangal on an earthquake-relief volunteer team building a temporary learning centre in Dolakha in 2015, he returned to Nepal in 2020 wanting to build slower, deeper mountain journeys alongside his education work. Together they revived El Yak Adventures, and during #ghtonwheels in 2022 Pawan helped plan the high-route logistics and held the satellite emergency line for all 88 days Mangal was on the trail.