[1] Guha mentions that Pathak was born in 1950 in the village of Gangolihaat in eastern Kumaon (present-day Pithoragarh district, Uttarakhand).

Bhatt and Pathak co-wrote a three-volume book on the life and times of the nineteenth-century Kumaoni explorer Pundit Nain Singh in 2006.

[1] He has been a Fellow of the Nehru Memorial Museum and Library, Delhi, and of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla.

[2] From 2015 till 2017, Pathak was involved as an expert with the India-China Institute of The New School, USA, in its Sacred Himalaya Initiative.

[7][8][9] In 2007, Pathak took upon a three-year project to study the Himalayan people along with Magsaysay Award winner, Chandi Prasad Bhatt, traversing the Himalayas, from Leh to Arunachal Pradesh.

[14] This organisation also has a large online repository of colonial-era and contemporary literature of various kinds on the Himalayas, Tibet, and the highlands of Inner Asia.