Annapurna I

Interesting facts

When Nepal let the French attempt Annapurna in 1950, it was the first time in over a century that the country had permitted mountaineering.

The French first had to find the mountain: their 1920s maps proved badly wrong, and Annapurna lay hidden behind the Nilgiri range.

The 1950 expedition originally set out for neighbouring Dhaulagiri and switched to Annapurna only after judging that peak unclimbable.

Herzog and Lachenal paid for the summit with severe frostbite, and the expedition doctor had to amputate fingers and toes during the retreat.

Herzog's account of the climb, Annapurna, became a bestseller, and expedition member Marcel Ichac filmed the documentary Victoire sur l'Annapurna.

In 1950 it became the highest summit ever reached, although climbers on Everest had already gone higher, above 8,500 metres, without reaching the top.

In 1970 a British Army expedition beat Chris Bonington's south face team to the second ascent of the mountain by just a few days.

The Tethyan rock that forms the summit belongs to a band of ancient shelf sediments that runs unbroken for more than 2,000 km along the Himalaya.

Ueli Steck claimed a solo ascent of the south face in 2013 in just 28 hours from base camp and back, though doubts about the climb remain.

Why it is worth it

Annapurna I is the tenth-highest mountain on Earth, 8,091 metres of rock and ice in north-central Nepal, and in 1950 it became the first peak over 8,000 metres ever climbed. Its name comes from Sanskrit, anna, "food", and purna, "filled": Annapurna is the Hindu goddess of food and nourishment, said to dwell on the mountain, and the streams that run off the massif water the fields and pastures below. Its south face, a wall about 3,000 metres high, is counted among the hardest climbs in the world.

The summit is made of sea floor. The upper mountain is a thick stack of early Palaeozoic sedimentary rock, Ordovician limestone and dolomite of the Nilgiri Formation, laid down on the continental shelf of the ancient Tethys Ocean along the northern edge of India. When India drove into Asia, that shelf was folded and thrust high into the Himalaya; at Annapurna the layers tilt steeply northward as part of a great overturned fold. Around the peak lies the Annapurna Conservation Area, covering 7,629 square kilometres, the first and largest of its kind in Nepal, crossed by two of the best-known treks in the Himalaya, the Annapurna Circuit and the route into the Annapurna Sanctuary.

The first ascent belongs to a French expedition led by Maurice Herzog: on 3 June 1950 Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the summit by the north face, with a team that included Lionel Terray and Gaston Rébuffat, and no higher summit had then been stood on. In 1970 Don Whillans and Dougal Haston climbed the south face without supplementary oxygen, on a British expedition led by Chris Bonington; in 1978 Vera Komarkova and Irene Miller of an American women's expedition became the first women on top, and in February 1987 the Poles Jerzy Kukuczka and Artur Hajzer made the first winter ascent. For decades Annapurna had the highest ratio of deaths to ascents of any of the great eight-thousanders, and among those it claimed were Ian Clough, Alex MacIntyre and Anatoli Boukreev.

Getting there

Annapurna I lies about 39 km north of Pokhara, Nepal's second-largest city, on the shore of Phewa Lake about 200 km west of Kathmandu. Pokhara International Airport (PHH), opened in 2023, is about 48 km from the summit; it has largely replaced the old domestic airport, which still handles flights to Jomsom.

Annapurna I

Interesting facts

Why it is worth it

Getting there

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