Nanda Devi

Nanda Devi rises to 7,817 metres in the Garhwal Himalaya of Uttarakhand: the highest summit standing wholly inside India, and second in the country only to Kangchenjunga, which sits on the border with Nepal. The figure matters less than the shape of the ground around it. The mountain is a twin-summited massif, a ridge about two kilometres long running east to west, with the higher western top and a lower eastern one known locally as Sunanda Devi. On its south-western side it climbs more than 3,300 metres from the Dakshini Nanda Devi Glacier in barely four kilometres of horizontal distance, a profile as steep as that of K2. Around it runs an almost unbroken ring of peaks, twelve of them above 6,400 metres, enclosing the basin known as the Nanda Devi Sanctuary, whose one natural outlet is the narrow, deep Rishi Gorge draining west.

The name is usually rendered as "Bliss-Giving Goddess", and the peak is revered as the patron deity of the Garhwal and Kumaon hills. Until surveys in 1808 showed Dhaulagiri to be taller, Nanda Devi was believed to be the highest mountain on Earth. Simply reaching its foot took half a century: W. W. Graham was turned back in the Rishi valley in 1883, Hugh Ruttledge failed three times in the early 1930s, and only in 1934 did Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman, with the Sherpas Angtharkay, Pasang and Kusang, find a line through the gorge into the Sanctuary. Two years later a small British-American expedition climbed the south ridge, and on 29 August 1936 Tilman and Noel Odell reached the top. No higher summit would be climbed until Annapurna in 1950.

The later history is stranger. Between 1965 and 1968 the CIA, working with India's Intelligence Bureau, tried to place a plutonium-powered listening device on the summit to pick up telemetry from Chinese missile tests; storms forced the team down, and the device they left high on the mountain was never found again. In 1976 Nanda Devi Unsoeld, daughter of the American climber Willi Unsoeld and named after the peak, died on an expedition that opened a new route up the north-west buttress. In 1983 the Sanctuary was set aside to let its fragile ecosystem recover, and the surrounding Nanda Devi National Park became a UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1988; the listed property now also includes the Valley of Flowers. From the hill towns of Kausani and Ranikhet to the south, the two summits stand clear above the foothills.

Getting there

Nanda Devi lies in Chamoli district, about 45 km in a straight line east of Joshimath, the hill town on the road to Badrinath; the traditional approach to the national park starts at the village of Lata, about 25 km upstream of Joshimath. On the Kumaon side, Pithoragarh is about 90 km away. The nearest airport is Pantnagar (PGH), about 156 km to the south; Jolly Grant Airport (DED) at Dehradun, about 175 km to the south-west, is the usual gateway to Garhwal by road via Rishikesh.