41 Hours on Nanga Parbat

On 3 July 1953, Austrian climber Hermann Buhl became the first person to summit Nanga Parbat (8,126 m, 26,660 ft), the ninth highest mountain in the world. Many, including the greatest climber ever Reinhold Messner, consider this improbable ascent one of the greatest ever.

"At 5.30 p.m. I stood at last on the Silver Saddle and, looking down, saw two men standing near the Moor's Head. The sight of them gave me fresh impetus and as though buoyed up a new by some secret force I went ahead with greater ease."

As Buhl staggered and swayed down the last few feet of the ridge he fell into the arms of Hans Ertl who had gone up to meet him. He looked aged by twenty years. His face, desiccated and deeply lined, bore the imprint of intolerable suffering.

From his lips fell the words: "Yesterday was the finest day of my life." [1, pg 209]

[1] Herrligkoffer, Karl M., Nanga Parbat. Elek Books, 1954.

Setting Up New Nanga Parbat Website

Of all the mountains in this world, Nanga Parbat is my favorite. At 8126 m (26660 ft), it is the ninth highest, and from just a geological point of view, it is extremely interesting. Immense and complicated, Nanga Parbat towers over its surroundings and boasts one of the greatest rock and ice faces in the world. From the Fairy Meadows base camp to the summit, it is more than a kilometer longer than base camp to summit on Everest.

In the Urdu language Nanga Parbat means Naked Mountain, but by the 1930s it had earned the reputation of the Killer Mountain. Its climbing history has been filled with legendary climbs by legendary climbers, legendary tragedies, and legendary controversies that continue to this day. Mummery, Merkl, Harrer, Buhl, and the Messner brothers are just a few of the many greats who have been associated with this formidable peak.

I'm currently in the process of setting up this website and have a long way to go. I hope, in the end, I'll be able to do this great peak proud. I would be happy to hear any suggestions or thoughts you may have.

E.R. Eddison Quote

In the first chapter of Mistress of Mistresses, by E.R. Eddison, the narrator compares his now deceased compatriot, Lessingham, to Nanga Parbat in a descriptive passage:

"I remember, years later, his describing to me the effect of the sudden view you get of Nanga Parbat from one of those Kashmir valleys; you have been riding for hours among quiet richly wooded scenery, winding up along the side of some kind of gorge, with nothing very big to look at, just lush, leafy, pussy-cat country of steep hillsides and waterfalls; then suddenly you come round a corner where the view opens up the valley, and you are almost struck senseless by the blinding splendour of that vast face of ice-hung precipices and soaring ridges, sixteen thousand feet from top to toe, filling a whole quarter of the heavens at a distance of, I suppose, only a dozen miles. And now, whenever I call to mind my first sight of Lessingham in that little daleside church so many years ago, I think of Nanga Parbat." (MoM, 1967, p.2-3)