Nanga Parbat

Nanga Parbat, known locally as Diamer, is the ninth-highest mountain on Earth with its summit at above sea level. Lying immediately southeast of the northernmost bend of the Indus River in the Gilgit-Baltistan region of Pakistan-administered Kashmir, Nanga Parbat is the westernmost major peak of the Himalayas, and thus in the traditional view of the Himalayas as bounded by the Indus and Yarlung Tsangpo/Brahmaputra rivers, it is the western anchor of the entire mountain range.
Nanga Parbat is one of the 14 eight-thousanders. It rises far above its surrounding terrain and has the second-highest prominence among the 100 tallest mountains on Earth only behind Mount Everest. Nanga Parbat is well-known for being an extremely difficult climb, and has earned the nickname Killer Mountain for its high number of climber fatalities and pushing climbers to their limits. According to Guinness World Records, Nanga Parbat is the fastest growing mountain in the world, growing taller at a rate of 7 mm per year.

Etymology

The name Nanga Parbat is derived from the Sanskrit words nagna and parvata, which, when combined, translate to "Naked Mountain". The name refers to the south face, which is usually snowless. The mountain is known locally by its Shina name Diamer or Deo Mir, from Sanskrit dēvamēru, meaning "mountain of the gods".

Location

Nanga Parbat forms the western anchor of the Himalayan Range and is the westernmost eight-thousander. It lies just south of the Indus River in the Diamer District of Gilgit–Baltistan in Pakistani-administered Kashmir. In some places, the river flows more than below the high-point of the massif. To the north is the western end of the Karakoram range.

Notable features

Nanga Parbat has tremendous vertical relief over local terrain in all directions.
To the south, Nanga Parbat has what is often referred to as the highest mountain face in the world: the Rupal Face rises above its base. To the north, the complex, somewhat more gently sloped Rakhiot Flank rises from the Indus River valley to the summit in just, one of the ten greatest elevation gains in such a short distance on Earth.
Nanga Parbat is one of only two peaks on Earth that rank in the top twenty of both the highest mountains in the world, and the most prominent peaks in the world, ranking ninth and fourteenth respectively. The other is Mount Everest, which ranks first on both lists. Nanga Parbat is also the second most prominent peak of the Himalayas, after Mount Everest. The key col for Nanga Parbat is Zoji La in Kashmir Valley, which connects it to higher peaks in the remaining Himalaya-Karakoram range.
On the Tibetan Plateau, Nanga Parbat is the westernmost peak of the Himalayas, whereas Namcha Barwa marks the east end.

Layout of the mountain

The core of Nanga Parbat is a long ridge trending southwest-to-northeast. The ridge is composed of an enormous bulk of ice and rock. It has three primary faces: the Diamir, Rakhiot, and Rupal. The southwestern portion of this main ridge is known as the Mazeno Ridge, and has a number of subsidiary peaks. In the other direction, the main ridge arcs northeast at Rakhiot Peak. The south/southeast side of the mountain is dominated by the Rupal Face. The north/northwest side of the mountain, leading to the Indus, is more complex. It is split into the Diamir face and the Rakhiot face by a long ridge. There are a number of subsidiary summits, including North Peak some north of the main summit. Near the base of the Rupal Face is a glacial lake called Latbo, above a seasonal shepherds' village of the same name.

Climbing history

Early attempts

As a result of its accessibility, attempts to reach the summit of Nanga Parbat began very soon after it was discovered by Europeans. In 1895, Albert F. Mummery led an expedition to the peak, accompanied by Geoffrey Hastings, and reached almost 6,100 m on the Diamir Face, but Mummery and two Gurkha companions later died reconnoitering the Rakhiot Face.
In the 1930s, Nanga Parbat became the focus of German interest in the Himalayas. The German mountaineers were unable to attempt Mount Everest, since only the British had access to Tibet. Initially German efforts focused on Kangchenjunga, to which Paul Bauer led two expeditions in 1930 and 1931, but with its long ridges and steep faces, Kangchenjunga was more difficult than Everest and neither expedition made much progress. K2 was known to be harder still, and its remoteness meant that even reaching its base would be a major undertaking. Nanga Parbat was therefore the highest mountain accessible to Germans and was also deemed reasonably possible by climbers at the time.
The first German expedition to Nanga Parbat was led by Willy Merkl in 1932. It is sometimes referred to as a German-American expedition, as the eight climbers included Rand Herron, an American, and Fritz Wiessner, who would become an American citizen the following year. While the team were all strong climbers, none had Himalayan experience, and poor planning, coupled with bad weather, prevented the team from progressing far beyond the Rakhiot Peak northeast of the Nanga Parbat summit, reached by and Herbert Kunigk, but they did establish the feasibility of a route via Rakhiot Peak and the main ridge.
Merkl led another expedition in 1934, which was better prepared and financed with full support from the new Nazi government. Early in the expedition Alfred Drexel died, likely due to high altitude pulmonary edema. The Tyrolean climbers, Peter Aschenbrenner and Erwin Schneider, reached an estimated height of on July 6, but were forced to return because of worsening weather. On July 7, they and 14 others were trapped by a storm at. During the desperate retreat that followed, three famous German mountaineers,, and Merkl himself, as well as six Sherpas, died of exhaustion, exposure, and altitude sickness, and several others suffered severe frostbite. The last survivor to reach safety, Ang Tsering, did so having spent seven days battling through the storm. It has been said that the disaster, "for sheer protracted agony, has no parallel in climbing annals."
In 1937, Karl Wien led another expedition to the mountain, following the same route as Merkl's expeditions had done. Progress was made, but more slowly than before due to heavy snowfall. About 14 June, seven Germans and nine Sherpas, almost the entire team, were at Camp IV below Rakhiot Peak when it was overrun by an avalanche. All sixteen men died. The search team found that the tents had been buried by ice and snow rather than swept away. One of the victim's diaries read "our situation here is not quite safe from avalanches".
The Germans returned in 1938 led by Paul Bauer, but the expedition was plagued by bad weather, and Bauer, mindful of the previous disasters, ordered the party down before the Silver Saddle, halfway between Rakhiot Peak and Nanga Parbat summit, was reached.

Aufschnaiter expedition

, an expert mountaineer, was a member of the SS Alpine unit. The unit practiced on the Eiger in Switzerland in 1938. When the group returned to Germany, Adolf Hitler met with them.
In May 1939, Harrer was selected by the German Himalayan Foundation to take part in a new expedition to Nanga Parbat, under the leadership of Peter Aufschnaiter. Their goal was to scout new ways to ascend the north-western face. They explored the Diamir Face with the aim of finding an easier route. They concluded that the face was a viable route, but World War II intervened and the four men were interned by the British in Dehradun, India. Harrer's and Aufschnaiter's escape and subsequent wanderings across the Tibetan Plateau became the subject of Harrer's book Seven Years in Tibet. Some evidence of this expedition is kept in the National Archives of Washington, D.C.

First ascent

Nanga Parbat was first climbed, via the Rakhiot Flank, on July 3, 1953, by Austrian climber Hermann Buhl on the German–Austrian Nanga Parbat expedition, a member of a German-Austrian team. The expedition was organized by the half-brother of Willy Merkl, Karl Herrligkoffer from Munich, while the expedition leader was Peter Aschenbrenner from Kufstein, who had participated in the 1932 and 1934 attempts. At the time of this expedition, 31 people had already died on the mountain.
The final push for the summit was dramatic: Buhl continued alone for the final, after his companions had turned back. Under the influence of the drug pervitin, padutin, and tea from coca leaves, he reached the summit dangerously late, at 7:00 p.m., the climbing harder and more time-consuming than he had anticipated. His descent was slowed when he lost a crampon. Caught by darkness, he was forced to bivouac standing upright on a narrow ledge, holding a small handhold with one hand. Exhausted, he dozed occasionally but managed to maintain his balance. He finally reached his high camp at 7:00 p.m. the next day, 40 hours after setting out. The ascent was made without oxygen, and Buhl is the only man to have made the first ascent of an peak alone.
The 1953 documentary film Nanga Parbat 1953 was filmed and directed by Hans Ertl, who participated in the expedition. Buhl's climb was also later dramatized by Canadian film director Donald Shebib in the 1986 film The Climb.

Subsequent attempts and ascents

The second ascent of Nanga Parbat was via the Diamir Face, in 1962, by Germans Toni Kinshofer, Siegfried Löw, and A. Mannhardt. This route has become the "standard route" on the mountain. The Kinshofer route does not ascend the middle of the Diamir Face, which is threatened by avalanches from large hanging glaciers. Instead it climbs a buttress on the left side of the Diamir Face. In 1970, brothers Günther and Reinhold Messner made the third ascent of the mountain and the first ascent of the Rupal Face. They were unable to descend by their original route, and instead descended by the Diamir Face, making the first traverse of the mountain. Günther was killed in an avalanche on the Diamir Face, where his remains were found in 2005.
In 1971, Slovak mountaineers Ivan Fiala and Michal Orolin summited Nanga Parbat via Buhl's 1953 route while other expedition members climbed the southeast peak above the Silbersattel and the foresummit above the Bazhin Gap. In 1976 a team of four made the sixth summit via a new route on the Rupal Face, then named the Schell route after the Austrian team leader. The line had been plotted by Karl Herrligkoffer on a previous unsuccessful attempt. In 1978, Reinhold Messner returned to the Diamir Face and achieved the first completely solo ascent of an peak.
In 1984, the French climber Lilliane Barrard became the first woman to climb Nanga Parbat, along with her husband Maurice Barrard. In 1985, Jerzy Kukuczka, Zygmunt Heinrich, Slawomir Lobodzinski, and Carlos Carsolio climbed up the Southeast Pillar on the right-hand side of the Rupal Face, reaching the summit July 13. It was Kukuczka's ninth summit. Also in 1985, a Polish women's team climbed the peak via the 1962 German Diamir Face route. Wanda Rutkiewicz, Krystyna Palmowska, and Anna Czerwinska reached the summit on July 15.
"Modern" superalpinism was brought to Nanga Parbat in 1988 with an unsuccessful attempt or two on the Rupal Face by Barry Blanchard, Mark Twight, Ward Robinson, and Kevin Doyle. 2005 saw a resurgence of lightweight, alpine-style attempts on the Rupal Face.

In August 2005, Pakistani military helicopters rescued Slovenian mountaineer Tomaž Humar, who was stuck under a narrow ice ledge at for six days. It is believed to be one of the few successful rescues carried out at such high altitude.
In September 2005, Vince Anderson and Steve House did an extremely lightweight, fast ascent of a new, direct route on the face, earning high praise from the climbing community.
On July 17 or 18, 2006, José Antonio Delgado from Venezuela died a few days after reaching the summit, where he was caught by bad weather for six days and was unable to make his way down. He is the only Venezuelan climber, and one of few Latin Americans, to have reached the summit of five eight-thousanders. Part of the expedition and the rescue efforts at base camp were captured on video, as Delgado was the subject of a pilot for a mountaineering television series. Explorart Films, the production company, later developed the project into a feature documentary film called Beyond the Summit, which was scheduled to be released in South America in January 2008.
On July 15, 2008, Italian alpinist Karl Unterkircher fell into a crevasse during an attempt to open a new route to the top with Walter Nones and Simon Kehrer. Unterkircher died, but Kehrer and Nones were rescued by the Pakistani Army.
On July 12, 2009, after reaching the summit, South Korean climber Go Mi-Young fell off a cliff on the descent in bad weather in her race to be the first woman to climb all 14 eight-thousanders.
On July 15, 2012, Scottish mountaineers Sandy Allan and Rick Allen made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat via the Mazeno Ridge. They reached the base camp on the Diamir flank of the mountain after an 18 day period of continuous climbing. In April 2013 were awarded the Piolet d'Or for their achievement.
On July 10, 2024, Vadim Druelle set a record speed ascent of Nanga Parbat from base camp to summit in 15 hours and 18 minutes without the use of supplemental oxygen.