Mountain · Nepal
Annapurna I
Annapurna I is 8 091 metres high and was the first mountain over 8 000 metres that anyone ever climbed — three years before Mount Everest. Its name means full of food.
Picture credit: Wolfgang Beyer (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Bijay Chaurasia (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Annapurna I?
Annapurna I is part of the Annapurna Himal, Himalayas.
You will find it in: Nepal.
Summit: 28.596° N, 83.820° E
The story behind it
The name comes from Sanskrit and belongs to a Hindu goddess of food, who is said to live on the mountain. On 3 June 1950 the Frenchmen Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal reached the summit without bottled oxygen — the first people ever to stand on top of an eight-thousander. The way down almost killed them. Herzog dropped his gloves and watched them slide away, both men were badly frostbitten, and by the time they were carried out of the mountains they had lost most of their fingers and toes. Herzog's book about it sold millions of copies and made the Annapurna famous everywhere. It is also counted as the most dangerous of the big eight-thousanders: far fewer people climb it than Everest, and its enormous south face is one of the hardest walls in the world.
Find it on the globe
Annapurna I is there as a small peak with its own shape — a horn, a ridge, a volcano — standing on the surface. From far away the planet is only a blue ball; detail arrives as you zoom in, and this one appears once you are close enough. Open it on the globe.
It sits at its real coordinates, not near them — the same numbers listed in the facts above. Switch off the layer for this kind of place and it disappears again; the buttons for that are down the right-hand edge.
Questions children ask
Which eight-thousander was climbed first?
Annapurna I, on 3 June 1950. Everest followed three years later, in 1953, and the last of the fourteen, Shishapangma, only in 1964.
Where is Annapurna?
In central Nepal, entirely inside the country, in a chain of peaks called the Annapurna Himal. A famous walking trail loops right around the whole massif.
What happened to the first climbers?
They got down alive, but barely. Herzog lost his gloves high on the mountain and both men were badly frostbitten on the descent, losing most of their fingers and toes before they reached safety.
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page was checked against public reference sources before publication. Where sources genuinely disagree, the text says so.
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