Mountain · Pakistan, China
Broad Peak
Broad Peak is 8 051 metres high, and its plain English name comes from its shape — the summit is a ridge, not a point. It runs for over a kilometre and a half.
Picture credit: Kogo (CC BY-SA 3.0) · Anne Dirkse (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Zacharie Grossen (CC BY-SA 4.0) · Wikimedia Commons
Where is Broad Peak?
Broad Peak is part of the Baltoro Karakoram.
You will find it in: Pakistan, China.
Summit: 35.811° N, 76.568° E
The story behind it
Broad Peak means, simply, wide peak. Martin Conway chose the name in 1892 because the mountain reminded him of the Breithorn in the Alps, whose German name means exactly the same thing. The people who live below it, who speak Balti, call it Falchan Kangri. Four Austrians climbed it for the first time on 9 June 1957, and they did it in a way that was almost unheard of then: no bottled oxygen, no high-altitude porters and nobody waiting in the base camp to help — just the four of them, carrying everything. One of them was Hermann Buhl, who had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat four years earlier, and he remains the only person to have been first on top of two eight-thousanders. Eighteen days after this summit he died on the neighbouring mountain Chogolisa, when a cornice of snow broke under him in a storm.
Find it on the globe
Broad Peak 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
Why is it called Broad Peak?
Because the top is wide instead of pointed — the summit ridge runs for more than one and a half kilometres. Martin Conway named it in 1892 after the Breithorn in the Alps, which means the same thing in German.
Where is Broad Peak?
Who was Hermann Buhl?
An Austrian climber who was first on top of two eight-thousanders — Nanga Parbat in 1953, alone, and Broad Peak in 1957 with three friends. Nobody else has done that. He died a few weeks after Broad Peak on a mountain nearby.
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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