Mount Wilhelm

Where is Mount Wilhelm?

Mount Wilhelm is part of the Bismarck Range.

You will find it in: Papua New Guinea.

Summit: 5.800° S, 145.033° E

The story behind it

The summit is the meeting point of three provinces, Chimbu, Jiwaka and Madang, so one footprint can stand in all three at once. In the Kuman language spoken around the mountain it is called Enduwa Kombuglu, or Kombugl'o Dimbin; the German name came in 1888, when the journalist Hugo Zöller named the peaks of the range after Otto von Bismarck and his children. Most walkers start at the village of Keglsugl, where the road from Kundiawa ends, and climb past the twin lakes Piunde and Aunde, which sit in a rocky basin between roughly 3400 and 3 900 metres. On the last night, climbers leave in the dark so they can reach the top around sunrise. Daytime temperatures high on the mountain stay between about 0 and 10 degrees, and at night the puddles freeze. When the patrol officer Leigh Vial reached the top on 15 August 1938 with two Papua New Guinean companions, he was surprised to find snow so close to the equator. With a prominence of 2 969 metres, Mount Wilhelm rises further above its surroundings than almost any other peak on the planet.

Find it on the globe

Mount Wilhelm 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.