Nanga Parbat

Where is Nanga Parbat?

Nanga Parbat is part of the Western Himalayas, Gilgit-Baltistan.

You will find it in: Pakistan.

Summit: 35.237° N, 74.589° E

The story behind it

On its southern side Nanga Parbat throws up the Rupal Face, a wall of rock and ice that climbs about 4 600 metres from the valley floor to the summit — often called the highest mountain face in the world. Climbing this mountain went badly for decades, and so many people died trying that it became known as the Killer Mountain. It was finally beaten on 3 July 1953 by the Austrian Hermann Buhl, who did something nobody has repeated: he made the last part of the climb alone, without bottled oxygen, set out at half past two in the morning and reached the top at about seven in the evening. Coming down in the dark he ran out of daylight near 8 000 metres and spent the night standing on a ledge the size of a doormat, with no tent and no sleeping bag. He got back to camp after forty-one hours, and he remains the only person ever to have made the first ascent of an eight-thousander alone.

Find it on the globe

Nanga Parbat 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.