Annapurna I, the Mountain Above Base Camp

If you walk to Annapurna Base Camp you spend a night directly beneath the tenth-highest mountain on earth, and most people leave without knowing what they slept under. This is the mountain's story — worth an hour before you go, because the view means more when you know what you are looking at.

A goddess of food, and a wall of ice

The name is Sanskrit: anna, food or grain, and purna, filled. Annapurna is the Hindu goddess of nourishment and harvests, and the massif takes her name because its snows feed the rivers that irrigate the land below.

It is a strikingly gentle name for a mountain with the reputation this one has.

The massif, not the peak

"Annapurna" on a map covers a 55 km ridge with six major summits, which is why trekkers and climbers can both say they went to Annapurna and mean entirely different places.

Peak	Altitude
Annapurna I	8,091 m
Annapurna II	7,937 m
Annapurna III	7,555 m
Annapurna IV	7,525 m
Gangapurna	7,455 m
Annapurna South	7,219 m

Annapurna I is the only 8,000 m summit among them, and the one standing at the head of the Sanctuary.

1950: the first eight-thousander, and a catastrophic descent

The French expedition of 1950 is among the most consequential events in mountaineering, and the part everyone repeats — that Herzog and Lachenal summited on 3 June 1950, three years before Everest — is the least interesting part of it.

What is remarkable is how little they knew. The team, led by Maurice Herzog with Louis Lachenal, Lionel Terray, Gaston Rébuffat and the doctor Jacques Oudot, arrived with maps that were simply wrong. They spent weeks reconnoitring Dhaulagiri first, decided its approaches were beyond them, and turned to Annapurna with the monsoon closing in. They found a route and climbed the mountain inside a few weeks, without supplementary oxygen, on a peak nobody had surveyed properly.

The descent is where it became a survival story. Herzog lost his gloves near the summit. Both men were badly frostbitten; caught by a storm, the party spent a night in a crevasse, and Terray and Rébuffat were snow-blind by morning. Oudot performed amputations on the walk out — on Herzog's fingers and toes, and Lachenal's toes — without the facilities any of that should have required.

Herzog's account, Annapurna, became one of the best-selling mountaineering books ever written and shaped how a generation thought about the Himalaya. Later accounts, including Lachenal's own less varnished diary, complicated the heroic version considerably. Both are worth reading.

1970: the south face, and the birth of modern Himalayan climbing

Twenty years later the same mountain produced the other landmark in its history, and it happened on the wall you look at from Base Camp.

The south face is roughly 3,000 m of steep, technical ground — not a snow slope but a mountain face in the alpine sense. Until 1970 nobody had attempted anything like it at that altitude. A British expedition led by Chris Bonington did, and on 27 May 1970 Don Whillans and Dougal Haston reached the summit by it.

It is generally taken as the moment Himalayan climbing stopped being about finding the easiest line to the top and started being about the difficulty of the route itself. Ian Clough was killed by a collapsing serac during the descent.

The face has kept its status. Ueli Steck soloed a line on it in October 2013 and was awarded a Piolet d'Or for the ascent.

Why it is the deadliest of the fourteen

Annapurna I has long carried the worst ratio of deaths to successful ascents of the fourteen 8,000 m peaks. The figure has improved as the number of summits has grown, but it remains the statistic the mountain is known for.

The reason is not that the climbing is harder than K2 or Nanga Parbat. It is the objective hazard — the danger that exists whether or not you climb well.

• The standard north-side route runs beneath hanging seracs that collapse without warning or weather.
• The south face is swept by avalanche on a scale that skill does not mitigate.
• The massif sits far south in the range, catching more snowfall than peaks further north, which loads those slopes faster.

On many mountains the dangerous moments are ones you choose. On Annapurna a great deal of the risk is simply the time spent underneath things that fall. Anatoli Boukreev, one of the strongest high-altitude climbers of his generation, was killed by an avalanche on the south face on 25 December 1997 — there is a memorial to him on the moraine above Base Camp, and most trekkers walk past without noticing it.

How many days does it take to climb Annapurna?

For the mountain itself, rather than the trek: an expedition runs roughly 45 to 60 days from arrival in Kathmandu to leaving it.

Phase	Rough duration
Travel, permits, approach to base camp	7–10 days
Establishing camps and acclimatisation rotations	25–35 days
Summit push from base camp and return	5–8 days
Descent, clear-up and travel home	5–7 days

Base camp for the normal route sits at around 4,200 m on the north side, approached from the Marsyangdi valley — the opposite side of the massif from the Sanctuary. Spring, April into May, is the main season.

The acclimatisation block dominates, and it is mostly waiting. The large majority of that time is spent sitting out weather and moving up and down between camps, not climbing towards the summit.

This is expedition mountaineering, not trekking or trekking-peak climbing. If a Himalayan summit is what you want, the realistic route in is a 6,000 m trekking peak first — Island Peak or Mera Peak — and several years of progression after that.

What you can see, and from where

You do not need to climb anything to see this mountain properly.

From Annapurna Base Camp at 4,130 m the summit stands almost directly above you, with the south face — the 1970 wall — filling the view. It is one of very few places where a walker on an ordinary trail stands at the foot of an 8,000 m face.

By contrast, Everest cannot be seen from Everest Base Camp at all. Annapurna gives you the mountain itself, which is why the Sanctuary is worth the week.

Getting there is a seven-day walk: the route is laid out in the Annapurna Base Camp route, mapped, and the trip itself is our seven-day Annapurna Base Camp trek. If you would rather see the massif from the north and cross a 5,416 m pass, that is the Circuit.