Masherbrum

A 7,821-metre peak in the Karakoram, originally designated K1 by the surveyor Thomas Montgomerie in 1856 — the first peak he sighted from the survey station on Mount Haramukh in Kashmir. K2 was sighted second. The K-series designations were intended as provisional; most were replaced by local names in subsequent decades. K2 retained the surveyor's notation. K1 became Masherbrum, from the Balti — the meaning of the name is contested between "musket-mountain" (referring to a similar shape) and "mother of all peaks."

The first ascent came in 1960, by an American-Pakistani expedition led by Nick Clinch. The summit team was George Bell, Willi Unsoeld, and the Pakistani officer Captain Jawed Akhtar. The route they climbed — the Southeast Face — is significantly more technical than the standard routes on most 8000ers despite the lower altitude. Sustained ice climbing on 50-degree slopes, mixed sections, an exposed summit ridge that has held wind and avalanche risk in equal measure across recorded attempts.

Masherbrum has been climbed substantially less than its 8000-metre neighbours. The technical demands of every known route are higher than the comparable 8000-metre routes, and the fatality rate has been correspondingly elevated when measured against the lower altitude. Several major attempts on the unclimbed Northeast Face — a 3,000-metre wall first attempted in the 1980s — have been turned back by weather and objective hazard.

What Masherbrum offers, for climbers who are not pursuing 8000-metre summits as a category, is one of the great alpine objectives in the Karakoram at a height that allows for harder technical climbing without the additional cost of extreme altitude. The mountain is climbed by climbers' climbers. The summit register holds names from a specific subset of the international climbing community.