Nanda Devi

A 7,816-metre peak in the Indian state of Uttarakhand, the second-highest mountain entirely within India and the highest until Sikkim joined the union in 1975. The name in Sanskrit means "bliss-giving goddess." Nanda Devi is the patron deity of the surrounding Garhwal region, and the mountain is sacred. It sits at the centre of a sanctuary — a ring of peaks over 6,000 metres surrounding an inner basin that, until 1934, no human had entered.

The first attempted access to the sanctuary, by Eric Shipton and Bill Tilman in 1934, took two years of reconnaissance to find a route through the only gorge that breaches the encircling ridge. The first ascent of the mountain itself was made in 1936 by Tilman and Noel Odell — a small Anglo-American expedition that climbed the South Ridge in alpine style, without supplemental oxygen, with a budget that Tilman later described as inadequate. The expedition reached the highest point yet attained by humans and held the altitude record until the French Annapurna climb in 1950.

The mountain has been closed to climbing since 1983. The reasons are partly ecological — the inner sanctuary is a unique ecosystem that suffered measurable damage from the climbing era — and partly religious. The Indian government has restricted access. Periodic discussions about reopening the mountain have not resulted in policy change. The most recent confirmed summits date to the early 1980s.

Nanda Devi sits in the climbing canon as a mountain that is both completely documented and almost entirely inaccessible. Photographs exist. The route is described in detail in Tilman's writing. The summit register is sealed. For Indian mountaineers, the closure preserves something. For climbers from elsewhere, the mountain is a lesson in what a sanctuary actually means.