Trango Towers

A group of granite spires in the Karakoram, the highest of which — Great Trango Tower — reaches 6,286 metres. The Trango group is not a peak in the traditional Atlas sense. The summits are modest by Karakoram standards. What distinguishes the Trangos is the verticality. The east face of Great Trango Tower is the world's tallest continuous vertical drop — 1,340 metres of sheer granite, a single uninterrupted face from base to summit. Photographs of the wall fail to convey the scale. The wall is its own measurement.

The first ascent of Great Trango Tower came in 1977 by an American expedition. The Nameless Tower, the most distinctive of the group at 6,239 metres, was first climbed in 1976 by a British team led by Joe Brown. Both ascents were technical rock climbing at high altitude, comparable to Yosemite big-wall standards but at elevations where the climbing is fundamentally harder due to oxygen, cold, and weather.

In 1992, Norwegian climbers Hans Christian Doseth and Finn Daehli completed the first ascent of the Norwegian Buttress on the east face of Great Trango. Both died on the descent. The route was unrepeated for over twenty years. Modern speed-climbing on the Trangos has produced ascents that twenty years ago would have been considered impossible — the routes have not changed, but the climbing community's collective capacity has. The current speed record on Nameless Tower is hours where the first ascent took weeks.

What Trango represents in this Atlas is a different category of mountain. The peaks are not high. The walls are absolute. Climbers come here for granite, for verticality, for the particular discipline of rock climbing at altitude. The Trangos are climbed by perhaps a dozen serious teams per year. Most of them spend longer on a single route than Everest expeditions spend on the entire mountain.