Ulugh Muztagh

A 6,973-metre peak in the central Kunlun range of Tibet, in one of the most remote and least-visited mountain regions on Earth. Ulugh Muztagh — "great ice mountain" in Uyghur — sits in the high plateau of central Asia, north of the Tibetan plateau and south of the Taklamakan Desert. The mountain receives perhaps a handful of attempted ascents per decade. The combination of altitude, the lack of any developed infrastructure for hundreds of kilometres in any direction, and the political restrictions on the region have kept the peak among the least-climbed major mountains in the world.

The first ascent came in 1985 by a joint Chinese-American expedition. The summit was reached on October 12, 1985, after an approach that required nearly two months from the nearest accessible road. The climb itself involved sustained glacier travel and a long summit day from a high camp at 6,400 metres. The expedition was, for its era, one of the most logistically demanding mountaineering efforts in Asia, comparable in scope to the early Himalayan expeditions of the 1930s.

The technical difficulty of the climb is moderate — the peak is geologically older and less architecturally sharp than the Himalayan giants, and the standard route does not require sustained technical climbing. What separates Ulugh Muztagh from peaks of comparable altitude is access. The Kunlun range as a whole receives perhaps a few dozen mountaineering expeditions per year, distributed across hundreds of peaks, and the western portion of the range — where Ulugh Muztagh sits — is among the least travelled.

The mountain is climbed perhaps once or twice per decade. The peak is included in the Atlas as the representative of a distinct geographic and political category — the mountains of central Asia that sit beyond the Himalayan-Karakoram tradition, beyond the Tien Shan and the Pamirs, in regions that climbing tourism has not penetrated. For climbers who have summited the more accessible giants, Ulugh Muztagh represents a different kind of objective: the mountain that asks for the approach itself as part of the climb.