Introduction of above 8000+m Peaks

Everest: 8,848m
Mount Everest was known as Peak XV until 1856, when it was named for Sir George Everest, the surveyor general of India from 1830 to 1843. The measurements made by the Great Trigonometrical Survey in 1850. Most Nepali people refer to the mountain as Sagarmatha, meaning “Sky Mother.” Speakers of Tibetan languages, including the Sherpa people of northern Nepal, refer to the mountain as Chomolungma, Tibetan for “Mother Goddess of the Country.”

The height of Mount Everest was given as 29,002ft (8,842m) as the highest mountain in the world by Andrew Waugh, who had succeeded George Everest, Surveyor General of India. Later this height was increased to 29,028ft (8,848m), which is the currently accepted altitude. In 1999 a Boston Museum of Science GPS system attached to Bisop’s Ledge, the outcrop just below the summit, suggested a height of no more than 8,830m (28,970ft): just a few day later of the National Geographic Society announced that the correct height was actually 8,850m (29,035ft)

The mountain’s actual height, and the claim that Everest is the highest mountain in the world, has long been disputed. But scientific surveys completed in the early 1990s continued to support evidence that Everest is the highest mountain in the world. In fact, the mountain is rising a few millimeters each year due to geological forces. Global Positioning System (GPS) has been installed on Mount Everest for the purpose of detecting slight rates of geological uplift.

K2: 8,611m
K2, also Mount Godwin Austen, mountain peak in the Karakoram Range of the western Himalayas, straddling the border between China and Jammu and Kashmīr, a territory claimed by India and Pakistan. Pakistan currently controls the portion where K2 lies. K2, rising 8,611 m (28,251 ft), is the second tallest mountain in the world. In 1856 T. G. Montgomerie of the Survey of India measured the mountain and named it “K2” to denote it as one of 35 summits in the Karakoram Range. In 1861 the peak was unofficially renamed Mount Godwin Austen, after British soldier and topographer Henry Haversham Godwin Austen, the second European to visit the area. A later search for a local name for the peak revealed that there was nome. Latterly the Pakistan authorities have attempted to rename the peak using names ‘discovered’ among local peoples, but these have all failed. In Baltistan the name Chogori (which means Great Mountain) does appear to have been applied to the peak and probably have been accepted had not the peak been known as K2 for decades before Chogoricame to light. Eight expeditions to K2 were made between 1892 and 1954. On July 31, 1954, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli, two members of an Italian expedition led by Ardito Desio, made the first successful ascent to the mountain's summit.

Kanchenjunga: 8,586m
Kanchenjunga, Peak IX of the Indian Survey, is the most easterly of the 8,000m peaks, standing on the border between Nepal and Sikkim. There are a number of subsidiary summits, at least three over 8,000m: the south summit – occasionally called Kanchenjunga II – was given a unique designation (Peak VIII) by the Indian survey. The central (between the south and main tops) and west summits are both over 8,400m, the west (Yalung Kang) having been the specific object of several expeditions. Kangchenjunga’s name is something of mystery. One Sanskrit scholar claimed it derived from Kancan Jangha, golden thigh, though quite why this should have been is a mystery as there is no physical resemblance, or any obvious legend associated with the area. Most experts now agree a Tibetan origin, deriving from Kang-chen-dzo-nga which would be pronounced (more or less) as Kanchenjunga. One 19^th century explorer claimed the name was given to a local Sikkim god who rode a white lion and waved a banner, believing that the lion was the peak, the banner the clouds or snow plume at the summit. The name remains an enigma.

Lhotse: 8,516m
Lhotse was E1 of the Indian Survey, but appears to have had no local name either in Tibet or Nepal when Charles Howard-Bury’s Everest reconnaissance team advanced along the Kama Valley and the northern edge of the Kangshung Glacier in August 1921. In the absence of an alternative, Howard-Bury christened it Lho-tse, south peak in Tibetan as it laid to the south of Everest, separated from it by the South Col. Because of the name’s Tibetan derivation it has stuck.

Makalu: 8,463m
Makalu was Peak XIII of the Indian Survey, the survey suggesting, in 1884, that its name was Khamba Lung. This seems to have derived from the local area being called Khamba, through the valley to the north of the peal was called Kama Lung (The valley of the River Kama). The French has negotiated permission for an attempt on Makalu from Tibet as early as 1934 but the Tibetans had changed their minds before any significant planning was underway. Two teams, American and New Zealand were attempted to climb Makalu on the pre-monsoon on 1954, but both were retreated due to bad weather and physical troubles of climbing member.

Cho Oyu: 8,201m
The British Indian Survey did not at first assign Cho Oyu a peak number. Though it was eventually assigned T45 (later changed M1) it must have originally seemed a minor peak among the giants that spread across the Nepalese horizon from Makalu to Dhaulagiri. The name is now invariably to mean ‘Goddess of Turquise’, the peak glowing turquoise when seen from Tibet in the light of an afternoon sun. As goddess is chomo in Tibetan, and turquoise is yu, the construction of chomo yu to Cho Oyu seems conclusive. A lama at Namche Bazar told Herbert Tichy that the name meant ‘Mighty Head’ and Heinrich Harrer claimed that the real name was cho-i-u meaning ‘god’s head’. Harrer’s suggestion is interesting because many early books have the peak’s name as Cho Uyo which would be a good phonetic approximation of the three Tibetan syllables. Harrer’s name is also close to the alternative Tibetan translation of the name as ‘bald god’. In Tibetan legend Cho Oyu, the bald god, had his back turned to Chomolungma, the mother goddess, because she refused to marry him.

Dhaulagiri: 8,167m
Peak XLII of the Indian survey is named from the Sanskrit 'Dhavala Giri', meaning White Mountain. It is often, and correctly, said that travelers to the Himalaya, when asking the name of a prominent peak, were told it was Dhaulagiri. It seems that when needing a name quickly, the local people chose an obvious one: most Himalayan peaks are, after substantially white.

Manaslu: 8,164m
Manaslu – the accent is on the second syllable: Man-as-loo rather than mana-sloo- was Peak XXX of the Indian Survey and was at the first called Kutang I, a name derived from it being the highest peak in the local district of Kutang. However, as tang is Tibetan for a flat area the name could be from the virtually that summit plateau, a distinctive feature of the peak when received form the Larkya La, a high pass to the north which would have been crossed by Tibetan traders to reach the valley of the Dudh Khola. Khola. The present name is Sanskrit in origin, deriving from manasa meaning the sprit or soul: Manaslu is the mountain of the sprit. The villagers of Sama, at the north-eastern foot of the peak, refer to it as Kambung, the name of a local god who is believed to reside on the summit.

Nanga Parbat: 8,125m
Nanga Parbat is the most westerly of the 8,000m peaks standing in massive isolation about 125km north of the Kashmir capital of Srinigar. Though geographically close to the Karakoram peaks, it is actually the western bastion of the Great Himalaya, overlooking the Indus River which forms the range’s western border.

The mountain’s name derives from the Sanskrit Nanga Parva, ‘Naked Mountain’, probably from its isolation.

Annapurna I: 8,091m
In 1948 the formerly closed, secretive nation of Nepal opened its borders, firstly to a group of American ornithologists, then to a team of Swiss climbers who, under René Dittert, explored the north-east of the country. In 1949 the French Fédération Française de la Montagne began negotiations with the Nepalese government for permission to climb one of the great peaks that stood wholly within Nepal. Annapurna was Peak XXXIX of the Indian Survey, its name being a combination of two Sanskrit words whose literal meaning is “Filled with food”. However the mane also contains the root of another name for Durga, the Hindu Divine Mother, consort of Lord Shiva, and as Maurice Herzog was told during his expedition, is more correctly translated as “Goddess of the Heaven”, i.e., the Divine Mother Provider.

Gasherbrum I: 8,068m
The Gasherbrum I was K5 in the first Karakoram survey, but was named Hidden Peak by Conway during his 1892 expedition because it only came into view as he climbed the Upper Baltoro Glacier towards the west ridge of Golden Throne (Baltoro Kangri). However, before Conway named the peak it had already been referred to by it’s ‘correct’ name, the Alpine Journal of August 1888 nothing the name Gusher-Brum which, it reported, Col Godwin-Austen had been told mean ‘Sunset Peak’. Hidden Peak was the accepted name for the peak until very recent time – the account of the first ascent uses the name, as does Messner in his book on the second ascent. But with the trend away from the use of western names for Himalayan peaks Gasherbrum I is now preferred.

Broad Peak: 8,047m
Broad Peak was not assigned a peak number in the original Karakoram survey, being hidden from the surveyor’s view, and was named by Martin Conway during his expedition of 1892.

Catching sight of the massif that defined the eastern side of the valley of the Godwin Austen Glacier, filling the space between the Sella Pass and the Palchan La/Gasherbrum group, Conway noted ‘a fine breadth of mountain splendor …… a huge Breithorn, as it were, filling the space between K2 and the hidden Gasherbrum’.

Shisha Pangma: 8,046m
Peak XXIII of the Indian Survey was for many years known by the Sanskrit name Gosainthan which translates as Place of the Saint. The existence of a Sanskrit name for a peak which rises from the Tibetan plateau was, and is, something of a mystery, but is assumed to originate from the mountain’s proximity to Gosainkund, a holy lake of the Hindus which lies near to the border in Nepal. The Tibetan name for the peak is Shisha Pangma, meaning the mountain crest above the grassy plain, a very descriptive, if somewhat mundane, name.

Gasherbrum II: 8,035m
The Gasherbrum group is a series of peaks on a gigantic horseshoed edge which encloses the South Gasherbrum Glacier. On the eastern side of the glacier is Gasherbrum I, separated by the Gasherbrum La from the pyramidal peaks of Gasherbrum II and III.

In the original classification of the Karakoram peaks Gasherbrum I was K5, Gasherbrum II being K4. The name is from the Balti (a Tibetan dialect) rgasha brum, beautiful mountain (though Dyhrenfurth claimed that he was once told the name meant ‘shining wall’).