Before Everest, There Was Annapurna: The First 8,000-Metre Summit Cost Two Climbers Nearly Every Finger and Toe
On 3 June 1950, two Frenchmen became the first humans to stand on an 8,000-metre summit — three years before Everest. The descent nearly killed them both.
Three years before Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stood on Everest, two Frenchmen became the first humans ever to reach the top of an 8,000-metre mountain — and nobody was sure it was even possible. On 3 June 1950, at two in the afternoon, Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal stood on the 8,091-metre summit of Annapurna I. Getting down nearly killed them both, and by the time it was over, Herzog had lost every finger and every toe.
Key facts
- Annapurna I (8,091m) was the first 8,000-metre peak ever climbed — by Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal, 3 June 1950, without supplemental oxygen.
- It happened three years before Everest's first ascent in 1953, when nobody knew for certain a human body could survive that altitude.
- The expedition had spent weeks scouting the wrong mountain — Dhaulagiri — before switching to Annapurna with the monsoon closing in.
- Field doctor Jacques Oudot amputated Herzog's fingers and toes, and Lachenal's toes, without anaesthesia, over the following weeks.
- Herzog's book about the climb has sold more than 11 million copies — still the best-selling mountaineering book ever written.
Annapurna wasn't even the plan. The 1950 French expedition — among the first Westerners ever permitted into this part of Nepal — set out for Dhaulagiri, at the time thought to be the more climbable of the two 8,000-metre giants flanking the Kali Gandaki valley. They spent from mid-April to mid-May scouting its approaches from Tukuche and found nothing workable. With the monsoon only weeks away and no reliable map, the team pivoted to Annapurna instead — a mountain they had barely seen up close and had no established route on. They found one, climbed it, and reached the summit with almost no margin left before the weather turned.
The timeline below shows how fast it all happened once they committed — and how fast it fell apart on the way back down.
The team first sights Dhaulagiri and begins scouting it — the original objective.
Dhaulagiri's approaches prove unclimbable in the time left. The team commits to Annapurna instead.
Herzog and Lachenal reach 8,091m — the first humans ever above 8,000 metres.
Herzog loses his gloves, both men are snowblind and frostbitten, a night is spent trapped in a crevasse, then an avalanche sweeps the group 150 metres down the mountain.
Dr Jacques Oudot removes Herzog's fingers and toes, and Lachenal's toes, in the field — without anaesthesia.
Herzog dropped his gloves during the descent and never got them back. By the time expedition doctor Jacques Oudot reached him at Camp II, gangrene had already set into his hands. Louis Lachenal lost his toes but kept his hands, and went on climbing for another five years before dying in a crevasse fall near Chamonix in 1955.
What makes 1950 remarkable isn't just that two men survived — it's that Annapurna proved the entire category of climbing was possible at all. Until that afternoon, doctors and physiologists genuinely debated whether the human body could function, let alone climb, above 8,000 metres without dying of oxygen starvation. Annapurna answered the question three years before Everest got the chance to.
| Peak | Height | First ascent |
|---|---|---|
| Annapurna I | 8,091m | 1950 |
| Everest | 8,849m | 1953 |
| Nanga Parbat | 8,126m | 1953 |
| K2 | 8,611m | 1954 |
| Kangchenjunga | 8,586m | 1955 |
What this means if you're standing at Annapurna Base Camp
What this means for you
You don't need an ice axe or an oxygen mask to stand in the same amphitheatre Herzog and Lachenal fought their way out of. The Annapurna Base Camp trek walks straight into the same sanctuary beneath the summit — a natural bowl ringed by Annapurna I, Machapuchare and Hiunchuli — on foot, over about nine days, with lodges, hot food and a trail the 1950 team never had. It's one of the very few places on Earth where an ordinary hiker can stand within sight of an 8,000-metre summit without technical climbing at all. For a longer, wider loop around the whole massif, the Annapurna Circuit crosses the Thorong La at 5,416m and traces the dry Kali Gandaki valley the French team marched up on their approach.
Seventy-six years on, Annapurna is still considered one of the most dangerous 8,000-metre peaks to climb — its fatality rate among summiteers remains among the highest of the fourteen. But the trek to its base camp is a different proposition entirely: a well-trodden, guided route that puts you closer to a genuine mountaineering legend than almost anywhere else in the Himalaya.
Source: ExplorersWeb
Cover photo: Dmitry A. Mottl via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0).
来源： ExplorersWeb
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