Dhaulagiri is the seventh-highest mountain in the world at 8,167 metres, in north-central Nepal, and it is the highest peak located entirely within a single country. Between roughly 1808 and 1838 it was believed by European geographers to be the highest mountain on Earth — a title it held for thirty years before better surveying moved it down the list.
Thirty years as the highest mountain in the world
When the Survey of India began measuring Himalayan peaks from the plains in the early nineteenth century, Dhaulagiri's computed height came out above anything previously recorded, and from about 1808 it was accepted as the world's highest.
The displacement came in stages. Kangchenjunga's measurement overtook it around 1838, and Kangchenjunga in turn yielded to Peak XV — Everest — when the Great Trigonometrical Survey's calculations were announced in 1856.
None of these were casual estimates. Surveyors were working from baselines on the Indian plains, sighting peaks well over 100 km away, and correcting for atmospheric refraction and for the deflection of the plumb line caused by the mass of the mountains themselves — a problem the survey identified and had to solve mathematically. That Dhaulagiri's height was out by enough to cost it the title says more about the difficulty of the task than about carelessness.
Facing Annapurna across the deepest gorge on Earth
Dhaulagiri and Annapurna I stand about 34 km apart, and the Kali Gandaki river runs between them.
Measured from the riverbed to the summits on either side, the resulting trench is generally described as the deepest gorge in the world — the river at Tatopani sits around 1,200 metres above sea level, with two 8,000-metre peaks rising on either flank, giving a relief of roughly 7,000 metres across a corridor a few dozen kilometres wide. Whether it qualifies as the deepest depends on how you define a gorge's width, and the Yarlung Tsangpo canyon has a competing claim, but by the simple measure of vertical relief either side of a river it is extraordinary.
The Kali Gandaki is another of the rivers older than the mountains, which cut down as the range rose rather than being diverted around it. It has consequently been a trade route through the Himalaya for a very long time — the salt road between the Tibetan plateau and the Indian lowlands ran up it — and Mustang, the semi-arid kingdom at its head, remained culturally Tibetan and largely closed to outsiders into the 1990s.
The gorge is also a wind tunnel. Air drawn up from the warm lowlands toward the plateau accelerates through the constriction, producing a reliable and ferocious afternoon wind that pilots into Jomsom plan around.
The glacier that drains it
The Chhonbardan glacier flows from the mountain's northern flank down toward the Myagdi Khola, and the Dhaulagiri Icefall on that side is one of the more serious obstacles on the trekking circuit — a section of moving, crevassed ice that walkers cross with guides and, in some conditions, with rope.
Meltwater from these glaciers is the dry-season flow for the valleys below, which matters more than the annual total suggests: the monsoon delivers most of the year's water in a few months, and glacier melt is what keeps the rivers running for the rest of it. Sustained glacier loss in the range therefore threatens dry-season water supply rather than annual water supply — a distinction with large consequences for irrigation timing downstream.
The white mountain
The name is Sanskrit — dhawala, dazzling white, and giri, mountain — and it is apt. The peak presents an enormous unbroken snow face to the south, and its whiteness at a distance is what made it conspicuous enough from the plains to be measured early.
The massif is substantial, with Dhaulagiri II through VI all exceeding 7,000 metres strung along a ridge system to the west of the main summit, and large glaciers draining north and east.
First climbed with the help of an aircraft
Dhaulagiri resisted longer than most of the 8,000ers, defeating expeditions through the 1950s. It was finally climbed on 13 May 1960 by a Swiss–Austrian team including Kurt Diemberger, Peter Diener, Ernst Forrer, Albin Schelbert and the Sherpas Nyima Dorje and Nawang Dorje.
The expedition is remembered for its logistics: it used a light aircraft, a Pilatus PC-6 Porter nicknamed the Yeti, to land supplies and climbers on the north-east col at around 5,700 metres — the first time an aircraft had been used to place a Himalayan expedition high on a mountain. The plane was damaged and eventually abandoned on the glacier.
Diemberger's presence gives the ascent a further distinction: he had been on the summit of Broad Peak in 1957 with Hermann Buhl, which makes him the only person alive to have made first ascents of two 8,000-metre peaks.
The face that had to be climbed twice
The south face of Dhaulagiri is one of the great unresolved problems of the range — a wall of roughly 4,000 metres, steep, avalanche-swept and technically severe. Attempts through the 1980s and beyond by some of the strongest climbers of the period reached high on it without a clean summit, and several ended in death.
The mountain's first winter ascent came on 21 January 1985 by a Polish team including Andrzej Czok and Jerzy Kukuczka, part of the extraordinary run in which Polish climbers took the first winter ascents of most of the 8,000ers during the 1980s — a campaign born partly of limited hard currency, which made the cheaper winter permits attractive, and partly of a national mountaineering culture that valued suffering as a discipline.
A dangerous mountain by the numbers
Dhaulagiri has a fatality rate among the higher figures for the fourteen 8,000ers — well above Cho Oyu or Manaslu, though below Annapurna, K2 and Nanga Parbat.
The reasons are specific. The standard north-east ridge route is exposed to avalanche over long sections, the mountain is notorious for sudden weather deterioration, and the upper ridge is corniced and offers little shelter in a storm. Several of its worst incidents have involved entire camps being swept away rather than individual climbing accidents.
It sees far fewer attempts than Manaslu or Cho Oyu, partly because it offers neither their relative accessibility nor Everest's prestige, so it retains something of an expedition-mountain character.
The mountain that makes a desert behind it
Dhaulagiri and Annapurna together form a barrier that the summer monsoon cannot easily cross, and the country immediately north of them shows the result. Upper Mustang, in the rain shadow, receives a small fraction of the rainfall that falls on the southern slopes a short distance away, and it is a high, arid landscape of eroded cliffs and sparse vegetation that looks far more like the Tibetan plateau than like Nepal.
The transition is abrupt enough to be visible in a day's walk up the Kali Gandaki: forest and terraced fields below Ghasa, then progressively drier country through Marpha and Kagbeni, and beyond Kagbeni a landscape with almost no trees at all. Traditional architecture changes with it, from pitched roofs shedding monsoon rain to flat roofs used for drying and storage.
The same barrier concentrates the flow of air through the gorge, which is why the Kali Gandaki wind is so reliable, and why the walled settlements of Mustang are built to present blank faces to it.
The other Dhaulagiris, and the region
Dhaulagiri I is the mountain generally meant by the name, but the massif includes Dhaulagiri II at about 7,751 metres, and III through VI, all above 7,000, along with Churen Himal and Putha Hiunchuli further west. Together they form a compact group of high peaks that is far less visited than the Annapurna or Khumbu regions.
Access is from Pokhara, which sits about 40 km south of the Annapurna massif and offers, on a clear morning, one of the most dramatic mountain views of any sizeable town in the world — the ground rises from around 800 metres at the lakeside to over 8,000 within that short distance. Flights up the Kali Gandaki to Jomsom cross between the two 8,000ers, which is why the aerial view of Dhaulagiri is such a familiar image.
The region's mountaineering history remains thinner than its neighbours'. Dhaulagiri II was not climbed until 1971, and several of the subsidiary summits have seen only a handful of ascents — a reminder that even in the most thoroughly explored range on Earth there are 7,000-metre peaks that almost nobody goes to.
The circuit, and the pass
The Dhaulagiri Circuit is one of the more demanding treks in Nepal — a route around the massif crossing the French Pass at about 5,360 metres and Dhampus Pass at around 5,200, camping throughout because there are no lodges, and involving glacier travel.
It is far less frequented than the Annapurna Circuit on the other side of the Kali Gandaki, which has lodges, road access along parts of its route, and an order of magnitude more walkers. The two circuits, separated by that one gorge, are a neat illustration of how sharply trekking infrastructure — and therefore trekking pressure — is concentrated in Nepal.
The Dhaulagiri region drains into the Kali Gandaki and thence to the Gandaki and the Ganges, so its meltwater ends up in the Bay of Bengal. Our Himalaya guide covers the range's structure and the rivers that cut through it.
