Broad Peak
— eight thousand metres of pale limestone, three summits in a row.
Not only on a wall.
“The twelfth-highest mountain on earth, rising to 8,051 metres on the divide between the Karakoram glaciers of Xinjiang and the Baltoro on the Pakistan side. Climbers know it for three summits along a long pale wall above Concordia. The Austrians who first reached the top in 1957 went up without bottled oxygen, the smallest party to climb an eight-thousander in that era.
Broad Peak, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
The place, in three passes.
Broad Peak (Falchan Kangri in Balti, K3 in the old survey notation) rises to 8,051 metres in the central Karakoram. The summit ridge runs north-south along the border between the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region of China and Gilgit-Baltistan in Pakistan, with the Chinese flank draining into the Shaksgam Valley and the southern face falling toward the Godwin-Austen Glacier and Concordia. It stands eight kilometres southeast of K2 and is the twelfth-highest peak on earth, the only eight-thousander with three named summits along a single crest.
Above eight thousand metres atmospheric pressure falls to roughly a third of sea level, and the climbing zone above Camp Three sits in what mountaineers call the death zone; long exposure there is incompatible with life. The summit ridge of Broad Peak is more than a kilometre long, and traverses between its three tops at that altitude have killed careful climbers in fair weather. Permits, weather windows, and acclimatisation rotations narrow expeditions to a few weeks in June and July each year.
The Karakoram is built of crystalline limestone and granitic gneiss thrust skyward by the same continental collision that raised the Himalaya. Broad Peak's pale walls catch evening light in the long apricot tone seen from Concordia. Hermann Buhl, Kurt Diemberger, Marcus Schmuck, and Fritz Wintersteller made the first ascent on 9 June 1957, in a small Austrian party without bottled oxygen or high-altitude porters, a style of climbing that has become a benchmark for everything attempted in the range since.