Nanga Parbat
— — the mountain the storm has not let go.
Not only on a wall.
“The ninth-highest mountain on earth, standing alone at the western end of the Himalaya. From the meadow at Fairy Meadows, the Rakhiot face fills the sky above a stand of cedar; the Rupal face on the other side drops nearly four and a half vertical kilometres to a pasture of sheep. Climbers call it the Killer Mountain. Astore shepherds call the lower valleys home.
Nanga Parbat, 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.
Nanga Parbat rises to 8,126 metres in the Diamir District of Gilgit-Baltistan, the ninth-highest summit on earth and the western anchor of the Himalaya. The Indus River gorge separates the massif from the Karakoram range to the north. Three great faces define the mountain: Rakhiot on the north, Diamir on the west, and Rupal on the south. The usual approach runs from the Karakoram Highway at Raikot Bridge, then by jeep track to Tato village and up through cedar forest to Fairy Meadows at about 3,300 metres.
The Rupal Face on the south side climbs roughly 4,600 metres from the valley floor to the summit, the largest mountain wall on earth. Reinhold Messner and his brother Günther made the first ascent of it in 1970; Günther died on the descent down the Diamir side. The Diamir Face on the west was the route Hermann Buhl took alone on the first summit climb in 1953. The rock is hard gneiss and schist, scoured by wind and avalanche through every season.
At 8,126 metres the summit sits well inside the death zone, where oxygen runs at roughly a third of sea level. Storms sweep in fast off the Indus plain and the mountain has killed more than seventy climbers, second only to K2 among the eight-thousanders. The base camps at Fairy Meadows on the Rakhiot side and the Rupal valley below the south wall sit far down in cedar and pasture, where the air is thin but breathable and Astore shepherds still graze flocks through the short summer.