Annapurna

In 1950, when no mountain taller than 8,000 meters had ever been climbed, Maurice Herzog led an expedition of French climbers to the summit of an 8,075 meter (26,493 feet) Himalayan peak called Annapurna. The route had never been charted and Herzog and his team had to locate the mountain using crude maps. The account of this climb and the nightmare descent, constitutes one of the great mountain adventure stories of all time. Herzog's achievment was surpassed only when Sir Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay reached the summit of Everest in 1953.