Ngojumba Kang II. The members of our expedition were Edin Alikalfic, Zdenko Anic, Mario Bago, Nives Boršic, Davor Butkovic, Željko Gobec, Jerko Kirigin, Boris Kovacevic, Branko Ognancevic, Branko Puzak, Mario Rodeš, Branko Šeparovic, Vojislav Vusic and I as leader. We climbed the south face and south ridge. We established Base Camp on October 15 at 5200 meters on the lateral moraine of the Lungsampa Glacier. The next day we improvised a cable lift to raise equipment 200 meters up onto the glacier. On October 17, Advance Base was placed at 5350 meters seven kilometers up on the edge of the Ngojumba icefall. That night a snowstorm began which lasted till October 20 and dumped a meter and a half of snow at Base Camp. On October 27, Camp I was set up at 5950 meters. We had fixed 200 meters of rope on the rock below the camp. The weather was beautiful, but the wind and deep snow caused difficulties and it was not until November 2 that we placed Camp II at 6500 meters. Camp III was established at 6950 meters on November 7. Progress was slowed by huge crevasses below the final face. On November 10, Kovacevic and Puzak climbed the face both in deep snow and on hard ice, which was of 50° to 65°. They set up Camp IV at 7200 meters. On the 11th, they reached the summit of Ngojumba II (7743 meters, 25,403 feet). From the same camp on November 13, Butkovic and Alikalfic got to the top while Ognancevic gave up at 7500 meters. (The Croatian climbers thought they had made the first ascent. They did make a new route and the second ascent. The first ascent was made by Japanese in the pre-monsoon period of 1965, when they first thought they had climbed Ngojumba Kang I. They later acknowledged they had gone to the slightly lower summit, Ngojumba Kang II.—Editor.)

Darko Berljak, Planinarski Savez Zagreba, Yugoslavia