Himlung Himal, Probable First Ascent. Himlung Himal (7126 meters, 23,380 feet) lies northwest of Manaslu near the Tibetan border. This autumn, a 14-member Japanese expedition led by Yukio Niwa was the tenth to go to Himlung. Of their nine predecessors, only one, also Japanese, there in 1983, reported that they had been successful, having climbed the east ridge from the south. But when Niwa returned to Kathmandu this year, he said he was “99%” sure that his own team had made the very first ascent of Himlung, climbing the northwest ridge with no great difficulty. He was convinced that all previous climbs had taken place on another mountain just to the south, Nemjung (7139 meters, 23,422 feet). He pointed out that the map coordinates assigned to Himlung by the Nepalese government correspond on the best Nepalese map of the region to those of the northern of these two mountains, not the southern one, labeled Nemjung.

Elizabeth Hawley