Hkakabo Razi is an intimidating peak.
“I wanted to always run away from this mountain,” confessed Takashi Ozaki, the first climber to set foot on the cloud-covered summit in Myanmar’s Kachin State. The Japanese alpinist, who scaled Everest twice, charted a perilous route dodging hanging glaciers and avalanches along the north face of the mountain. “We had to fight the weather constantly,” Ozaki told Asia Times after his ascent in 1996.
At 19,295 feet, Hkakabo Razi is officially Southeast Asia’s tallest mountain. However, mountaineers and mapmakers agree that the elevation, based on a 1925 survey, needs an update. “Hkakabo has never been measured with an accurate recording instrument on the summit,” wrote Andy Tyson, the American climber who led an expedition to nearby Gamlang Razi in 2013. Satellite-generated data and on-site GPS measurements suggest that Gamlang might be slightly higher.
An altitude check on Hkakabo Razi is long overdue. But who is willing to climb the “difficult” mountain?
The peak is part of a contiguous terrain where the borders of Myanmar and China intersect. “Here Burma joins Tibet,” wrote Frank Kingdon-Ward, a British plant collector who explored the area in 1937 and concluded that the south face of Hkakabo Razi was “unclimbable.” Kingdon-Ward noted that the peak’s name, meaning “white snow mountain,” was of Tibetan origin.
In Myanmar, Hkakabo Razi is revered as the source of the Irrawaddy River. The river’s precise origin point is still a matter of debate. Of the two glacial streams that merge to form the country’s longest river, the N’Mai rises in an “untrodden” mountain range in TAR (Tibet Autonomous Region) across the border. The presumed source of the smaller Mali River is a glaciated slope in the Dandalika range, home to the nation’s three tallest peaks.
The two tributaries were in the news last month when the government indicated a renewed interest in a shelved hydroelectric project. Construction on the $3.6 billion Myitsone Dam was halted in 2011 when a reformist government under Thein Sein concluded that building a large reservoir in a seismic zone was a risky proposition for downstream areas of Kachin State.
Hkakabo Razi and its surroundings were designated a national park in 1998, two years after Ozaki’s ascent. A former deputy director general of Myanmar’s Forest Department called the landscape a “sylvan heaven” that could become a “major attraction of nature-based tourism.”
Myanmar attracted a record number of foreign visitors after the country opened its doors to tourism in 2011. A Lonely Planet author who visited the hill town of Putao in 2017 caught a glimpse of Hkakabo Razi from a distance. “It’s rice field river valleys, very Southeast Asia, at ground level. But then you’re surrounded by this sort of amphitheater of peaks,” said Nick Ray in an episode of the Talk Travel Asia podcast.
Still, mountaineering has remained a fraught endeavor.
In August 2014, two members of a Yangon-based climbing group planted Myanmar’s flag on Hkakabo Razi’s summit and confirmed the height of the mountain using a GPS device. However, the climbers lost radio contact on their descent and never returned to base camp. A rescue helicopter dispatched from Putao crashed near the foothills, killing one of the crew members.
An American expedition sponsored by National Geographic arrived in Myanmar around the same time, hoping to emulate Ozaki’s feat. They found the mountaineering infrastructure stretched thin by the ongoing rescue mission. Team leader Hilaree Nelson, who made a mark in the field climbing Everest and Lhotse back to back, admitted that those experiences had not prepared her for the rigors of Hkakabo Razi.
If the world’s highest peak was a “well-oiled machine” in terms of logistics, the icy mountain in Myanmar was the “anti-Everest,” wrote Nelson.
Three of the five climbers got close to the summit but abandoned their ascent when scarce supplies ran out. A two-week trek through a leech-filled tropical jungle at the base of the mountain was another disorienting experience for the alpinists who had trained at higher elevations. “I had no idea how claustrophobic and oppressive it would be in reality,” blogged Nelson.
Team photographer Cory Richards, whose images documented the moody landscape as well as the mixed emotions of his colleagues, told National Geographic, “there’s a reason that this mountain hasn’t been mapped. . . It’s hard to do.”