Maurice Herzog

On June 3, 1950, three years before anyone would stand on top of Everest, French mountaineers Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal knocked off the first of the 8,000-meter giants: 26,545-foot Annapurna, the tenth-highest mountain in the world.

For three years, Annapurna was the highest anyone had ever climbed on earth. The accomplishment was overshadowed on the world stage when Edmund Hillary and Tenzing Norgay stepped onto the summit of Everest in 1953, but the Annapurna summit was groundbreaking and to this day commands the respect of mountaineers. The French team was in unknown terrain; it reconnoitered, planned, and pulled off its summit attempt in one season; and it didn’t use supplemental oxygen. It remains the only 8,000-meter peak to have been climbed on the first attempt ever made on the mountain. The French hadn’t even seen Annapurna before deciding to climb it.

The Nepalese government had just reopened its high peaks to foreign mountaineers after more than a century of isolation, and Dhaulagiri — at 26,795