The Trango Towers are a family of rock towers situated in Gilgit-Baltistan, an autonomous territory in the North of Pakistan. The Towers offer some of the largest cliffs and most challenging rock climbing in the world, and every year a number of expeditions from all corners of the globe visit Karakoram to climb the challenging granite. They are located north of Baltoro Glacier, and are part of the Baltoro Muztagh, a sub-range of the Karakoram range. The highest point in the group is the summit of Great Trango Tower at 6,286 m (20,608 ft), the east face of which features the world's greatest nearly vertical drop.There are some impressive and extremely difficult rock towers around the world, competing in being the hardest to climb. One of the more famous and possibly the group of peaks that would get the most votes for being the toughest is the Trango Tower Peaks. There are two main summits in the central part of the group: Great Trango Tower (6286m) and Nameless Tower (6230m) a.k.a. just Trango Tower.
The group is reasonable easy to access as it is located much closer to civilization than many other popular peaks in Pakistan. You would suspect a peak like Trango Tower is an expensive climb, but it isn’t. Like all other peaks in Pakistan the price tag on the permit is determined by the peak’s elevation and therefore Trango Tower comes at a very affordable price. More about this in the red tape section..
The peaks have some of the highest vertical faces on the planet and were for a long time some of the most coveted mountaineering challenges. It was not until 1975 the area opened for climbing and the race for the hard-to-reach summits began.
Great Trango Tower has three routes straight up the E/NE face and a couple of alpine routes on the NW and W sides of the peak. Nameless Tower has been climbed via many routes, which all are located on its SE and SW faces. It's said the quality of the granite is very good on both the main peaks as well as on the lesser peaks in the area.
All of the Trango Towers lie on a ridge, trending northwest-southeast, between the Trango Glacier on the west and the Dunge Glacier on the east. Great Trango itself is a large massif, with four identifiable summits: Main (6,286 m), South or Southwest (circa 6,250 m), East (6,231 m), and West (6,223 m). It is a complex combination of steep snow/ice gullies, steeper rock faces, and vertical to overhanging headwalls, topped by a snowy ridge system.
Just northwest of Great Trango is the Trango Tower (6,239 m), often called "Nameless Tower". This is a very large, pointed, rather symmetrical spire which juts 1000 m out of the ridgeline. North of Trango Tower is a smaller rock spire known as "Trango Monk." To the north of this feature, the ridge becomes less rocky and loses the large granite walls that distinguish the Trango Towers group and make them so attractive to climbers; however the summits do get higher. These summits are not usually considered part of the Trango Towers group, though they share the Trango name. Trango II (6,327 m) lies northwest of the Monk, and the highest summit on the ridge, Trango Ri (6,363 m), lies northwest of Trango II.
Just southeast of Great Trango (really a part of its southeast ridge) is the Trango Pulpit (6,050m), whose walls present similar climbing challenges to those of Great Trango itself. Further, to the south is Trango Castle (5,753 m), the last large peak along the ridge before the Baltoro Glacier.
