Excerpted from Imaginary Peaks: The Riesenstein Hoax and Other Mountain Dreams by Katie Ives (October 2021) with permission from the publisher, Mountaineers Books. All rights reserved. The idea of a summit taller than any known peak has long held a special allure for mountaineers. Early surveyors had mistakenly designated various Himalayan peaks as the highest mountain in the world, including Nanda Devi, Kangchenjunga, and K2. Those errors were corrected in the 1850s after Indian mathematician Radhanath Sikdar and his colleagues at the Great Trigonometrical Survey finished calculating the elevation of…
