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In 1950, Maurice Herzog and his team reached the Tilicho Pass in the hope to locate elusive Annapurna I. To their surprise, they found before them a gigantic wall and a big frozen lake (Tilicho Lake) standing on their way to the mountain. This wall was given the name "La Grande Barriere" or "the Great Barrier" by Herzog. Here's how he described it in his book "Annapurna":

"We were completely overwhelmed by the Great Barrier whose average height I put at nearly 23,000 feet. Its defences culminated in a gigantic and inaccessible keep, right in the center, and its precipitous walls rose 10,000 feet above the camp. The rock was smooth and offered no irregularity, no line of weakness on which the trained eye of a mountaineer might hope to trace out a possible route. Annapurna was a giant fortress and we were still only on the outer defences."

Tilicho Peak is the highest point of the Great Barrier which links Khangsar Kang (7,458m) and Nilgiri North (7,061m) together. It was first climbed by a French expedition led by Emanuel Schmutz in 1978 via the North West Shoulder.