What this is ranked on: personal attachment. Not height, not difficulty, not how famous the mountain is. K2 is the hardest of the eight-thousanders and it is not first on this list, because a ranking of what these places meant is a different list from a ranking of what they are.
Pakistan's north is where the Karakoram, the Himalaya and the Hindu Kush meet — the only place on earth those three ranges come together. Five of the world's fourteen eight-thousanders are within a hundred kilometres of each other here, and you can stand on a glacier with four of them in view at once.
Ranks 1–22 are places I have been, and they already have pages in the Hobbies tab of this space with photographs and descriptions. Ranks 23–25 are the three I have not reached yet — the Baltoro, the Trango Towers and Astore — kept on the list because a ranking of a place you love should be honest about where you still have not got to.
Ordering this was harder than expected. Fairy Meadows takes first place over K2 and Concordia for one reason: it is the first time the scale of any of this becomes real. You come up a jeep road that most people remember for the wrong reasons, walk through pine forest, and the entire Rupal side of Nanga Parbat is simply there in front of you.
Every entry links to its own page. Where Geo already had the place, this list points at that entity rather than making a second one.