By Staff Reporter
GILGIT: The body of Nirmal Purja, the Nepali-British mountaineer who rose to global fame for his record-breaking ascent of the world’s 14 highest peaks, was recovered from Pakistan’s Broad Peak on Sunday, three days after an avalanche swept away his entire ten-member expedition team.
The Alpine Club of Pakistan said a ground rescue team had reached Purja — known to climbers and fans worldwide as “Nims Dai” — at an altitude of roughly 5,700 metres, where three further bodies were also sighted. Those three were later identified as Chinese climber Wang Zhong and Nepali climbers Nima Sherpa and Kili Pemba Sherpa. All four were being brought down to Camp 1 by the rescue team, the club said, warning that recovery efforts were continuing “under extremely difficult terrain conditions.”
The confirmation of Purja’s death came a day after his expedition company, Elite Exped, announced that none of the ten climbers on the trip had survived. The group included six Nepali climbers, along with one each from Pakistan, Oman, the United States and China.
Word of Purja’s death has drawn tributes from across the climbing world and beyond. Britain’s Prince William was among those to send condolences to the families of the climbers, as an outpouring of shock and grief spread through the mountaineering community, particularly in Nepal, where Purja was regarded as a national hero.
How the disaster unfolded
The avalanche struck on Thursday, cutting off all contact with Purja’s expedition partway up the 8,051-metre peak, the world’s twelfth-highest mountain and one of its most technically demanding climbs. Poor weather severely hampered the response in the days that followed, grounding the helicopters rescuers had hoped to use and forcing teams to rely on slower, more perilous ground operations.
Ayaz Shigri, the Alpine Club’s general secretary, said before the weekend’s recoveries that the mountain’s unstable terrain, the continued risk of further avalanches and its steep slopes were all complicating the search. An eight-member ground team made up of Pakistani and Nepali climbers reached Camp 1 before 9am on Sunday to begin what the club described as a search and recovery mission “under extremely difficult conditions.”
The first bodies were recovered on Friday, when rescuers brought down the remains of Omani climber Nadhira Ahmed Abdullah Al Harthy — the first Omani woman to summit Mount Everest — along with Nepali climber Pur Bahadur Gurung and the remains believed to belong to American climber Mallory Geis. A fourth body, that of Nepali climber Gyalu Sherpa, was recovered on Saturday, according to Alpine Club president Irfan Arshad.
Naila Kiani of the Alpine Club said a further five bodies had been spotted on the mountain on Saturday through aerial reconnaissance. Rescuers have since confirmed the presence of one additional body at a significantly higher elevation than the others, though the Alpine Club said a recovery attempt there was unlikely given the hazardous terrain and prevailing conditions.
A life spent redefining the impossible
Purja, 43, first came to prominence within elite climbing circles in 2019, when he summited Annapurna, the world’s tenth-highest mountain, before going on to complete an extraordinary feat: scaling all fourteen of the world’s peaks above 8,000 metres in just six months, smashing the previous record by more than seven years. The achievement, and the sheer audacity of attempting it, turned him into one of the sport’s most recognisable figures once Netflix released ’14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible’, the documentary chronicling his journey, in 2021.
Before he turned to professional climbing, Purja served in the British military, first with the Gurkhas and later within the special forces — a background that friends and fellow climbers say shaped the relentless, almost unshakeable drive for which he became known.
British mountaineer Kenton Cool, who has climbed Everest twenty times — more than any non-Sherpa — described Purja as a “charismatic, colourful” figure who reshaped high-altitude guiding. Speaking to Reuters on Saturday, Cool said that any assessment of Purja’s legacy would have to reckon with how he stood at the forefront of transforming the profession.
The Alpine Club of Pakistan, confirming his death, remembered Purja as a “man who made the impossible possible.” In a statement, the club said he had carried the Nepali flag “to the highest points on Earth with pride,” and that his achievements had brought new recognition to Nepal’s climbing community. His impact, it said, reached “far beyond any one nation” — more than the records themselves, Purja had given people everywhere reason to believe the impossible was simply something no one had yet dared attempt hard enough.
“His loss on the very mountains he so loved is a devastating blow to the global mountaineering family,” the statement continued. “But his legacy of pushing limits, of proving that the impossible is only impossible until someone dares to do it, will endure in every climber, everywhere, who follows the trail he blazed. Our deepest condolences go out to his family, loved ones, and the entire climbing community during this immensely difficult time. Rest well, Nims Dai.”
Recovery efforts on Broad Peak were continuing on Sunday, as rescue teams worked to bring down the bodies already located while assessing whether any further attempts could safely be made higher up the mountain.
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