“This was never the plan.”
Those were among Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja’s final public words.
Four days before he disappeared beneath an avalanche on Pakistan’s Broad Peak, the celebrated Nepalese mountaineer told his followers that the mountain had not even been part of his original itinerary.
He had travelled to Pakistan to climb Gasherbrum II. After completing it without supplemental oxygen, he began, as he put it, “running the numbers.” If he added Broad Peak, only Cho Oyu would remain between him and another extraordinary milestone: becoming the first person to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks twice without bottled oxygen.
Then the mountain changed the plan.
On the morning of July 30, Purja was climbing below Camp III on Broad Peak, at roughly 6,600 metres, when a massive avalanche swept across the route. GPS data later placed him at 6,659 metres at 9:38 am. About 40 minutes later, his tracker registered an abrupt descent of nearly 800 metres, to 5,891 metres. Then it went silent.
Within a day, rescuers recovered the bodies of fellow climbers from the avalanche debris. Purja remained missing. For a time, much of the mountaineering world resisted the obvious conclusion.
This was Nimsdai, after all…a climber who had built a career out of collapsing the distance between impossible and done. A former Gurkha and British Special Boat Service soldier, he had climbed all 14 of the world’s mountains above 8,000 metres in six months and six days, shattered assumptions about the limits of high-altitude climbing and become known far beyond mountaineering through the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible.
“When you are in the mountains, if you give up, you die,” Purja once said.
It sounded like survival advice. It was also something close to a personal creed.
As the search continued, Mingma David Sherpa, Purja’s close friend and fellow mountaineer, travelled from Nepal to Pakistan to help lead the effort on Broad Peak. Veteran Nepali guides abandoned their own K2 expeditions and joined the search through the avalanche debris.
For those who knew him, it was more than a rescue operation. They were trying to bring home a man who had helped transform how a generation of Himalayan climbers imagined themselves…no longer merely as the indispensable guides standing behind celebrated Western mountaineers, but as record-setters, expedition leaders and protagonists in their own right.
On the afternoon of August 1, the hope ended. Elite Exped, the Nepal-based expedition company Purja co-founded, confirmed his death. “The world has lost one of mountaineering’s greatest climbers,” the company said.
To understand the scale of that loss, it helps to return to another mountain, five years earlier, and to a moment that perhaps revealed Purja more clearly than any record.
On January 16, 2021, Purja and nine other Nepali climbers were nearing the summit of K2. The world’s second-highest mountain had resisted every previous attempt at a winter ascent and remained the last of the 14 eight-thousanders unconquered in that season.
Near the top, the climbers stopped.
Any one of them could have rushed ahead and claimed the distinction of becoming the first person to summit K2 in winter. Instead, they waited for one another. Then, shoulder to shoulder and singing Nepal’s national anthem, all 10 walked the final steps together.
The gesture mattered because Himalayan mountaineering had long carried a peculiar imbalance. Nepali climbers had hauled loads, fixed ropes, opened routes and conducted rescues while international climbers often went home with the fame. On K2 that winter, the supporting cast claimed the stage.
Purja understood the symbolism.
“Doesn’t matter where you come from,” he said. “You can show the world nothing is impossible.”
It was an idea formed far from the celebrity circuit of international mountaineering. Born in Nepal’s Myagdi district in 1983, Purja joined the Gurkhas and later earned a place in the British military’s Special Boat Service, an elite special-forces unit. The experience gave him an unusual combination of physical endurance, logistical discipline and almost unnerving self-confidence.
“The biggest strength I have is I have no fear,” he once said. His career in the mountains repeatedly seemed designed to test that proposition.
In 2019, Purja announced Project Possible, his plan to climb all 14 mountains above 8,000 metres in seven months. The existing speed record had been measured in years. Even accomplished mountaineers regarded his timetable as bordering on fantasy.
Purja finished in six months and six days.
The feat transformed him from a formidable climber into an international celebrity. 14 Peaks brought his story to millions who had never followed Himalayan mountaineering and turned his phrase—“Nothing is impossible”—into something resembling a personal brand.
It also started an argument that followed him for much of the rest of his life.
Purists pointed to his use of supplemental oxygen, fixed ropes, helicopters between climbing regions and a highly organised logistical operation. They argued that his record belonged to a different category from the achievements of climbers such as Reinhold Messner, who in 1986 became the first person to climb all 14 eight-thousanders, completing the undertaking over 16 years and without supplemental oxygen.
Sir Chris Bonington, the British mountaineering legend, called Purja’s accomplishment “quite extraordinary,” while arguing that it was not mountaineering in the traditional sense.
But Messner himself recognised the scale of what Purja had done, describing it as “a unique statement in the history of mountaineering” and praising his leadership, logistical ability and exceptional physical endurance.
Purja had another answer to the criticism. He went back up.
Between 2022 and October 2024, he climbed all 14 eight-thousanders again, this time without supplemental oxygen, completing the circuit in roughly two years and setting another record.
The distinction was significant. The very thing critics had used to qualify his first great achievement became the premise of his next one. By the time of his death, Purja had made 57 ascents of 8,000-metre peaks, 29 of them without supplemental oxygen.
But statistics alone never quite explained his appeal.
Purja was unusually suited to the social-media age of mountaineering…charismatic, quotable, intensely competitive and capable of making extreme risk appear almost conversational. He could turn expedition logistics into drama and a summit push into a story about human possibility.
His confidence sometimes irritated the old guard. To his admirers, particularly younger climbers from Nepal and elsewhere in Asia, it was precisely the point.
He refused to behave as though the great mountains—or the international culture surrounding them—belonged to somebody else.
He also insisted that the record books obscured another part of his climbing.
“They criticized me,” he wrote on Facebook shortly before his final expedition. “I was there doing multiple rescues of climbers left behind by other expeditions, raising the funds myself, leading from the front, fixing our own lines.”
“The noise hasn’t stopped,” he added. “I just stopped listening.”
Then came Pakistan.
Purja had gone there intending to climb Gasherbrum II. He summited it without supplemental oxygen. Only afterward did Broad Peak enter his calculations.
“This was never the plan,” he wrote on July 27.
The possibility was difficult for a man like Purja to ignore. Climb Broad Peak without oxygen and only Cho Oyu would remain before he could complete the 14 eight-thousanders twice without supplemental oxygen.
“Opportunities don’t scream,” he wrote. “They whisper to those already working in silence.”
There is an uncomfortable poignancy to those words now, but Purja did not write about Broad Peak as a man who believed himself invulnerable. For all his public bravado and the slogan that made him famous, he understood perhaps better than most that mountains were indifferent to reputation.
Before setting out, he addressed Broad Peak almost as if negotiating with it. “Broad Peak, I ask for nothing but safe passage up and back down,” he wrote. “I take zero mountains for granted. Not one.”
Three days later, the avalanche came.
His death inevitably leaves behind the temptation to read his final expedition backward, searching his last posts for prophecy or warning. But doing so risks misunderstanding both Purja and the world in which he operated. High-altitude mountaineering is built around the management of hazards that can never be entirely managed.
Experience reduces uncertainty; it does not abolish it. Records do not confer immunity. Purja knew that. He climbed anyway.
His legacy will remain contested in the way consequential careers often are. There will continue to be arguments about oxygen, logistics, style and what precisely constitutes a mountaineering record. There will be debates over whether the industrial organisation of modern expeditions has changed the meaning of climbing the highest mountains.
But Purja changed that debate simply by forcing it to accommodate him.
He compressed timelines once considered immutable. He demonstrated what sophisticated logistics, extraordinary fitness and relentless ambition could accomplish when combined. And he helped shift Himalayan climbers from the margins of mountaineering's mythology toward its centre.
Most of all, he understood that records acquire meaning only when other people can see themselves in them.
Elite Exped remembered as “a leader who inspired millions through his courage, humility and unwavering belief that human potential is far greater than we often imagine.”
Purja had put it differently in one of his last public messages.
“My purpose has never been about me,” he wrote. “It’s about what I represent. It’s about showing YOU that your own mountains—whatever they are—are climbable.”
Broad Peak was supposed to be one more mountain. It was never the plan.
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