Record-Setting Climber Nirmal Purja Among 10 Dead in Broad Peak Avalanche

An avalanche swept a 10-member international climbing team off Broad Peak in Pakistan's Karakoram range on Thursday, killing Nirmal "Nimsdai" Purja, the Nepali-British mountaineer who became one of the most recognized names in high-altitude climbing after setting a world record for summiting all 14 of the planet's 8,000-meter peaks in under seven months. Purja's expedition company, Elite Exped, confirmed his death on Saturday: "Today it is with profound sadness and immense heartbreak that we confirm that Nirmal 'Nimsdai' Purja tragically lost his life following the avalanche on Broad Peak."

Nine other climbers from at least five countries died alongside him, among them an Omani mountaineering pioneer, an American attempting her first 8,000-meter peak, a Chinese climber chasing the same 14-peak record Purja had already claimed, and several of the Nepali and Pakistani guides who make commercial Himalayan and Karakoram expeditions possible in the first place. Days later, recovery teams working at extreme altitude on unstable terrain have brought some of the dead down to lower camps, but outlets covering the operation directly from the mountain still disagree on exactly which bodies, including Purja's own, have actually been recovered as of Monday, a genuine gap in the reporting rather than a settled fact either way.

An Avalanche Hit Above Camp II in the Middle of the Day

The avalanche struck the 10-climber group on Broad Peak, the world's 12th-highest mountain at 8,051 meters (26,414 feet), around midday Thursday, according to Al Jazeera. The mountain sits in Gilgit-Baltistan, the Pakistan-administered region of the wider Karakoram range that also contains K2, and the team was climbing what mountaineers call the normal route, the standard path used by the large majority of commercial expeditions, rather than a more technical or experimental line. Rescuers reached the site and recovered three bodies by Friday despite harsh weather, Al Jazeera reported, and by Saturday, Elite Exped had confirmed that all ten members of the group had died. The scale of the loss, a full expedition team wiped out in a single slide, immediately registered as one of the worst single incidents in recent Karakoram climbing history, on a par with disasters that have historically prompted the sport to rewrite its own safety norms. It prompted at least one team attempting nearby K2 to abandon its own summit push in the aftermath, according to ExplorersWeb, a sign that the danger was read by other expeditions on the mountain as a broader instability in that week's snowpack rather than a freak, isolated event confined to one slope. Broad Peak and K2 sit close enough together, and share enough of the same approach routes and base-camp infrastructure, that a slide serious enough to wipe out one team routinely changes the risk calculus for every other expedition working the same range that week, which is part of why the K2 team's decision to stand down registered as significant rather than merely cautious. Both mountains were near the tail end of what climbers call the summer weather window, the narrow stretch of relatively stable conditions expeditions plan an entire season around, and a slide this late in that window is a reminder that "stable" in the Karakoram is always a relative and temporary description rather than a guarantee.

Purja Built His Fame on a Record Most Climbers Called Impossible

Purja was 43 and had built his reputation on a feat that redefined what was considered physically possible in high-altitude mountaineering. A former British Army soldier who served with the Gurkhas, the Nepali-recruited regiments long attached to the British military, and later in UK special forces, he set out in 2019 to climb all fourteen of the world's mountains above 8,000 meters, a list that includes Everest, K2 and Broad Peak itself, and completed the entire project in roughly six months, a pace that shattered the previous record by nearly eight years and stunned a sport where most climbers spend a lifetime attempting only a handful of those peaks. The achievement became the subject of the Netflix documentary "14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible," which introduced Purja to an audience far beyond the small world of professional mountaineering and turned him into one of the sport's most recognizable ambassadors, a rare crossover figure whose name registered with people who had never followed a Himalayan expedition before. He went on to lead Elite Exped, guiding paying clients on the same peaks he had once raced to complete, which is how he came to be on Broad Peak with this particular team, a mix of seasoned record-chasers and first-time 8,000-meter climbers, when the slope gave way above them. That transition, from record-setter to full-time expedition leader responsible for other people's safety at extreme altitude, is itself part of why his death landed as harder to absorb than the loss of a client climber would have: Purja was, by reputation, precisely the person other climbers trusted to read a mountain's conditions correctly and to know when a slope was too dangerous to be on.

The Other Nine Climbers Spanned Five Countries and Very Different Levels of Experience

The group Purja was leading was strikingly varied in background, which is part of what made the loss register so widely across so many different countries at once. Nadhira Al Harthy, an Omani climber, was the first Omani woman to summit Mount Everest, in 2019, and the first Omani to climb K2; she held a master's degree in geography and had directed the Citizenship Department at Oman's Ministry of Education, making her death a national story in a country with only a small handful of high-altitude mountaineers to begin with. Mallory Geis, 39, of San Antonio, Texas, was on her first attempt at an 8,000-meter peak. She had closed her Pilates studio earlier in 2026 to pursue mountaineering full time, according to Al Jazeera, a career pivot that placed a relative newcomer to extreme altitude on the same rope-team as some of the most experienced climbers alive. Wang Zhong, a 52-year-old Chinese climber, was attempting to complete his own run of all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks and had already summited twelve, according to Global Times, putting him two peaks away from joining the small handful of climbers, Purja among them, who have completed the full list. The remaining victims were largely Nepali and Pakistani professionals whose names rarely make international headlines despite doing the most dangerous work on any commercial expedition, the fixed-rope setting, load-carrying and route-finding that make it possible for clients like Geis to attempt these mountains at all: Pur Bahadur Gurung, Nima Sherpa, Kili Pemba Sherpa, Gyalu Sherpa, Nawang Thindu Sherpa and Sohail Sakhi. Gyalu Sherpa was an experienced guide with Seven Summit Treks, one of the largest commercial expedition operators in the Himalayas and Karakoram, per ExplorersWeb. That roster, a Guinness record-holder, a national pioneer from Oman, a career-changer from Texas, a Chinese climber closing in on his own record, and a half-dozen Nepali and Pakistani guides, is a fairly accurate cross-section of who actually populates a modern commercial 8,000-meter expedition, and it is a large part of why the loss was reported as a genuinely global story rather than a niche item confined to mountaineering outlets.

Accounts of the Recovery Operation Genuinely Conflict

What happened after the avalanche is where the reporting stops agreeing, and it is worth being direct about that rather than picking whichever version reads cleanest. Global Times, citing an Alpine Club of Pakistan statement posted to Instagram over the weekend, reported that four bodies had been recovered and were being moved to lower camps, with one body at extreme altitude deemed too dangerous to retrieve at that stage. ExplorersWeb, in a report published Monday morning, described Purja's body specifically as having been found at 5,700 meters and brought down to Camp 1, alongside Wang Zhong, Nima Sherpa and Gyalu Sherpa, with Kili Pemba Sherpa's body successfully brought down separately and two climbers, Nawang Thindu Sherpa and Sohail Sakhi, still unaccounted for entirely. A separate report from Everest Chronicle, published later Monday, described the opposite for Purja specifically: that his body remained on the mountain five days after the avalanche, on a slope too steep for conventional recovery, alongside Wang Zhong and Nawang Thindu Sherpa, while listing six others, including Al Harthy and Geis, as already brought down to Base Camp. Neither outlet is reporting from the mountain itself, both are relaying information from the Alpine Club of Pakistan and the expedition companies involved, and a chaotic, multi-day recovery across several separate crash sites is exactly the kind of situation where two secondhand accounts, filed hours apart, can land on different pictures of who has actually come down. What every account agrees on is that recovery is happening in stages, on dangerous terrain, and that the full, final tally of who has actually been brought off the mountain had not settled by Monday. Vyraa is not resolving that discrepancy here, since neither claim can be independently verified from Bremerton, and readers following the story elsewhere should expect the exact status of individual bodies to keep shifting as more direct reporting reaches the mountain.

Nepal's Government and the Climbing World Moved Quickly to Grieve

Nepal's prime minister, Balendra Shah, posted a public tribute to Purja and the rest of the expedition team, writing on Facebook that "climbing is not just a journey to the top" but "the supreme expression of courage, discipline, sacrifice and indomitable confidence that challenges human limits," and that "the legacy of their courage, dedication, and contributions will forever remain alive and inspiring," according to ANI News. China's embassy activated its own emergency response process following news of Wang Zhong's death, according to Global Times, and Elite Exped's own statement confirming Purja's death used a similarly weighted tone, the language of national loss rather than a routine business notice from an expedition company. The reaction reflects how central high-altitude mountaineering, and Purja specifically, had become to Nepal's national identity over the past several years; his 2019 record was widely covered as a point of national pride, elevating Nepali climbing culture beyond the guiding profession it had long been treated as by foreign expedition operators and into something closer to an internationally recognized sport with its own record-holders, household names and now, with this avalanche, its own widely mourned casualties. The tribute from Shah, delivered in the language of national loss rather than a routine condolence statement, mirrors how Nepal's government responded to Purja's original 2019 achievement, when his return from the fourteen-peak project was treated domestically as closer to a returning champion than a private mountaineering accomplishment. The same pattern is playing out this week in miniature for the other Nepali guides killed alongside him: Nima Sherpa, Kili Pemba Sherpa, Gyalu Sherpa and Nawang Thindu Sherpa worked in a profession that has historically received far less public attention than the foreign climbers they support, and the scale of this single loss, several guides from the same small professional community dying in the same incident, has pushed their names into the same national conversation usually reserved for someone with Purja's level of individual fame.

Why Bringing the Remaining Bodies Down Is So Difficult

The technical obstacle facing rescue teams is straightforward to describe and extremely hard to solve. An eight-member ground team has been working the slopes where the bodies remain, and the Alpine Club of Pakistan said plainly that "due to the extremely hazardous terrain and prevailing conditions, it is unlikely that a recovery attempt will be made at this stage" for the body left at the highest elevation. The alternative is a helicopter long-line operation, in which a line is lowered from a hovering aircraft to lift a body without the helicopter itself landing, but that maneuver requires relatively flat terrain beneath the aircraft's altitude ceiling to avoid a rotor strike, terrain Broad Peak's upper slopes largely do not offer at the elevations where the remaining bodies sit. Pakistani military pilots, per ExplorersWeb, have also historically been reluctant to fly this kind of civilian recovery mission given the risk involved, which leaves ground teams as the primary option even though those same teams have already had to halt earlier attempts once conditions worsened. Fresh avalanche activity in the days since the initial slide has compounded the problem, closing windows that rescue teams had planned to use and forcing repeated reassessments of which routes up to the crash sites are even survivable for the people doing the recovering, let alone the people already lost. That is the tension running underneath every update from the mountain this week: the same steep, loaded slopes that make Broad Peak's upper section so dangerous to climb in the first place are exactly what now stands between the remaining bodies and their families, and the same slopes that killed ten people last Thursday are entirely capable of injuring or killing the rescuers sent up to bring them down, which is why the Alpine Club has been willing to publicly call some recovery attempts off rather than push a team into terrain it has already judged unsurvivable.

A Death Toll That Puts Karakoram Risk Back in the Spotlight

Ten deaths in a single avalanche is an unusually high toll even for a mountain range with the Karakoram's reputation; K2, Broad Peak's neighbor and the second-highest mountain on Earth, is already considered by climbers to be significantly more dangerous per attempt than Everest, with a historical fatality rate several times higher, and Broad Peak sits in the same weather systems and the same remote, helicopter-poor logistics chain. The incident arrives at a moment when commercial expeditions to 8,000-meter peaks have become more accessible than at any point in mountaineering history, with guiding companies like Elite Exped and Seven Summit Treks bringing climbers with widely varying experience levels, from record-chasing professionals like Purja and Wang Zhong to first-time 8,000-meter climbers like Geis, onto the same fixed ropes and the same exposed slopes in the same short weather windows each summer. That mix, more people on the mountain with more different levels of preparation, does not cause an avalanche, but it does mean that when one hits a crowded route at the wrong moment, the toll tends to be higher and more varied than it would have been a generation ago, when far fewer climbers attempted these peaks at all and expeditions were staffed almost entirely by specialists rather than a blend of guides and paying clients. Purja's own career embodied that shift, since his record depended on the same speed-focused, heavily supported commercial model that put a first-timer like Geis on the same mountain seven years later, and his death on one of the fourteen peaks he made famous is likely to reopen a debate the sport has had before about how much risk that model asks newer climbers, and the guides responsible for them, to accept in a range where the weather, the terrain and now, again, the snowpack rarely give much warning before turning fatal.