Nirmal Purja, the Gurkha mountaineer who put the 8,000-metre peaks on a stopwatch

Nirmal Purja

Photo: Iamthanes / CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Born	July 25, 1983 Dana
Died	July 30, 2026 (43)
Occupation	Mountaineer
Awards	Member of the Order of the British Empire

Nirmal Purja treated the highest mountains on Earth as an operation with a deadline. An earlier generation of climbers measured a career in decades; he measured his in days, announced the target in public and then went out and hit it. That method made him the most visible mountaineer of his era, and it handed Nepali climbers, for a century the people who fixed the ropes for someone else’s record, a record of their own. It also raised a question he never quite answered: what a mountain becomes once it is mostly a schedule.

His story starts in Dana, a village in the Myagdi District of western Nepal, in a Magar family with soldiering in its blood. His father had served as a Gurkha in the Indian Army and three of his older brothers joined the Gurkhas too; their pay put him through an English-language boarding school. Being a Gurkha, he said later, was the only thing he ever wanted.

He was born there on 25 July 1983, joined the Brigade of Gurkhas in 2003, and in 2009 became the first Gurkha to pass selection for the Special Boat Service, the Royal Navy’s special forces unit, where he specialised in cold-weather warfare. Climbing arrived late, with a trek to Everest Base Camp in 2012. Within a few years he was going higher on military leave, and by 2018, the year he was appointed MBE, he had decided to walk away from sixteen years of service for a plan that most of the climbing establishment treated as a fantasy.

He called it Project Possible: all fourteen of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks in seven months. The fastest round until then, by the South Korean climber Kim Chang-ho, had taken close to eight years. Between April and October 2019, Purja and a small team of Nepali climbers finished it in six months and six days, summiting Everest, Lhotse and Makalu inside 48 hours along the way. The record stood until 2023, when the Norwegian Kristin Harila and the Nepali guide Tenjen Sherpa completed the fourteen in 92 days.

The achievement that is likely to outlast the stopwatch came on K2. It was the last 8,000-metre peak never climbed in winter, the final great first left in the sport, and on 16 January 2021 ten Nepali climbers walked onto its summit together. Purja, climbing alongside Mingma David Sherpa and Mingma G, was the only one of the ten to do it without supplemental oxygen. For most of mountaineering’s history the people who carried the loads had been Nepali and the names in the record books had not. That winter, the first belonged to Nepal. The same season killed John Snorri, Ali Sadpara and Juan Pablo Mohr on a later summit push, and Amir Bar-Lev’s documentary The Last First: Winter K2 still argues over whether the Nepali team’s decision to race its neighbours without saying so was treachery or overdue justice.

Fame followed fast. His memoir Beyond Possible came out in 2020, and the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, directed by Torquil Jones, reached a global audience in 2021. Purja, known to almost everyone as Nimsdai, built a business around the brand: the guiding company Elite Exped, a foundation for high-altitude workers and the chairmanship of Mustang Helicopters.

That business is where the doubts gathered. Purists pointed out that the 2019 record leaned on bottled oxygen, fixed ropes, strong Sherpa teams and helicopter hops between base camps, which made it a triumph of logistics as much as of alpinism. Nepal’s Department of Tourism looked into an unauthorised helicopter flight to Everest’s Camp II. He answered the sporting critics on their own terms, climbing the fourteen again without supplemental oxygen and finishing on Shishapangma in October 2024. The heavier charge came in May 2024, when The New York Times published accounts from the Finnish climber Lotta Hintsa and the American physician April Leonardo, who accused him of sexual misconduct. He denied the allegations as false and defamatory; the backpack maker Osprey ended its partnership with him. Those accounts sit beside the records in any honest reckoning of his life.

He kept moving at the same pace. In late May 2026 he went from the summit of Everest to the summit of Lhotse without supplemental oxygen in 13 hours and 42 minutes, cutting his own earlier mark roughly in half after a forced extra day at Camp IV. That summer, in the Karakoram, Broad Peak was a late addition to an expedition that had been planned around Gasherbrum II. A summit would have left only Cho Oyu between him and a second round of the fourteen without bottled oxygen.

Heavy snow had fallen for days and most teams had already gone home. At about nine in the morning on 30 July 2026, an avalanche swept the climbers from roughly 6,600 metres down the mountain’s west side. Ten people died, Purja among them, together with Nepali guides including Kilu Pemba Sherpa, who had stood with him on the winter summit of K2, the Omani climber Nadhira Al-Harthy and the Pakistani guide Sohail Sakhi. A search led by Mingma G brought his body down in early August. Why the team stayed on as conditions worsened has not been fully explained.

Purja married Suchi, the daughter of a Gurkha soldier, in 2006, and the couple had a daughter. They made their home in Hampshire, near Southampton. He was laid to rest in England after a private funeral at Milton Abbey in Dorset on 26 August, while climbers and guides in Kathmandu held a guard of honour for him on the same day.

His speed records were always going to fall; the first one already has. What is harder to reverse is the shift he forced in who gets the credit on the big mountains. Nepali-run companies now lead much of the commercial traffic on the 8,000-metre peaks, and the arrival of The Last First: Winter K2 on Apple TV this October puts the argument he started, about ambition and about who a summit belongs to, back in front of an audience that has only just lost him.

Tags: sports, athletes, Nirmal Purja, 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, K2, The Last First: Winter K2

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