He Lost Both Legs to an IED in Afghanistan. He Just Finished Climbing the Highest Peak on Every Continent on Earth.

On 6 January 2026, in temperatures of -25°C on the ice fields of Antarctica, Hari Budha Magar became the first double above-knee amputee in history to stand on the highest point of every continent on Earth. Sixteen years earlier, he had been a Gurkha rifleman on patrol in Afghanistan's Helmand province when he stepped on an improvised explosive device and woke up in a hospital bed with both legs gone above the knee, his career as a soldier over.

Budha Magar was born in 1979 in Mirul, a village perched at 2,500m in Nepal's remote Rolpa district — hill country where walking for hours over rough ground before breakfast is simply how children get to school. He joined the Royal Gurkha Rifles at 19 and spent 15 years in uniform, deployed across five continents as a combat medic, sniper and covert surveillance specialist, before the blast in Helmand ended that chapter of his life.

What came after took years just to be allowed to attempt it. In 2017, Nepal's government barred blind and double-amputee climbers from Everest permits altogether, citing safety; Budha Magar became one of the most visible faces of the legal fight against the rule, and in March 2018 Nepal's Supreme Court struck it down as discriminatory. He spent the years that followed rebuilding his climbing from the ground up on Nepali peaks, including a 2017 ascent of Mera Peak, a 6,476m trekking peak above the Hongu valley that's become one of the most popular first climbs for aspiring Himalayan mountaineers. On 19 May 2023, he crawled, climbed and pulled himself onto Everest's summit — a feat that earned him a Guinness World Record.

Vinson was hard in a different way than Everest. There's no altitude sickness at 4,892m, but there's nothing to shelter behind either: three days of climbing through -25°C wind on featureless ice, without the Sherpa crew and fixed high camps that had carried him up Everest. “The climb was very tough, the conditions and difficulty meant that I was literally crawling up on all fours, battling my way up the mountain,” he said afterwards. His verdict on the whole journey, from hospital bed to seventh summit: “If you have a dream and dedicate yourself and never give up, you can achieve anything.”

What this means for trekkers

For climbers ready to go beyond a trek, Island Peak is the natural next step up from Mera in difficulty, and both routes stage through the same Khumbu villages — Namche, Tengboche, Dingboche — that carried Budha Magar toward his own first Himalayan summit. His achievement also lands in the middle of a remarkable stretch for Nepali mountaineering more broadly, in the same era that produced Kami Rita Sherpa's record 32nd Everest summit.

Source: The Himalayan Times.

Cover photo: Gary Humphrey via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).