The First Omani Woman to Summit Everest Died Chasing All 14 of the World's Highest Peaks

In 2015, an Omani schoolteacher led a group of students up Mount Kilimanjaro and turned back a few hundred metres from the top, beaten by altitude sickness. It should have been the end of the story. Instead, Nadhira Al Harthy spent the next two years training in running, swimming, hiking, climbing and caving, and on 23 May 2019 she stood on the summit of Mount Everest — the first Omani woman, and only the second Omani of either sex, ever to reach it. On 30 July 2026, an avalanche swept the slope below Camp III on Pakistan's Broad Peak and killed her, alongside Nepali climber Pur Bahadur Gurung, ending a seven-year run that had carried Gulf mountaineering further than anyone before her.

Al Harthy's path to Everest ran through Nepal before it ran through anywhere else. Inspired by Khalid Al Siyabi, the first Omani to reach the summit, she trained for two years and then joined a Nepali-led expedition on the standard South Col route out of Kathmandu, the route most Everest climbers still use today. Her 2019 summit made her the first Omani woman on top of the world, and it did not slow her down. In 2021 she returned to Nepal for Manaslu, the world's eighth-highest mountain, becoming the first Omani woman to stand on its 8,163m summit. The following year she climbed K2 in Pakistan — at 8,611m the second-highest mountain on Earth, and by most climbers' reckoning the more dangerous of the two — and became the first Omani of either sex to do it.

By the time she flew to Pakistan this summer, Al Harthy had climbed five of the fourteen mountains on Earth above 8,000 metres and was openly chasing all fourteen, a list only a few dozen people have ever completed. Broad Peak has historically claimed far fewer lives than K2 or Annapurna, which is part of what made the scale of the July 30 avalanche so shocking to the climbing world: it struck a ten-member team below Camp III on a mountain not usually near the top of climbers' danger lists. The team also included Nirmal Purja, the Nepali climber who was later confirmed dead alongside five Nepali guides. The Alpine Club of Pakistan confirmed the deaths of Al Harthy and Gurung; rescue teams could only reach the site by helicopter in the days that followed, in terrain too unstable for a ground search.

Tributes followed from climbers across the Gulf who had never had a mountaineering role model who looked like them before Al Harthy. 'It feels like a betrayal when nature seems to choose our most powerful ambassadors to take from us too soon,' Amy Subaey, CEO of UAE Trekkers, said in a tribute. Her friend Laila Al Hadhrami called her simply 'an inspiration to us all.'

What this means for trekkers

For trekkers inspired by her story rather than her risk tolerance, Everest and Manaslu are both reachable on foot without ropes or oxygen: our 14-day Everest Base Camp trek follows the same Khumbu valley she flew into in 2019, and the 16-day Manaslu Circuit circles the mountain she summited in 2021 without ever leaving the trekking trail.

Source: The National, with additional reporting from the Oman Observer and Muscat Daily.

Cover photo: Muhammad Nabeel via Pexels (Pexels License).