Nirmal Purja Is Confirmed Dead — Five Nepali Guides Died Beside Him on Broad Peak

On the morning of July 30, 2026, ten climbers were moving between Camp 2 and Camp 3 on Broad Peak, the 8,051m giant on the Pakistan side of the Karakoram, when the slope above them let go. For two days Nepal held its breath. On August 1, the expedition operator EliteExped confirmed what many had feared: all ten were dead, including Nirmal 'Nimsdai' Purja, the Nepali climber who spent the last seven years redrawing what one human body could do above 8,000m.

The ten had been attempting a technical, oxygen-free push — Purja was trying to become the first person to climb all fourteen 8,000m peaks three times, and twice without supplemental oxygen. Contact was lost soon after the avalanche. Over the following 48 hours, rescue teams backed by Pakistan Army Aviation helicopters located three bodies, then spotted seven more by drone on the slope below. EliteExped's confirmation on August 1 closed out what had briefly been reported, hopefully but incorrectly, as a survivable situation for at least part of the team.

Who was on the mountain

Six Nepali lives, not one

International coverage has, understandably, led with Purja's name — he was born in Myagdi district in 1983, served as a British Army Gurkha before becoming the first Gurkha selected for the UK Special Boat Service, and was awarded an MBE after a solo rescue on Everest. His 2019 project climbed all fourteen of the world's 8,000m peaks in 189 days, a record that had stood for decades, later told in the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible. But five of the men working beside him — Pur Bahadur Gurung, Nima Sherpa, Kili Pemba Sherpa, Nawang Thindu Sherpa and Gyalu Sherpa — were career Nepali high-altitude guides, the same profession that keeps Everest, Manaslu and Annapurna running every season. Six Nepali families lost someone on that slope, not one. It is the guiding community, more than the record books, that will feel this loss longest. We wrote last month about which 8,000m peaks actually carry the highest death rate — Broad Peak's exposed upper camps are exactly the terrain that explains the numbers.

What this means for anyone booking a Himalayan trip

We did not know any of the six Nepali climbers on this team personally, but in an industry this small, everyone here knows someone who did. Our own guides are NMA-certified and Pokhara-based, and route selection on every one of our itineraries — including Everest Base Camp and Mera Peak — is built around exactly this kind of terrain judgment.

Source: Al Jazeera

Cover photo: Aa Dil via Pexels (Pexels License).