He Lost Both Legs in a Barracks Collapse. He Just Climbed Everest Using Only His Arms.
Russian veteran Rustam Nabiev spent about a week — instead of the usual three or four days — hauling himself past the Khumbu Icefall and up the world's highest mountain without prosthetic legs, becoming the first person on record to summit Everest this way.
Key facts
- Rustam Nabiev, 34, lost both legs below the waist in 2015 when a Russian military barracks collapsed on him.
- He reached Everest's 8,848.86m summit at 8:16am on 20 May 2026 — with no prosthetic legs, using arm strength alone.
- The Khumbu Icefall crossing took him 15 hours; his full summit push lasted about a week, against the usual 3–4 days.
- He was backed by five Sherpa climbers from the Seven Summit Club, two of whom stayed at his side the entire climb.
On the morning of 20 May 2026, at 8:16am, a 34-year-old Russian former soldier pulled himself onto the summit of Mount Everest using nothing but his arms. Rustam Nabiev has no legs below the waist — he lost them in 2015 when the roof of a military barracks in Russia collapsed on him — and he climbed the world's highest mountain without a single prosthetic limb. Every metre of the ropes, ladders and fixed lines above Base Camp, he crossed by pulling his own body weight hand over hand.
It is being described by climbers who have followed the ascent as a new benchmark in mountaineering, distinct from anything attempted on Everest before. Amputee climbers have summited the mountain using prosthetic legs; Nabiev is believed to be the first to do it with no legs and no artificial ones at all.
The hardest single stretch was the Khumbu Icefall, the shifting maze of seracs and crevasses just above Base Camp that most climbers cross in a matter of hours on their summit push. It took Nabiev 15 hours. His guides from the Kathmandu-based Seven Summit Club — five Sherpa climbers in total, two of whom never left his side — rigged extra support along the ladders so he could haul himself across the gaps by hand. Where a typical climber spends three to four days moving from Base Camp to the summit and back down through the high camps, Nabiev's push took roughly a week of continuous, grinding effort.
At the top, he unfurled a sign reading: “To those who thought that life ended after the fall. Rustam Nabiev, Everest 2026.” Asked what drove him, he made clear the climb wasn't only for other amputees. “My message is not only for people with disabilities; it is for everyone,” he said. “A person can reach the highest peak in their life, and that peak does not necessarily have to be a mountain.”
| Climber | Year | How |
|---|---|---|
| Mark Inglis (New Zealand) | 2006 | Below-knee prosthetics — first double amputee ever to summit |
| Hari Budha Magar (Nepal / UK) | 2023 | Above-knee prosthetics — first above-knee double amputee |
| Rustam Nabiev (Russia) | 2026 | No prosthetics — arm strength alone |
What this means for trekkers
What this means for you
You don't need Nabiev's arms to feel what he felt on that ladder. The Khumbu Icefall is the single hardest stretch on the route to Everest — which is exactly why almost no trekking itinerary, including ours, sends ordinary trekkers through it. Our Everest Base Camp trek stops at Base Camp itself, at 5,364m, well below the Icefall — you get the same jaw-dropping amphitheatre of ice Nabiev spent 15 hours fighting through, without ever needing to touch a ladder. What his climb proves at the scale of the whole mountain is true at the scale of a two-week trek too: the walk to Base Camp is graded, paced and guided so that fitness — not disability, not age, not experience — is usually the only real barrier, and even that barrier is more forgiving than people assume.
Everest's climbing season only opens for a short window each spring — as we've covered in our look at why the summit can only be climbed for about ten days a year, the same brief calm that let Nabiev's team fix the Icefall ropes is what every expedition, and every trekking season, is built around. If Base Camp itself is the goal rather than the summit, our NMA-certified guides run the classic route as well as the shorter 12-day itinerary, year-round.
Source: The Kathmandu Post.
Cover photo: laichun via Pexels (Pexels License).
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