Nirmal Purja Obituary: Intrepid Mountaineer with Extreme Ambition
Selected from The Times – 1 August 2026

Nirmal Purja MBE, special forces serviceman and mountaineer, was born on July 25, 1983. His death after an avalanche was announced on August 1, 2026. He was 43.

The Nepalese-born Purja, who fought with the Gurkhas in Afghanistan and saw service with the Special Boat Service, realised that things could go catastrophically wrong on this most exposed stretch of Everest. As people waited, they grew colder and more impatient, using up their oxygen supplies; it was quite literally the worst place to be stuck in a queue. For two hours he took charge, “like a traffic policeman”, prioritising the coldest and those who had been waiting the longest while trying to calm the others. “Rather than people fighting over who should go up first, it’s better if it is managed systematically,” he told The Guardian.
Nirmal Purja was on Everest as part of Project Possible, aiming to climb the world’s 14 highest peaks, each more than 8,000m high and in the so-called death zone. He and his team of Sherpas achieved their goal in 189 days, breaking the previous record of seven years, ten months and six days set in 2013. Their remarkable feat can be seen in the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible (2021). Along the way he rescued three other climbers, including descending from a helicopter rope on Annapurna in the Himalayas to recover Chin Wui Kin, an anaesthesiologist who later died in hospital.

Three years ago Purja and his team became the first to conquer K2 in winter. The peak is so deadly that it is known as Savage Mountain, with many of the 11 victims of a 2008 avalanche still lying in the Bottleneck, a long, steep and narrow gully overhung by a 100m ice cliff. “Passing bodies, you realise some things are beyond planning and skill. Sometimes it’s just your day and sometimes it isn’t,” he observed.
Recalling the Everest queues of 2019, Purja expressed concern about both the environmental damage to the mountain and the ever-growing and under-prepared number of mountaineers.

Nirmal Purja, known as Nimsdai or Nims, was the fourth of five children born to a family in the mountain village of Dana, in western Nepal, in 1983. His father, Nanda Bahadur Purja, served with the Gurkhas; his mother, Purna Kumari, was an uneducated farmworker, often toiling with a child strapped to her back. He was four when they moved downhill to Ramnagar, a jungle village near Kathmandu, in the hottest and flattest part of the country. At ten he contracted tuberculosis and was later diagnosed with asthma, but shrugged off both potential limitations. Two of his brothers, Ganga and Kamal, followed their father into the Gurkhas, sending money home to support Nirmal’s education at Small Heaven Higher Secondary, an English-speaking school in Chitwan. There he took on the bullies by practising kickboxing, becoming regional champion. He had another brother, Jit, and a younger sister, Anita.

He grew up wanting to be either a Gurkha, like his father and brothers, or a government official. “But I wanted to be Nepal’s version of Robin Hood, stealing from the rich and giving to the poor,” he said. He chose the former, was selected at his second attempt and in 2003 joined the Gurkha Training Company at Catterick Garrison, North Yorkshire, only to be bombarded with questions about Everest.

In 2006 he married Suchi, who works in dentistry and is the daughter of a Gurkha. They lived in Eastleigh, near Southampton, and she survives him with Himani, their young daughter.

Deployed to Afghanistan in 2007, he was involved in sweeping vast areas of land for improvised explosive devices with Royal Marines Commandos. He also took part in gun battles and attached L9 bar mines to the doors of enemy compounds. His unit patrolled open desert valleys in the baking heat, making their presence known to anyone watching and “checking in with the friendly locals, while taking potshots from the not-so-friendly”.

Learning of operations elsewhere, including hostage rescues, hard arrests on serious Taliban players and door-kicking raids, all performed by the Special Air Service (SAS) or Special Boat Service (SBS), he wanted “to be one of those guys”. In 2009 he became the first Gurkha to pass selection for the SBS, fitting in by learning British sitcom humour and dirty jokes.

He also learnt to fend off negative thoughts, a technique he later put to use on the mountains. “If you have frostbite or diarrhoea, concentrate on your bad knee instead. Sounds crazy, right? But that’s it, think about something worse.”

In the SBS Purja specialised as a trauma medic and in July 2010 was deployed on active service, rushing through houses and enemy compounds, coming face to face with dangerous enemy forces, or IED booby-traps. “Kicking in doors was exciting, but terrifying,” he recalled. On one occasion he was shot during a gunfight. “Having taken up a position on a compound roof, firing my weapon while lying flat on my belly, I was struck by something. I wasn’t sure by what at first, but it was powerful enough to knock me from the building,” he said. Fortunately, the round had only sliced across his face, doing more damage to his rifle butt. He resumed fire with a pistol until the operation concluded and his wound could be patched up.

Meanwhile, he had begun mountaineering, trekking to Everest base camp in 2012 and, despite little experience, climbing the 6,119m Lobuche East. In 2014 he took a diploma in security management at Loughborough University. Two years later he used a period of leave to make the first of his six climbs of Everest, covering the £50,000 cost by telling the bank that he needed to borrow £15,000 “to buy a car” and draining his savings for the rest. Lack of acclimatisation meant he developed a pulmonary oedema, excess fluid in the lungs. Embarrassed, he descended to recover before returning and making it to the top. On the way down he rescued an abandoned Indian climber in distress for which he was rewarded with an MBE.
He climbed Everest again in 2017 with a team of Gurkhas as part of G200E, a delayed celebration of their 200th anniversary of service to the British Crown in 2015. While others recuperated, he climbed Mount Lhotse (8,516m) and Mount Makalu (8,485m), the world’s fourth and fifth highest peaks.

Sensing his desire to move into full-time mountaineering, the SBS promoted him to cold-weather warfare instructor while the SAS tried to lure him with a one-year, high-altitude climbing programme. However, in 2018 he sacrificed his full military pension, “a life-changing chunk of money”, to concentrate on Project Possible, funding himself through sponsorship, notably from Bremont the watch manufacturer, and by remortgaging the family home. “Walking out on such a prestigious career had felt risky, but I was prepared to gamble everything for my ambition,” he wrote in his memoir Beyond Possible (2020), in which he demonstrates a somewhat unorthodox relationship with fear.

Purja’s alpha-male style was sometimes the subject of fierce criticism. Some felt he took his own motivational talks too literally; others that he pushed fellow climbers too hard. One friend in Tibet warned him of jealous rivals, adding: “It takes only one push for you to disappear from the mountain for good.”

On July 21, 2026, Purja scaled the 8,035m Gasherbrum II in Pakistan without supplemental oxygen, a record 57th ascent of a peak above 8,000 meters. Nine days later he began a spontaneous climb of Broad Peak in Pakistan with a group of fellow mountaineers. “This wasn’t planned. But opportunities don’t scream: they whisper to those already working in silence,” he wrote in typically upbeat manner. Hours later they were caught in an avalanche that swept down Broad Peak. He was not heard from again.