The Karakoram giant is told as the “easiest” 8,000-meter peak. This July it swept ten climbers, including Nirmal “Nims” Purja, down its west face after most other teams had already read the snow and gone home.
On the evening of June 9, 1957, four Austrians stood on what most climbers before them would have called the summit of Broad Peak. It wasn’t. The mountain’s crest runs on for roughly a kilometer and a half, and the point they had reached, now called the foresummit, sits about 17 meters below the true one. Marcus Schmuck, Fritz Wintersteller, Kurt Diemberger, and Hermann Buhl kept walking the ridge into the dark and finished the first ascent without bottled oxygen and without high-altitude porters.
The mountain has been misread ever since. Climbers still turn around at the foresummit believing they have topped out. Guiding companies still list the 26,414-foot (8,051-meter) peak among the most attainable of the world’s fourteen 8,000-meter mountains.
Broad Peak
Sixty-nine years later, in the last week of July 2026, the people who had spent the most time under the mountain were leaving it. David Klein, a Hungarian who led his country’s first attempt on Broad Peak in 2000, had been at base camp for a month with Ian Overton, an American emergency-room nurse; the pair had climbed together on Nanga Parbat in winter 2012 and were attempting Broad Peak without supplemental oxygen or porter support.
On July 19, Klein followed a Pakistani rope-fixing team up the west side for 19 hours and stopped 50 to 70 vertical meters short of the summit. He considered a second attempt. Then, around July 22, heavy snow began to fall.
Klein’s reasoning, as he later explained it to reporters, was the standard avalanche calculus: after a big snowfall, good weather alone is not enough. Fresh snow needs days to either bond to the slope or come down on its own, and until it does one of those two things, nobody should be moving underneath it. Most teams at base camp reached the same conclusion and packed up. On July 25, Klein and Overton walked out too.
A few teams with summit ambitions stayed. Among them was Elite Exped, the guiding company co-founded by Nirmal “Nims” Purja, the most famous high-altitude climber of his generation. Why those teams remained on the mountain after the July snowfall is still not clear. What is clear is what the snow did next.
At around 9 a.m. local time on Thursday, July 30, an avalanche released on Broad Peak’s west side and ran down the main gully that carries the standard route, according to the Alpine Club of Pakistan. Ten climbers were caught. Some were carried as much as a vertical mile.
The Alpine Club’s statement late Thursday listed the group: five Nepali climbers led by Purja, Pakistani guide Sohail Sakhi of Moving Mountains, Omani climber Nadhira Al-Harthy, American climber Mallory Geis, a Chinese climber identified only as Mr. Wang, and one other foreign national. The entire team, the statement said, had been out of contact since the slide.
The GPS record sketches the morning. Purja carried a Garmin tracker, and its first pings on Thursday placed him at 6,166 meters (20,231 feet), roughly at Camp 2, at 5:33 a.m. Pakistan time. Al-Harthy’s device showed a similar position. By 7:03 a.m. the team had climbed to 6,430 meters.
Just before 9 a.m., both trackers pinged from around 6,660 meters (21,850 feet). Half an hour later, Purja’s device was reporting from more than 2,000 feet lower on the mountain. Al-Harthy’s signal vanished from the upper slopes and reappeared more than a vertical mile below.
Mingma Gyabu “Mingma David” Sherpa, Purja’s co-founder at Elite Exped, pointed to continued movement on Purja’s tracker in the hours after the fall and pressed for a rescue, holding out hope in text messages that his partner was still alive. The data since then has been harder to read: the device has produced a few more pings suggesting slight drift, but at zero recorded speed and with a failing battery. Trackers buried in snow or lodged in steep terrain often keep transmitting while their reported positions wander, so the movement may mean nothing at all.
Nims Purja Confirmed Dead in Broad Peak Avalanche
By Friday, the Alpine Club of Pakistan confirmed that the bodies of two climbers had been recovered: Al-Harthy, who in 2019 became the first Omani woman to summit Everest, and Pur Bahadur Gurung, known as Yukta, a Nepali climber who had spent years working on the world’s highest peaks and who last autumn helped support Jim Morrison’s first ski descent of the Hornbein Couloir on Everest’s north face. Drones had located seven more climbers; whether any were alive was unknown. One remained unaccounted for.
Broad Peak’s reputation and its record do not match. The mountain sits across the Godwin-Austen Glacier from K2, and next to its neighbor it looks manageable: a long snow slope, a col, a ridge. That west-side route is exactly why the marketing works, and exactly where the danger concentrates.
The standard line climbs a broad flank that funnels into gullied terrain, and everything that releases above it, as the July snowfall eventually did, comes down through the line of ascent. The climbers who left in late July were not reading anything exotic. They were reading a loaded slope above the only road up.
What Purja did for Himalayan climbing is difficult to overstate. In 2019, a former British soldier in the Special Boat Service with only a handful of 8,000-meter summits behind him, he set out to climb all fourteen in a single push. The existing record for the full set, held by South Korea’s Kim Chang-ho, stood at seven years and ten months.
Nims Dai
Purja started on Annapurna on April 23 and finished on Shishapangma on October 29: 189 days. Netflix released “14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible” in late 2021 and made him the first streaming-era celebrity mountaineer. Commercial expedition style changed around him; clients who once besieged a single summit per season now chain several 8,000-meter peaks in weeks, often under Elite Exped’s guidance.
The criticism arrived with the fame. He used bottled oxygen. He climbed fixed trade routes behind some of the strongest Sherpa climbers alive. The record, his critics argued, was a solved logistics problem. His answer came in January 2021, when he summited K2 in winter, the last 8,000-meter peak never climbed in that season, with nine other Nepali climbers, walking the final meters together, and did it without supplemental oxygen.
His reputation off the mountain is more contested. In May 2024, Finnish climber Lotta Hintsa and American physician April Leonardo publicly accused Purja of sexual harassment. Through his lawyer, Purja called the allegations false and defamatory and denied any wrongdoing.
Broad Peak, he said in an Instagram post before the climb, was a late addition to his summer. A summit would have left him one mountain short of becoming the first person to climb all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks twice without oxygen.
In that same post, he addressed the mountain directly: “Broad Peak, I ask for nothing but safe passage up and back down.”
Search and rescue operations for Purja and the missing climbers continue.
Sources: Alpine Club of Pakistan statements (July 30–31, 2026); Garmin tracker data as reported by National Geographic; David Klein interviews with ExplorersWeb and National Geographic; Nirmal Purja via Instagram; Elite Exped communications.