Nirmal Purja Missing After Deadly Avalanche on Broad Peak in Pakistan
According to Al Jazeera, Nirmal Purja—"Nims Dai"—the Nepal-born former British army soldier who bagged all fourteen 8,000-meter peaks in a record 189 days back in 2019, is missing alongside six others after an avalanche ripped through Broad Peak in Pakistan.
Clay Masterson, Backcountry Conditioning Expert & Gear Pragmatist·updated August 01, 2026
Pakistani rescuers pulled four bodies from the 8,051-meter peak on Friday in weather that grounded helicopters, identifying three: Omani climber Nadhira Al Harthy, the first Omani woman to summit Everest; Nepalese veteran Pur Bahadur Gurung, who had summited Everest ten times and held a K2 round-trip record under 24 hours; and American Sarah Mallory Geis, 39, of San Antonio, who had closed her Pilates studio earlier this year to chase a high-altitude life. The fourth body remains unidentified.
The Setup
The ten-person expedition included five Nepali climbers, Pakistani guide and high-altitude photographer Sohail Sakhi, a Chinese climber identified only as Wang, and one other foreign climber. The slide hit around midday Thursday on the world's 12th-highest peak—26,414 feet, widely considered one of Pakistan's most technical ascents. Purja's 14-peak record stood until 2023 and was the subject of the Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing is Impossible. Six climbers remain unaccounted for. The search zone, per Gilgit-Baltistan tourism deputy Sajid Hussain, is "remote and difficult." Fewer than three dozen mountaineers have stood on all fourteen 8,000ers.
What This Tells You
Strip the Netflix footage out of it for a second. Purja was elite. Gurung was elite. Al Harthy had Everest and K2. Geis was stepping up to her first 8,000er. The slab did not care about their résumés.
If you're a trail runner eyeing high-altitude objectives—or just hard winter alpine days—here's the part most training plans skip: objective hazard doesn't grade on your fitness curve. Snowpack stability, serac collapse, slide paths run on their own clock, not yours. The work that actually buys you margin isn't in the weight room. It lives in reading the local bulletin the night before, hiring a guide who will tell you no, and walking away from a summit window that looks blue but smells wrong.
Build the aerobic base. Capacity is what hauls you out when weather flips, when hypoxia stacks, when the descent takes twice as long as the ascent. Months, not weeks. Earn the mountain. And when conditions on your own objectives look shaky, watch the bulletin for 72 hours, not 24. If your guide is hedging, you hedge too. That's not weakness. That's how you come home.