Karakoram Dispatch

What Really Happened on Broad Peak, the Deadliest High-Alpine Tragedy in More than a Decade

Andoram Desk9 August 2026 · 14:33 UTC · 4 sources

Two men stood on a steep couloir on Broad Peak on 2 August, several hundred feet below the body of their friend, and ran out of rope for the second time that day. Above them the slope curved into an overhang. Below them was a crevasse. Then they heard the sound that had put the body there in the first place, and they were directly in its path.

The avalanche that killed ten climbers on Broad Peak was over in seconds. The attempt to bring them home took weeks, cost more than anyone planned, and exposed something the sport has not resolved: in the Karakoram, the machinery for getting people off a mountain is far weaker than the machinery for getting them on it.

The window that was not really a window

Heavy snow fell across the range from 22 to 26 July. Jenjen Lama, a guide and base camp manager for Seven Summit Treks who was across the Godwin-Austen glacier on K2, described the calculation to Outside in terms that deserve to be quoted rather than paraphrased.

“It snowed heavily from the 22nd to the 26th. In the Karakoram, you’re supposed to wait five days for the snow to settle before you climb. But the weather windows here are too small. If you wait, it just starts to snow again.”
“If you want to reach the summit, you just have to take the risk. It’s do or die. Fifty-fifty. There is no other way to do it.”

That is the whole problem stated by someone standing in it. The recommended wait after that snowfall would have run past the next system. The Karakoram does not offer the long settled spells that make Himalayan spring seasons workable, and a party that observes the textbook interval frequently observes it all the way home.

Ten climbers left Broad Peak Base Camp, at roughly 16,000 feet, on the morning of 28 July, on one of the first clear days after the storm. They came from four independent expeditions running on similar schedules, and they were the season’s second wave; fresh snow had erased the tracks of a group that had gone up ten days before. They followed fixed ropes towards Camp I at 18,500 feet. Earlier reporting placed the avalanche on 30 July, and outlets have dated it inconsistently since.

Who was on the slope

Among them was Nirmal “Nims” Purja, 43, attempting something no one had done: all fourteen 8,000-metre peaks without supplemental oxygen, twice over. After Broad Peak only Cho Oyu would have remained. His team was outfitted by Elite Exped, one of the largest operators in the business.

The dead, as confirmed by the Alpine Club of Pakistan and reported by Gripped, included Purja; the Chinese climber Wang Zhong; the Nepali guides Nima Sherpa and Kili Pemba Sherpa; the Nepali climber Pur Bahadur Gurung; the Omani climber Nadhira Ahmed Abdullah Al Harthy; and the American climber Mallory Geis. Nawang Thindu Sherpa and the Pakistani guide Sohail Sakhi were among those still on the mountain as the recovery ground on.

Our initial report on the avalanche set out how the first thirty-six hours of coverage diverged on the timing, the altitude and the number of bodies recovered.

Two men and not enough rope

The detail that should trouble the industry is not the avalanche. It is the arithmetic of the response.

Nawang Thindu Sherpa’s body lay at around 19,000 feet on the lower flanks. Pem Dorje Sherpa and “Speed” Dawa Sherpa went up to bring him down, fixing rope as they climbed so they could lower him afterwards. They carried a thousand feet of it. It ran out well short. They descended, borrowed another three hundred and fifty feet from other rescuers, and went back up.

It ran out again, at the lip of a crevasse where the slope steepened into an overhang. They built an anchor and stopped to think. That is when the second avalanche came down the couloir above them.

“We carried as much rope as we could manage. This rescue really needed eight people, but it was only the two of us.” — Pem Dorje Sherpa, to Outside

Eight people were needed. Two were available. Nobody had done anything wrong in that moment; there simply was not a rescue capability in the valley proportionate to the number of climbers it was serving.

The decision to go back in

By 4 August the operation was in its sixth day. Helicopters were grounded by weather, and the long-line option was slipping away. Eight of the ten had been located and four carried down, but three — Purja, Nima Sherpa and Wang Zhong — could not be moved below 5,000 m, because the ground between them and Base Camp kept avalanching.

Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, who made the first winter ascent of K2 alongside Purja in January 2021, decided to go into that ground anyway. “I will try to climb the treacherous section of Broad Peak to retrieve three bodies,” he said in comments reported by ExplorersWeb. His own posts made the motive plain enough: My loving brothers Kilu, Wang and Nims, we will take you back home to see families.

By 5 August seven bodies had reached Base Camp. The Alpine Club of Pakistan called the mission “exceptionally challenging and technically demanding” and named the Pakistani climbers Sirbaz Khan, Abid Baig and Sherbaz alongside the Nepali climbers Dipen Gurung and Pemba Chhewang Sherpa. Three climbers remained unrecovered, with the club saying efforts would continue when conditions allowed.

The uncomfortable pattern

Mingma G and Purja had worked together for years, and their teams had a documented habit of pushing when others turned back. Two weeks before Broad Peak that approach produced a summit on Gasherbrum II. In autumn 2023 on Shishapangma it produced the deaths of two American climbers and their Sherpa guides.

Stating that is not an accusation. It is the record, and it is the context in which a decision to climb after a five-day storm on a two-day wait has to be read. The same appetite that produces the results that sell expeditions produces the days that fill obituaries, and the industry has not found a way to keep one without the other.

What compounds it commercially is that four separate expeditions converged on the same narrow window. Nobody coordinated that. The weather did, and the weather is getting less generous.

What is still unresolved

Three climbers have not been brought down. The avalanche date is still reported inconsistently across outlets. Broad Peak’s own elevation appears as 8,047 m in some accounts and 8,051 m in others, and the altitude at which Nawang Thindu Sherpa came to rest is given as roughly 19,000 feet in one account and about 6,000 m in another — a gap of several hundred metres in the record of where a man died.

None of that will be settled by the operators involved. It will be settled, if at all, by whoever keeps the documents.