Shocking Update on the INSANE 2026 Climbing Accident With Nirmal Purja transcript

July 30th, 2026. Broad peak, Pakistan. At 9:20 in the morning, 10 climbers were swept off the mountain in a single moving wall of snow. Nobody raised the alarm for 13 hours. What almost nobody understood that morning is that the avalanche was the last domino in the chain, not the first. This is the brutal August update on the death of Nurmal Persia. Welcome to tourist tragedies. Broad Peak is not the mountain people put on posters.

It stands 8,051 m above sea level in the Kakorum range of northern Pakistan, 12th on the list of the world's 14 highest mountains. And it spends its entire existence being overlooked in favor of the peak sitting 8 km to the west. That peak is K2. Somewhere along the way, Broad Peak picked up the nickname the friendly giant. That nickname has probably done more damage than anything else on the mountain because Broad Peak is considered one of the most punishing ascents of all 14 of the 8,000 m peaks.

And in July, that valley is busy. Broad Peak sits in the same basin as K2, which means that for 6 weeks every summer, the caracorum fills up with the most ambitious climbers on the planet. Most of them trying to tick off two or three 8,000 m peaks on a single trip. That is a fairly modern habit. Hold on to it because it matters later. To reach the top from the west, you have to cross a section between camp 2 and camp 3 where the upper mountain funnels everything it sheds into one long gully.

Snow, ice, rock, all of it drains down the same line, and there is no way around it. Picture standing at the bottom of a chute more than a vertical mile long, [music] roughly twice the height of the tallest building on Earth, and then walking across the bottom of it. The part that I find hardest to sit with is this. The mountain had been sending warnings for almost 2 weeks and most people listened. Not one expedition walked away early, not two, but very nearly every commercial team in that valley.

By July 25th, Broad Peak base [music] camp was emptying out. Tents came down. Porters were booked for the walk back to Scardu. Four teams stayed and the man leading the largest of them had spent the previous seven years as the most recognizable mountaineer alive on the planet. So who exactly stays on a mountain after almost everyone else has already gone home. Nirmal Pura Nims die [music] born in Magagdi Nepal in 1983. a girka in the British Army, then a soldier in the Special Boat Service, and then in 2019, something nobody in the sport saw coming.

He climbed all 14 of the world's 8,000 m peaks in 189 days. The record he broke had stood at 7 years and 10 months. He did not shave time off it. He [music] deleted it. Netflix turned that into a documentary and turned him into the first genuine celebrity mountaineer of the streaming era. Then in January 2021, he did the thing the climbing world had spent decades calling impossible and made the first winter [music] ascent of K2 with nine other Nepali climbers, all 10 of them walking the final meters arm in arm, singing the national anthem without bottled oxygen.

For you and me, a mountain is a mountain. For him, there were two records left on the board, and he was chasing both of them at once. He wanted to become the first person to climb all 14 8000ers three times. He also wanted to climb all 14 twice without supplemental oxygen. Broad Peak was a late addition to his 2026 expedition. If he had summited it, he would have been one single mountain away from the second of those firsts.

He turned 43 on July 25th. He died 5 days later. And he was not alone up there. Keeli Pembba Sherpa, one of the 10 men from the winter K2 team, was on that slope. So was poor Bahadur Gurung, known as Yukta, who the previous autumn had helped support the first ski descent of Everest's north face. Nadira al-Harthy of Oman, the first Omani woman to stand on top of Everest. So Saki, a Pakistani guide and photographer who had told people this would be his last expedition before he retired.

Mallerie Gase of the United States, Wong Jong of China, Nema Sherpa, Nwang Thindu Sherpa, and Galu Sherpa of Nepal. Before the climb, Purga posted about the mountain on Instagram. He wrote, "Broad [music] peak, I asked for nothing but safe passage up and back down. To understand how strange the final week on that mountain was, you have to meet two men who are still alive because they left. David Klene is Hungarian. He led his country's first attempt on Broad Peak back in the year 2000.

Ian Overton is an American emergency room nurse. The two of them had climbed together before, and this summer they had been living underneath Broad Peak for a month, planning to climb it the hard way [music] with no bottled oxygen and no porters above base camp. In the middle of July, Klein was optimistic. He told the climbing press that conditions on the mountain were reasonable and that avalanche danger was low. His logic was simple.

Most of the snow that was going to slide off that face had already slid off it. On July 19th, he followed a Pakistani rope fixing team up the west side of the mountain. 19 hours of climbing. He turned around somewhere between 50 and 70 vertical meters below the summit. Breathing nothing but the air at 8,000 m. Overton had already gone back down to base camp, hit hard by the altitude, 50 m after 19 hours. Think about how close that is.

But the night before that push, something had already changed. On the night of July 18th, a huge windstorm hit the mountain, moving enormous volumes of snow around the upper slopes. Overton later described what the route felt like afterwards. The benches between camp 3 and camp 2 [music] had a heavy wind crust that you punched straight through. Everything below camp 2 had gone loose and slushy, melting out fast with rock coming free and ice failing.

Then around July 22nd, it started snowing properly heavily day after day. Klein thought hard about going back up [music] and decided against it. And the reason he gives is the single most important sentence in this entire story. After a big snowfall, he says, a good forecast is not enough on its own. You need several days of clear weather in which nobody is moving on the mountain because the new snow has to do one of two things.

It either has to bond to the slope underneath it or [music] it has to come off. So he and Overton watched the weather. Wind stayed too high. Humidity across the whole region stayed elevated, which meant more fresh snow was likely right the way through to the 29th. On July 25th, they packed up and walked out. They were not the only ones. Team after team came to the same conclusion that week. Base camp thinned out. By the last days of the month, the valley underneath the friendly giant was close to deserted.

Four teams remained on the mountain. A Pakistani guide with a single American client. a seven summit TX group, a team from Imagine Nepal whose leader was over on K2 and the elite expedia. And by the 29th of July, whatever they were reading on their forecasts, it was good enough. The plan was on. The team moved up through camp 1 and into camp 2 in position, [music] ready to go for the top. July 30th, 2026, 5:33 in the morning.

Pura's tracker pings from 6,166 m. That is camp 2. Nadra Alharthy's device reads almost exactly the same. [music] It is dark. It is cold. Head torches, krampons, the compressed silence of a team that has done this hundreds of times. They start climbing. There is no reason for anyone to be nervous at this point. [music] This is an experienced team on a route most of them have climbed before. moving in the cold hours before the sun softens anything, which is exactly the way you are supposed to do it. 7:00 in the morning, 703 to be exact.

The team has reached 6,430 m. That is a steady pace. [music] That is a strong team moving well on a good day. Just before 9, both trackers report again. 6,660 m, 2 hours and 30 minutes of climbing, roughly 500 vertical meters gained. Everything going exactly to plan. And this is the part you need to hold on to. At 6,660 m on the west face of Broad Peak, they are inside the funnel. [music] This is the stretch between camp 2 and camp 3.

It is the collector. Every gram of snow that comes off the shoulder above them travels through this exact slope on its way to the glacier. There are 8 days of new snow sitting above their heads. So, you already know how this ends. You know that none of the 10 came home. What you don't know yet is why a slope that had held for eight straight days chose that exact 2-hour window and why the people whose job it was to come looking did not find out until the middle of the night.

To understand what happened next, you need to understand what a winds slab actually is. [music] When snow falls gently in still air, it settles as a soft, loose layer. And over a few days, it slowly welds itself to whatever is underneath. When snow arrives on a hard wind instead, something completely different happens. The wind picks the crystals up, smashes them, and packs them down into a dense sheet. Think of the difference between a heap of loose flour and a brick of flour that has been pressed solid in a mold.

That dense sheet then sits on top of the old hardened surface below it. And here is the problem. It is not glued to it. It is lying on it. The closest everyday comparison is a length of carpet laid across polished floorboards with no adhesive. Walk on it carefully and it holds. Put weight on it in the wrong place and the whole sheet goes at once as one piece. taking everything on top of it with it. That is why avalanche forecasters talk about a slab releasing rather than snow sliding.

A wind slab does not [music] crumble. It cracks across its entire width like a windscreen and then it moves. Now, go back to Klein's rule. After a heavy snowfall, the new snow either bonds or it releases. And you want it to do that while nobody is standing underneath it. On broad peak in 2026, the heavy snow started on roughly July 22nd, and the region stayed humid and unsettled with likely fresh snow through the 29th, [music] which means the snow on that face never got its quiet days. 9:20 in the morning, the slope releases.

Above the climbers, the slab cracks. It moves as one sheet. On a face that steep, [music] it is traveling faster than a car within seconds. There is nowhere to go. There is no shelter on that section. There is no time to unclip. All 10 climbers are taken. No shout on a radio, no flare. On a face that steep, the whole event is over in under a minute. Pura's tracker records him more than 2,000 ft lower than his position half an hour earlier. 800 m straight down the funnel.

That is the height of the tallest building on Earth. Alarthy is carried further, more than a vertical mile, almost all the way to the base of the mountain. Both trackers show the same signature. [music] A violent drop, then one small final movement, then nothing that makes any sense. [music] The devices are still transmitting. They are transmitting from under the snow. Nobody answers a radio call. Nobody answers the next one either.

The sun keeps climbing. The glacier keeps glaring white. and down at base camp in perfect weather. Nobody knows. Quick heads up, every week I drop a new update you won't find anywhere else. Please subscribe. The Alpine Club of Pakistan did not find out until 10:00 that night. Their own words, "They only found out at 10 p.m. By then, the light was long gone and no helicopter was flying." The response when it came was extraordinary.

Pakistani and Nepali climbers went up from camp 1 on foot. Two army helicopters flew search patterns. Local mountaineers who had been preparing for their own summits flew in to help instead. And over on K2, 8 km away, the ropes had just been fixed high on the mountain and teams were pushing for the top. Almost every single one of them turned around and came down to help. Every commercial expedition on the Caracorum [music] 8000ers was cancelled.

Friday brought two bodies down, then a third. A drone found seven more in the snow. By Sunday, ground teams had reached Persia himself along with Wong Jong, Nema Sherpa, and Keely Pemba Sherpa. Seven recovered, three still on the mountain, including Sohail Saki, the guide who was going to retire after this one. In Chiwan, at the school where Purge aborted for 8 years as a boy, students gathered around his photograph with candles.

When you lay the sequence of events in order, a clear picture begins to form. Factor one. July 18th. A windstorm loads the upper face with dense packed snow. Not falling snow, transported snow, which is the kind that builds slabs. Factor two. July 22nd onward, heavy snowfall on top of that, and a regional weather pattern that keeps feeding fresh snow onto the mountain through the 29th. The slope never gets the still quiet days it needs to either bond or release on its own.

Factor three. July 25th the exodus. And this is the factor almost nobody talks about. So I want to give it a name because I think it explains more of these accidents than weather ever will call it summit debt. Summit debt is what builds up when you have already spent the money, already burned the weeks, already told the world what you are attempting, and the goal is close enough to touch. Persia was one summit away from being one summit away.

[music] Broad Peak was a late addition to his season, which means the entire trip existed to be climbed, not to be [music] abandoned. When your base camp is full of other teams, other people's caution is free information. When your base camp empties, that information leaves with them. What is left is you, your plan, [music] and everything you have already spent. I want to be very clear here. This is not me second-guessing a man who had more high altitude judgment than almost anyone who has ever lived.

Hindsight cost nothing. Every one of those 10 people had been in that valley for weeks, looking at that mountain with their own eyes. Factor four. [music] And this is the number I gave you at the very start. Nobody raised the alarm for 13 hours. A slope released at 9:20 in the morning. The Alpine Club of Pakistan was told at 10:00 at night. An entire day of clear light, of flyable weather, of helicopters sitting on the ground in Scardu gone.

In an avalanche, survival is measured in minutes. But if anyone in that debris field had been alive at 10 9, the system that was supposed to find them did not start looking until it was dark. That is the chain. A storm. A snowfall that never settled. an empty base camp and 13 hours of silence. Nirmal Porya did not die because he was careless. He died because a slope that had been loading itself with snow for 12 straight days [music] released at the exact minute that 10 people were crossing the one place on the mountain where everything above them comes down.

Do you think a faster alarm would have changed anything at all? Or was this already decided the second that slab cracked at 9:20 in the morning? Let me know in the comments. I read every single one.