Beyond Possible: One Soldier, Fourteen Peaks — My Life In The Death Zone

by Nimsdai Purja

Was I scared of dying in those brief seconds? No way. I’d have taken death over cowardice any time, especially if it arrived in an attempt to push myself beyond what was considered humanly achievable.

Quitting wasn’t in my blood, even in a near-death crisis. I wasn’t a sheep waiting to be prodded by the shepherd; I was a lion and I refused to walk and talk with the rest.

My confidence had taken a slight dent, so I gripped the rope tightly and double-checked each and every footfall until my self-belief returned. There was now a different mindset in play. As I planted my boots in the shifting snow, I told myself that death was going to come for me at some point – maybe on a mountain during Project Possible, maybe in old age, decades down the line – but not on Nanga Parbat, and not within the next heartbeat.

But to me it presented an opportunity to prove to the world that everything, anything, was possible if an individual dedicated their heart and mind to a plan.

I’d overreached and the mountains were delivering their first major lesson: Never burn yourself out unnecessarily

The Gurkha soldier was legendary and their motto, Better to Die Than to Be a Coward, conjured up images of heroism. That was only enhanced by stories of successful war missions and against-all-odds adventure.

From an early age, I believed in the power of positive thinking; I didn’t allow myself to become poleaxed by illnesses, or chronic ailments that carried the potential to afflict other individuals for years. I felt like a human antibiotic because I’d taught myself to think that way: I trusted myself to heal. I believed. And the same attitude eventually powered me into the British military, where I had next-level resilience under pressure. It surrounded me like a force field and I soon learned that if a warrior had relentless self-belief, anything was possible. I’d need every ounce of it once installed into the Gurkhas.

I wasn’t a religious person. While my parents were Hindus, I didn’t follow one single higher power. Instead, I liked to celebrate everything. Sometimes I went to church, other times I’d visit a Buddhist monastery, but I always wanted to learn new ideas; I was open and human, I respected every religion in the world, but I had faith in myself more than anything.

‘Today I will give 100 per cent and survive’, I thought at the beginning of each day. ‘I’ll worry about tomorrow when tomorrow comes’.

In the face of my toughest challenge yet, I hadn’t cracked. I’d bent and flexed. I was malleable.

I had a code: bravery over everything else. And there was no other way for me to live.

This was an ethos I’d long applied to life: if I ever got up in the morning and told myself that I was going to do three hundred push-ups that day, I made sure to do them, wholeheartedly, because to skip the effort would be to break a commitment, and breaking commitments led to failure. But I also understood that getting angry about the situation wasn’t going to help. Military training had taught me it was imperative to remain emotionally strong: flipping a negative event into positive momentum was the only way to remain focused on my primary objective.

With Project Possible I wanted to highlight the skills of Nepal’s climbers, but for that to work I needed my team to have the same philosophies as me. I didn’t want sheep, or dedicated followers. I wanted a group of thinkers.

The sky was a bright blue; thick cloud drifted around the higher edges, but I was locked into a one-to-one conversation with the wall of rock and ice ahead. In a way, I wanted to ask the mountain for permission.

Weird things stick with a person during chaotic events. I remember the perfect visibility on Kanchenjunga that day and there was a bright blue sky around us. Whenever I took a second to check my surroundings, or the line below, the views resembled a picture postcard, or one of those aerial photos from National Geographic magazine.

In the mountains, distressed climbers died because they, or the people around them, were ill-equipped to work effectively in deteriorating circumstances. Those situations, to a degree, were painful but understandable – they were usually caused by human error or accidents. But the deaths of Biplab and Kuntal felt totally unacceptable, because their endings had been settled by choice. Somebody could have made an effort to help us. They could have been saved.

I’d noticed that whenever people failed, if they were unable to top the summit or were forced back by fatigue or altitude sickness, they had a tendency to train their excuses upon the other people climbing in that window – their guides, fellow mountaineers, or even the individuals responsible for managing Everest. That drove me crazy. In life I was always encouraged to admit to a mistake.

I realised Project Possible now presented me with the platform to speak out on climate change, a position I’d hoped to reach when I first announced my idea. People were now watching my progress. I needed to alert them about the damage that was being inflicted around the world by posting one or two comments on social media, each one outlining my fears.

‘Whatever you decide, can you please not increase the cost of climbing Everest?’ I said. ‘A price shouldn’t be placed on nature. The mountains are there to be enjoyed by all.’

I’d rather have died in an avalanche than an execution.

Somebody pulled out a bottle of vodka and some canned tuna.

I knew more than anyone that nature didn’t care for reputation, age, gender, or background. It was equally indifferent to personality: the mountain couldn’t give a shit if the people exploring it were morally nasty or nice. All I could do was to place myself into the right frame of mind. Then I’d be able to tackle the challenges above.

The American writer Mark Twain once wrote that if a person’s job was to eat a frog, then it was best to take care of business first thing in the morning. But if the work involved eating two frogs, it was best to eat the bigger one first. In other words: Get the hardest job out of the way.

death happens fast on the mountain and to give up, or to be half-hearted, will only cause you to stop. And to stop is to freeze and die.’

I suppose to admit that pain was part of my job would be to accept its reality, and to do that would increase my chances of becoming crushed by it. What the UK Special Forces required were people that could grin and bear it. I sucked up the agony thrown my way and laughed as much as I could.

Suffering sometimes created a weird sense of satisfaction for me. The psychological power of always giving 100 per cent, where simply knowing I was delivering my all, was enough to drive me on a little bit further: it created a sense of pride when seeing a job through to the end.

My goals went way beyond culture or caste, regiment or country. I was representing the efforts of the human race.

The story of a climber from Chitwan and his attempts to scale the world’s tallest mountains in record-breaking time didn’t carry the same impact as a mountaineer working towards a similar goal from New York, Manchester, or Paris. Even though I was technically a British citizen, my nationality had positioned me under the radar of almost everyone.

Cloud had swept in, an ominous rumble of thunder was echoing through the valley below, and as I watched, it was impossible not to be awed by the size and scale of what lay ahead. No matter the weather raging around it, a mountain like Shishapangma always stayed solid. It never buckled or broke, and instead seemed impervious to the harsh elements swirling around its mass. I wanted to be like that.

The boundaries for what was considered achievable had expanded and I took a lot of pride from that.

The mountains are there to be scaled; I have only to pick which ones to take on and the style in which I want to do them. There are challenges to be conquered based on speed, style and physical effort – there are no limits to the test I might set myself. The chances I might be killed while trying to attempt those missions are certainly higher than anything I’ve risked before, but that is the whole point: I have to push my limits to the max. Sitting tight, waiting it out and living in the past, has never been my thing. I want to be at the world’s highest point again, knowing it might slip out from underneath me at any moment. Because that is the only way to live – and to die.