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

by Nimsdai Purja

I also understood the healing power of nature. It felt good to be outside, climbing at altitude across an environment that didn’t care about race, religion, colour or gender. Only humans showed bias, the mountains were impartial. There was no judgement. Whenever friends had opened up to me about the serious emotional problems they might have been having, I’d taken them climbing. The mountains were just about the best therapy a person could experience. Life felt so much simpler when you were connected to nature by a climbing rope and a set of crampons.

In many ways, I was running a high-altitude equivalent of the UK Special Forces Selection on Annapurna.

‘Nimsdai, if nobody brings food and water from Camp 2, I’ll bring you some from Base Camp.’ Who’s this? ‘It’s Gesman.’

The date was 23 April 2019. A clock was ticking and the world was watching. My race was on.

But presented with the choice between dying slowly and uncomfortably through age, or passing away during an expedition or mission, my feelings were clear: I would definitely take the latter. I wasn’t afraid to die on the mountain; I’d rather burn out in style than drift away quietly.

On average around three hundred people climbed Everest successfully every season; at Kanchenjunga that number came in at around twenty-five.

I was fast learning that the biggest challenge for any climber was self-awareness; it’s impossible for anyone to run or hide from themselves, their truth, on the mountain.

I moved closer to check on Biplab, asking if he’d like to speak to anyone on the satellite phone. Although time was against us, I knew that a shot of positivity would stand him in good stead during what was bound to be a long, tough descent. ‘My wife,’ he said. Shortly afterwards, the distanced couple were connected. By the sounds of things, his entire family had gathered around one mobile and Biplab was laughing. He’d located the inspiration and sense of positivity that was so important when making it off the mountain in one piece. There was a feeling of relief and hope. For a brief moment, I believed we were going to be OK.

As far as I was concerned, there was very little room for debate: on missions I’d been encouraged to leave no operator behind. The rules were certainly very different during high- altitude expeditions, but my attitude had been hardwired, plus it was the reason I used oxygen in the first place. ‘Let’s get this dude down as well,’ I said.

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.

The biggest problem facing humanity at this moment in history is our inability to think long-term. Ours is an overcrowded planet, and we worry about the days, weeks and months ahead, but when it comes to the contemplation of our environmental health in twenty or thirty years’ time, we tend to switch off. Maybe the process is too scary to contemplate; it is certainly sobering.

The people I worried for the most were those climbers lost in the chaos; they were in fear and emotionally spiralling. I’d often thought that anxiety at high altitude wasn’t too dissimilar to a drowning event. In the middle of the ocean, somebody who thinks they’re about to go under will grab at anything, or anyone, for buoyancy, even their loved ones. They thrash and panic, often yanking the nearest person down with them in a desperate attempt to survive. Mental freak-outs above 8,000 metres weren’t that dissimilar, and people flapped and made reckless decisions, which often impacted the safety of the climbers around them.

Phase One of the mission had been executed as promised. And I’d broken one of the two promised world records: I’d climbed from the summit of Everest to the summits of Lhotse and then Makalu in forty-eight hours and thirty minutes, smashing my time from 2017.

With a small Bluetooth speaker, the Project Possible team was able to transform any dining tent into a club after dark, banging out Nepalese pop hits and loud rock music into the early hours of the morning, as we passed around bottles of beer and whisky.

‘A terrorist cell hoping to reach Base Camp could probably get here in twenty-four hours. And if they come, they won’t end it with me. So, don’t let people know I’m here – please.’ I was very much erring on the side of caution, but it seemed best not to take the risk, especially when there were plenty of other dangers to stress about. I’d rather have died in an avalanche than an execution.

told myself, ‘You are the champion. You can do this.’ I remembered the stories I’d heard about Muhammad Ali and how, even in his senior years as a fighter, he never considered defeat. Likewise Usain Bolt during his Olympic gold-winning races. At the base camp of every mountain, I tried to think in the same way, never once imagining that the summit above me might be out of reach. Instead, I told myself it was there to be taken. ‘You are going to make this happen,’ I would say. ‘You’re the man here.’

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.

I told them about the UK Special Forces Selection process. How around 200 people put themselves through it every year, knowing that sometimes only around five or six people would qualify. ‘Yeah, there’s always a high risk of failure,’ I said, ‘but those two hundred people all started out from a point of positivity. They didn’t quit before the very first day.’

The time had arrived to deliver my war briefing. ‘Guys, we are the best climbers from Nepal,’ I said. ‘It is time to show the world what we are capable of. Let’s get this done.’

On occasions, my attitude towards climbing a mountain was not dissimilar to the psychological position I’d adopted for military operations. In both circumstances I was never sure if I was going to come back alive, and once a mission was finished, it was often the best course of action to leave safely and efficiently. Of course, I was always supported by information: before military jobs we worked from the gathered intelligence regarding the enemy, their location and their capabilities. On climbing expeditions, we relied heavily on our knowledge of the mountain, weather reports, and our equipment; but some factors were forever beyond our determination in both scenarios. In war, unexpected hostiles might be lurking nearby. During climbs, a rock fall might explode from nowhere. Once a team stepped into action, the unpredictable became a dangerous opponent. The best approach to neutralising it was to work steadily and methodically, without emotion.

Each step had felt torturous as I heaved their weight towards Camp 4, and every now and then I briefly imagined the sweet release of an avalanche collapsing above me. Picturing my fall in the whiteout, I felt the eruption sucking me down deeper, a rock or chunk of ice knocking me unconscious. Out cold, I’d suffocate quickly, blissfully free of pain; the suffering would come to an end. Thankfully, those thoughts were only ever fleeting.

During rare moments of weakness, where I’d briefly envision turning around, I’d think: Yeah, but what happens if I give up now? Sure, quitting would have brought some much-needed respite, but the relief would prove temporary – the longer-lasting pain of giving up would be bloody miserable.

No way was I allowing myself to quit, so I also recalled my undefeated record. I have reached all my objectives, from the Gurkhas to the Special Forces and then at high altitude. Now is not the time to break down.

In many ways, this was the echo of an old mind trick I had used in war. When trying to negotiate pain, I often worked to create a bigger, more controllable hurt, one that would shut out the first – replacing an agony that was beyond my control. If my Bergen felt too heavy, I’d run harder. Any backache I’d been experiencing was soon overshadowed by the jabbing pain in my knees.

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.

In much the same way that making the bed first thing in the morning was a mental cue that a new day was beginning, so the arduous effort required to pull on my boots and crampons was a trigger for the work to come. Self-discipline was my biggest strength during the mission. I was always the first to get up, even when it felt horrendous to do so, and there were times when I wished someone could encourage me. Instead I had to motivate myself at all times to step away from the relative comfort of my shelter.

Throughout my military life I was trained to survive and succeed in almost any environment going, so I found it easy to work through the mountains. But that same mindset was available to every climber. It was possible for a novice to become accustomed to the harsh realities of life in base camps very quickly; after a few days or a few weeks, surviving even higher up the mountain becomes a habit for a lot of people, especially if they have positivity.

Only by communicating with our radio contacts in Base Camp, Kathmandu and London, all of whom were linked up to another GPS to track our location, were we able to get a steer on our exact position. Voices in the clouds told us to move left, right, or forward.

Turning my thinking around, I found fuel: I saw myself a year down the line, fuming at my inability to pull through at the end. I thought of the people that had put their faith in me, the friends I had made along the way – and most of all I considered Suchi and the family. They needed me to get back. Finally, I envisioned the finishing line, my ascent on Shishapangma and the reception in Kathmandu as the world learned of my successes. The fug of despair was lifting. Just make it happen. You can’t give up here.

I’d had a tattoo of all fourteen 8,000-ers etched into my back. Beginning at the top of my spine, the promontories of each mountain were spread out across my shoulder blades in an epic tapestry. The tattoo was a statement of everything I hoped to achieve and during its painful creation, the DNA of my parents and siblings, and Suchi, was mixed in with the inks. I wanted to carry everybody along with me for the journey, to places they would never have been able to experience for themselves ordinarily.

Mum understood that she was my inspiration. She seemed to be hanging on to life, knowing her death would shatter the dream of completing the fourteen mountains.

As I sat by Mum’s bedside, holding her hand, I explained my plans for the coming month. ‘I have only the three mountains to climb,’ I said. ‘Let me go do this.’ There was a nod and a smile. But she didn’t have to say anything – I knew Mum was on my side. She always had been.

I had to do only three things from then on. The first required me to finish Manaslu and the final mountain, hopefully Shishapangma, possibly Dhaulagiri and Everest, before bringing Mum and Dad together under the same roof once more as the second. The third was to make the world pay attention to some of the damage we’d been inflicting upon the environment. And with the eyes of the climbing community upon me, I decided that Manaslu wasn’t simply a peak to be crossed off the list; it felt like a platform.

‘Today is the 27th of September,’ I said, as Gesman filmed me. ‘Here I am on the summit of Manaslu. We’re not going to talk about Project Possible, but what I am going to talk about from the summit [is the environment]. For the last decade, it’s pretty obvious there has been a huge, significant change in terms of global warming. There is a huge change in the melting of the ice. The Khumbu Icefall on Everest: every day the glacier is melting, it’s getting thinner, and smaller and smaller. The earth is our home. We should be more serious about it, more cautious, more focused about how we look after our planet. At the end of the day, if this one doesn’t exist, we don’t exist.’

If I could climb the Death Zone mountains in seven months – give or take the final peak – then what was to stop another individual from finding, and climbing, their personal Everest in the field of environmental science, alternative energy, or climate action? My efforts had proved that everyone had the potential to go way beyond what was considered humanly achievable. It was meant to stand as a glimmer of hope. Now I wanted others to use it for their own challenges and projects in a show of positive action. If my work created a spark for change, however small, I’d be happy.

On the eve of the summit push, I sat at the foot of Shishapangma and gathered my thoughts. ‘Nims, take it easy,’ I said to myself. ‘You are here now; you only have to stay alive. Don’t take any unnecessary risks unless you have to. Control everything. Stay calm; stay cool. The mission isn’t done unless you come back home alive.’

The avalanche was billowing away below me, dissipating on the rocks and puffing up a white mushroom cloud. But the snow I’d been standing on had somehow come to a stop. The deities had spared my life. ‘I can’t believe it, brother,’ I laughed. ‘You’ve come all this way and nearly died on the last expedition.’ The drone stayed in the bag from then on.

Everything I had achieved up until that moment started to dawn on me. I’d silenced the doubters by climbing the fourteen highest mountains in the world in six months and six days. I’d shown what was achievable with imagination and a determined spirit, while shining a light on some of the challenges being faced by the planet and its people. I’d made the impossible possible.

Standing on the peak of Shishapangma, I took in the view, feeling the bitter cold on my face. Then I called home and told Mum of what I’d achieved, and where I planned to go next. ‘I’ve done it!’ I shouted into the phone. ‘And I’m OK.’ The line was crackling, but I could just make out her laughter. ‘Get home safe, son,’ she said. ‘I love you.’

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.

Taking care of the little things feeds into the bigger ambition. For you, that might mean knowing the finer details of a contract so you can succeed in a deal at work, or learning why buying the right running shoes for a 10K race can stop you from getting blisters.

Pushing on to the summit, I couldn’t wait to turn around, having learned another lesson at high altitude: Never underestimate the mountain you’re about to climb – no matter how easy other people think it might be. And another: Be confident, but show respect.

Brother, you’re not going to get to your dream by just fantasising about it. But if you make it your ultimate goal, or god, and give yourself to it entirely, there’s a good chance it might come your way.

So rather than thinking, praying and waiting for your next project or challenge (and not doing it), commit to serious action instead.

Give 100 per cent to the now . . . . . . because it’s all you’ve got.

If I say that I’m going to run for an hour, I’ll run for a full hour. If I plan to do three hundred push-ups in a training session, I won’t quit until I’ve done them all. Because brushing off the effort means letting myself down and I don’t want to have to live with that. And neither should you.