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A former special forces solider in the Nepalese military, Nims Purja began
climbing at altitude at age 29 and is now among the most accomplished
mountaineers on the planet.
GQ Sports

THE CONTROVERSIAL KING OF HARDCORE CLIMBING

After scaling the 14 meanest mountains on earth in record time, Nepali-born Nims
Purja emerged as a powerful champion of the country’s Sherpa guides. He’s also
become the first celebrity mountaineer of the social media age—and the most
controversial figure in the global climbing community.

By Grayson Schaffer

Photography by AF Webb

January 19, 2023
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To listen to this profile, click the play button below:

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When I strolled into base camp at Ama Dablam, the 22,349-foot peak known as the
Matterhorn of the Himalayas, the mountaineer Nims Purja was locked in a fierce
game of beach volleyball. Just beyond the court, in every direction, sprawled a
village of tents, some 65 in all, erected by his guiding company, Elite Exped.
The outfit is the ultra-ambitious Nims’s latest gambit—a business meant to
parlay his status as one of the world’s most celebrated climbers into a venture
that pays more than simply breaking mountaineering records. Perhaps more
significantly, though, the Nepali-born Nims wants to use the company to upend
the old paradigms of the Himalayan guiding industry by cutting the Sherpa guides
in on the largesse. And as with anything Nims tries, he has launched it on a
grandly immodest scale.

When I found him on the makeshift volleyball court, Nims and his Sherpa guides
were taking on the kitchen crew and getting beaten. Still, it was immediately
clear that the 39-year-old Nims is a gifted athlete. With his thin mustache,
almond eyes, and black swooped hair, he resembles a Bollywood star. And despite
standing only five feet seven, he was still able to spike the ball from above
the net. The cook crew was spry, however, and kept sending it back, until
finally the hitter behind Nims squibbed one into the latrine tent.

These days, it’s a rare thing to see Nims face defeat. Over the past four years,
the former Nepalese special forces soldier has electrified the climbing world
and the wider culture beyond. He became mega-famous in 2019 by scaling all 14 of
the world’s 8,000-meter peaks in just six months and six days. After that
inventive feat, his notoriety was multiplied by the releases of his book, Beyond
Possible, and Netflix movie, 14 Peaks, both of which helped confer a level of
power on Nims that climbers seldom achieve. Now he’s deciding how to wield that
influence, both for himself and his Sherpa compatriots. He’s aimed at nothing
less than remaking the Himalayan guiding industry in his image—and along the way
is raising questions about what it means to be a mountaineer in the age of the
influencer.

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Having arranged to meet Nims at his camp at the base of Ama Dablam, where he was
leading his final Himalayan expedition of the year, I’d flown by helicopter from
Kathmandu to the roadless Sherpa capital of Namche Bazaar, located at just over
11,000 feet. From there, it was a three-day walk up Nepal’s Khumbu Valley to the
tent city occupied by Elite Exped, which Nims operates with two Sherpa business
partners, Mingma David and Mingma Tenzi. Roughly two dozen clients had ponied up
about $11,000 each to share a rope with one of Nims’s Sherpa guides on the
25-day expedition, which would involve about a week of acclimatization followed
by a grueling two-day summit push. In addition to Elite, there were a dozen or
so other outfitters on the mountain, but the teams didn’t mix. Like the fancy
camps at Burning Man, Elite was roped off with tasteful signs advising “No
entry.”

The scene at Nims’s ultra lavish, 65-tent base camp.

Dominating camp were a pair of 30-foot-tall dome tents, inside which the
climbers took their meals. At dinner that night, Nims sat at the head of a
T-shaped banquet table in one of the two domes. He gave a weather report and
dispensed customized summit plans for each client-Sherpa team from memory. He
was surrounded by his patrons, among them several jovial, square-jawed British
special-forces alums of the sort who now have successful life-hacking podcasts
and large social media followings. Propane heaters purred, and a dozen of his
climbers—the ones not currently acclimatizing higher up the mountain—sat noshing
in comfortable armchairs.

There was Madison Loyola, an athletic former LDS 30-something with a successful
manufacturing company. Kayla Perez, a private-jet flight attendant had googled
“how to climb a mountain” early in the pandemic; now she was here. Michael Green
was a Vancouver-based architect who’d figured out how to build timber
skyscrapers and gave a TED talk about it, with over a million views.

After dinner, the Sherpas cranked up a local Nepali DJ named Badal and the scene
phase-changed into a full-blown dance party. A fifth of rum appeared and Nims
filled everyone’s cups. Green, the architect, leaned over and assured me, “This
is every night.”

“I don’t care what you do,” Nims later said of his policy on both clients and
employees getting turnt. “But next day if you can’t operate, that’s your
fuckup.”

Nims danced for a half-hour, dropping into thigh-crushing Cossack leg kicks at
one point, and then settled into a chair with a mug. Earlier in the day he’d
been irritated that a French climber had died during his descent, and that his
outfitter hadn’t called Nims to ask for help. “If only they had told my team,
‘Could you give us a hand?’ ” Nims lamented, referring to the staff of 46
able-bodied men in camp. “I have such huge manpower here.”

Nims typically has a knack for being near the center of the action. His photo of
a traffic jam of hundreds of climbers queuing near Everest’s summit in 2019
became an international news story, as were his many rescues of other climbers
that same season. Last September, he organized the recovery of American ski
mountaineer Hilaree Nelson’s body after she died falling from the summit of
Manaslu, the world’s eighth-tallest peak.

But this time, there was nothing he could do. The guides had gotten the
Frenchman off the mountain, but he expired before they could reach a waiting
helicopter. The incident had prompted Nims to reflect on his own safety record.

“Thirty-two 8,000-meter expeditions, my brother,” he boasted. “All summits.
Brought everybody back home exactly the same way they left. Probably fitter and
with a better mental attitude. No one in the world has got that track record. I
say that with pride.”

In 2021, Nims became the first person to ever summit K2 in winter—a feat he
staggeringly accomplished without the aid of bottled oxygen.

Nims projects the kind of confidence that isn’t long suffered by these
mountains. But what happens when someone does die? How would he respond to that?

“No one should die,” Nims insisted. “There’s no What if? bro.” For Nims, this
absolute belief seems less like denial than the daily affirmations of a man who
makes Norman Vincent Peale look like a whiner. Nims has a lot of care for his
clients and holds his Sherpa team in the highest regard.

He believes he’s carrying more than their safety on his back.

He nodded to the Sherpa guys still dancing. “I’m the fucking face of these
people, bro,” he said. “You’ll see it everywhere in Kathmandu. I’m their hope
now.”

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Indeed, his name was everywhere in Kathmandu, like a flickering signal resolving
from the noise of interstellar static. A wobble in an orbit. A telltale shift in
wavelength. A new and powerful force had taken hold here: Nimsdai. In sleek
black sans serif on the hood of the custom white Land Rover that fetched me from
Tribhuvan airport: Nimsdai.

Those same seven letters appeared above the glass-and-steel shopping pavilion
annexed to the five-star Marriott that sprang up in the brief interlude between
the 2015 earthquake, which killed nearly 9,000 Nepalis, and the pandemic, which
took an additional 12,000. Nimsdai is both the flagship mountaineering store
above the Apple computer retailer in that square, and the diminutive Nepali call
sign of the man whose name is on every Himalayan climber’s lips: Nirmal Purja
a.k.a. Nims Purja a.k.a. Nimsdai.

It means “Brother Nims.” He is family. He is a demigod. He is the second coming
of Tenzing Norgay. Only this time, instead of politely supporting his Edmund
Hillary, he takes the credit and razzes the best foreign climbers for drafting
behind him and his Sherpa crew.

Though he is now in possession of a British passport, Nims was once a barefoot
ethnic Magar kid, running in the sweltering streets of Chitwan, near the Indian
border. He was one of those uniformed boarding-school boys walking arm-in-arm in
the road, dressed in a striped tie and a blue cardigan. That was before he
joined the Gurkhas, the legendary Nepali infantrymen established by the British
Empire, and then, through sheer force of will, became the first Nepali elevated
to the Special Boat Service, the Royal Navy’s version of the SEALs. This,
despite Nepal’s nonexistent coastline.

Nims started out humble. The humility wore off. Like the punch line to that joke
about how you know there’s a Navy SEAL in the room: He tells you of his deeds,
his world records, his daring rescues. He has compared himself to Muhammad Ali,
Usain Bolt, Neil Armstrong, and Robin Hood, and speaks slogan-ese with a fluency
that could reanimate Ron Popeil. Achieve your new possible! Always a little
higher! Giving up is not in the blood! These and other phrases are printed on
everything from coffee cups to the mission patches Nims velcros to the one-piece
down summit suits worn by his mountaineer clients.

He says he’s the CEO of nine companies, though he won’t name them all. His book
and movie are both autobiographical. The former, a best seller, reads like the
kind of memoir written by American politicians who have suddenly taken to
vacationing in Iowa. The latter, Nims says, was Netflix’s most popular release
of 2021. He gets consistent corporate speaking gigs, and his one-on-one guiding
rate up Everest is, he told me, more than a million dollars.

At night, Nims’s Ama Dablam base camp often turns into a disco. The mountaineer
has a simple policy on boozing at altitude: “Next day if you can’t come and
operate, that’s your fuckup.”

It’s a lot. Nims is a lot. But his hustle and bravado are precisely the things
that have allowed him to break into the mainstream from Nepal’s deep bench of
climbing talent. I’ve covered mountaineering and Sherpa culture on and off for
more than a decade, and while there have always been insanely strong climbers
with roots in Nepal, nobody has ever amassed the mind share, as the marketers
say, that Nims has. In the process he’s gathered a legion of devotees and plenty
of critics, all of them hoping to cement his reputation as either a generational
talent among high-altitude mountaineers or else an egotistical self-promoter
flying perilously close to the sun.

I found it impossible to escape these questions in Kathmandu as I prepared to go
meet the man himself. At the airport, I made my way beneath the rotors of an
AStar B3, noticing before I climbed aboard that it was wrapped in now familiar
black lettering: Nimsdai.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The heli put me down in Namche Bazaar, which sits in an airy amphitheater of
hillside high above the confluence of the Dudh Kosi and Bhote Koshi rivers. From
a ridgeline above town, I could see Ama Dablam—“mother’s necklace”—a granite
pinnacle adorned with a hundred-ton pendant of ice near its western crown.
Farther in the background rises the squat pyramid of Everest, at 29,032 feet.
Chomolungma, as the Sherpas call it, isn’t the prettiest, but it’s so high that
it juts into the jet stream and makes a rooster tail in the stratosphere, like
it’s clawing at space itself.

Walking the dusty trail beside these mountains produces a kind of vertigo of
naked scale. They follow you the way the moon does—Thamserku, Taboche, Cholatse.
The path feels stationary, like a treadmill. For most of us, Himalayan peaks
merely inspire awe. But to an unfortunate subset of climbers, they’re as
irresistible as a wobbly bookcase is to a toddler. The tallest 14 of the world’s
summits, through a chance intersection of geology and the metric system, are
known as the 8,000’ers. Above 8,000 meters—about 26,000 feet—your body can no
longer adapt to the thinness of the air. This is the Death Zone. You can’t stay
here long.

It was on these 14 peaks—all of them located in the Himalayan uplift in the
border regions of Nepal, Tibet, and Pakistan—that Nims first blew minds. The
Death Zone peaks are roughly sorted into three groups, based on those
international borders. In Nepal: Annapurna, Dhaulagiri, Kanchenjunga, Everest,
Lhotse, Makalu, and Manaslu. In the Pakistani Karakoram, 900 miles to the north
and much colder: Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum I and II, K2, and Broad Peak. Lastly,
along Nepal’s border with Tibet: Cho Oyu and Shishapangma.

He’d first begun climbing at altitude in 2012, at the age of 29, and four years
later reached the summit of Everest as an anonymous client while on leave from
the U.K. Special Forces. Then, in 2019, having previously climbed only four of
the Death Zone peaks, Nims summited all 14 in just six months and six days. He
called it Project Possible, because people who know about such things told him
it couldn’t be done. The previous record was a brisk but sensible seven
years—one expedition in each of the spring and fall climbing seasons, between
the monsoons and the frigid winter.

Bagging Himalayan peaks as if they were day-trip outings was unheard of. The
movie Nims shot and produced debuted on Netflix in November 2021 and elevated
Nims and his Sherpa team to social media celebrity status. The film also
generated huge international publicity for Elite Exped. By mid-2022 Nims had
over 2 million followers on Instagram. He also had a client list that he said
included numerous billionaires, whose names he won’t reveal, and one Qatari
princess, Asma Al Thani, who appears frequently in his feed.

The peak of Ama Dablam, known as the Matterhorn of the Himalayas.

Trekking from the town of Namche Bazaar into the mountains.

A balmy day at Ama Dablam base camp.

On the way to meet Nims, I sent a WhatsApp message to Garrett Madison, an
American outfitter on Ama Dablam that fall, letting him know that I was coming.
“Just visited Nims’s camp today,” Madison replied. “Only three models this
time 😂.” Was Madison worried that Nimsdai and his Elite Exped would swallow up
the entire Himalayan guiding industry? Not quite. It’s a “different vibe,”
Madison responded. “Interesting ‘new market’ of clientele. Not my competition,
so all good. A rising tide lifts all boats.”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The models Madison was referring to were known collectively as the
@SwissAlpineGirls. When I rolled into base camp, they were with another Elite
detachment over on Lobuche East, a nearby 6,100-meter peak that Nims often
advises novices to tackle as their first Himalayan ascent. Among the other
clients on Lobuche was Andrew Shaw, who calls himself a “well-being engineer.”
Nims’s appeal seems especially strong among the aesthetically inclined, probably
due in part to his outsize digital footprint.

But if the social media set was drawn to Nims, the climbing world wasn’t sure
what to do with him. Mountaineers knew that Nims had accomplished something
significant, but they couldn’t agree on what exactly that was. He had used some
of the accoutrements frowned upon by purists, including bottled oxygen and fixed
ropes, and had a team of Sherpas guide him in the way that a pace line of
seasoned domestiques slices through wind resistance for the yellow jersey at the
Tour de France.

Krzysztof Wielicki, the legendary Polish mountaineer who in 1980 became the
first to climb Everest in winter, told a Polish radio station, “It’s more of a
statistical achievement,” adding that the feat would not be “written into the
history of alpine climbing.”

He felt that others had summited the 14 peaks in a far more impressive fashion,
among them the South Tyrolean great Reinhold Messner, now 78, who achieved the
feat in 16 years without fixed ropes or bottled oxygen, and the late Pole Jerzy
Kukuczka, who pulled it off in eight years and used oxygen only on Everest. “It
is light-years short of Kukuczka and Messner’s class,” Wielicki said of Nims’s
Project Possible.

But he failed to grasp the significance of Nims’s innovation, like the guy who
stands in front of a Pollock and says, “My kid could do that.” Filmmaker and
climber Jimmy Chin points out that while it is a logistical feat, “It’s way more
than that…. You still have to climb the mountains”—often in bad weather.

Nims receiving radio communications in base camp.

The fact is, before Nims did it in 189 days, nobody had even considered
attempting a fastest known time (FKT) on the 8,000’ers. It was a feat of
creativity as much as raw physical talent, and it changed the way people view
these mountains. Climbers now routinely attempt multiple 8,000-meter peaks in a
season.

Non-climbers sometimes struggle to comprehend the nuances of what makes certain
routes difficult. But they do understand a story. And that’s what Nims gave
them. It’s neither alpinism nor speed climbing but something altogether new. He
called it, unsurprisingly, “Nims style.” It’s less an unknown runner turning in
a sub-two-hour marathon than somebody with a healthy appetite and determination
realizing that they can wipe out the buffet at Bob’s Big Boy. It’s a spectacle.
It’s a campaign. It’s because it’s there.

One person who was deeply affected by Nims’s new benchmark was a bubbly,
dreadlocked 36-year-old skier and runner from Norway named Kristin Harila.
Though she hadn’t climbed a single 8,000’er before 2021, last year she decided
to break Nims’s record. After stacking up sponsors, she hired a manager, and was
guided by Sherpas Dawa Ongju and Pasdawa. In late September, with 12 peaks down,
Harila was comfortably outpacing Nims, but the Chinese government wouldn’t give
her a permit to climb Shishapangma and Cho Oyu. That ended her run. It was, in
fact, logistics that defeated her. She plans to try again in 2023.

But while Nims’s feats have inspired some, his particular communication style
really fires up critics. In the book and movie, as much as in conversation, Nims
routinely lapses into one-liners and aphorisms as if his life were in fact a
screenplay. During an early rescue in 14 Peaks, he shouts, “Giving up is not in
the blood!” which has become his catchphrase. It’s on a T-shirt. He makes
extraordinary claims that are difficult to confirm, which produces skepticism in
any rational person receiving his story.

At times, Nims has lashed out at reporters for questioning his version of events
or attempting to learn about his expeditions without passing through him first.
Explorersweb, a small but committed online journal about mountaineering, is
among the few to attempt to verify Nims’s claims. “Your information has always
been crap,” he wrote on Instagram last May after a reporter questioned whether
he and Qatari princess Asma Al Thani had started a climb from Camp Two instead
of base camp. (Nims says they hadn’t.) The irony is that, as a media property,
Nims far outstrips any of the climbing publications that would seek to cover
him. And since he insists on controlling the narrative, the only source for info
on Nims’s capers ends up being Nims himself.

“My story, I didn’t ever want it to be told by anyone else, because that will
never do it justice,” he told me.

Take, for example, the time he was shot by a sniper in Afghanistan. “I tasted
the warm, metallic tang of blood in my mouth,” Nims writes in Beyond Possible.
“A puddle of red grew around me on the floor. For a split second I worried half
my face had been shredded away, though I didn’t feel any pain.” Then he
discovers that the bullet struck his rifle, not his face, and that he is fine.
Still, the puddle of blood! Nims has no obvious scars on his face, and the Royal
Navy doesn’t comment on such matters. It’s not that it couldn’t have happened
exactly the way he wrote it. But it’s the type of facile twist that feels too
cute for real life, like a sheriff’s badge stopping a bullet in a Western.

A helicopter arrives on the wide plain where Nims's team set up base camp for
their ascent of Ama Dablam.

Nims’s story is full of these pulpy bits. Like when, as a child, he tests
himself by swimming across a river near Chitwan and realizes he hasn’t reserved
any stamina to get back (straight out of Gattaca), or when he discovers he’s out
of shape at Annapurna and trains with boulders (Rocky IV).

The worry is that an adventurer so concerned with his image may be prone to
self-aggrandizement, as was notoriously the case with Colin O’Brady, of Olympia,
Washington. In 2018, O’Brady famously claimed to have been the first person to
cross Antarctica solo and unsupported but was criticized for exaggerating the
difficulty and danger of the undertaking while appearing to downplay the
accomplishments of other adventurers, like Norwegian Børge Ousland, who made a
much longer solo crossing in 1997. After an initial, gushing account in The New
York Times, which wrote that O’Brady’s trek “could go down as one of the great
feats in polar history,” the 37-year-old explorer was smacked down in National
Geographic and The New Yorker.

O’Brady’s book The Impossible First starts with a death-defying stormbound
cliffhanger not entirely dissimilar to a fall Nims took down Nanga Parbat that
opens Beyond Possible. These breathless first-person accounts aren’t in any way
linked, but they’re of a genre—one that views Guinness World Record certificates
as currency and doesn’t brook modesty. But Nims has an ace in the hole: The man
whose achievements in the mountains are the standard by which all others are
judged; the unimpeachable arbiter of high-altitude cred, who deflated poseurs
for using oxygen and set the timeless benchmark for the ethics of alpinism with
his 1971 essay “The Murder of the Impossible”; the South Tyrolean hardman whose
deeds were so far ahead of his time that he, too, was doubted as a fabulist.
Reinhold Messner has emerged as Nims’s biggest booster.

“Some climbers criticized Nirmal, but I didn’t understand why,” says Messner
in 14 Peaks. “He was doing it in this way, otherwise it’s not possible in such a
short time.”

Game recognize game.

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In case we’re not clear on this, doing the impossible gives adventure bros a
boner. It’s tied up in old ideas of masculinity and validation. The problem is
that the big obvious firsts—climbing the tallest mountain, visiting the bottom
of the ocean, discovering America—have all been done. And it turns out that with
proper training and modern gear, most impossible feats become merely difficult.

And so they equivocate, aggregate, elongate, and accelerate settled business
until it once again seems to qualify as virgin territory. The relatively mild
Seven Summits—climbing the tallest peak on each continent—was invented by Texas
entrepreneur Dick Bass in 1985. Messner’s 1987 book All 14 Eight-Thousanders
chronicled a 16-year campaign through the Death Zone. Project Possible was in
this vein: audacious but what the reviewers at Pitchfork might call derivative
work.

Nims is sensitive to criticism. He reads the comments. And rather than try to
defend his achievement, he set his sights on a new one for late 2020. There’s a
single, glaringly obvious prize in mountaineering that has rebuffed the world’s
finest climbers since it was first attempted in 1987: climbing K2 in winter. If
Project Possible was a cool trick, this was climbing’s sub-two-hour marathon, 62
homers in the post-steroid era, GOAT-level stuff.

Nims surveys the scene at base camp.

A mule carrying supplies on the trail in Nepal’s Khumbu region.

Climbers picking out snacks ahead of their ascent.

“I knew I had to do this for the country,” Nims said, “for the people, and only
I could do it the right way.”

At 8,611 meters, the world’s second-highest peak—just 237 meters shorter than
Everest—was the only 8,000’er still unclimbed between mid-December and
mid-March. That’s because the Karakoram, eight degrees latitude north—think
southern New England versus Florida—puts the Savage Mountain in a different
league entirely. Not only is it colder and more difficult to climb even in mild
weather, but during winter the temperature and barometric pressure at the summit
mean that, atmospherically speaking, it has a similar altitude density as
Everest. As far as a climber’s lungs and physiology are concerned, both
mountains have a perceived altitude of around 9,100 meters in January.

Teams had been hunting winter K2 for decades, but 2021 was a particularly tricky
time because of the pandemic. On top of that, Nims had to assemble a new team.
Some of the Sherpas had left the team after Project Possible. Nims thinks other
local outfitters poached his talent, telling them, “Why only Nims is famous? Why
are you not famous?” he told me. “It really hurt.” Nims thought they were on
board with a supporting role, but ultimately the story had been too much Lone
Survivor and not enough Band of Brothers. (The subtitle of Beyond Possible is
“One Man, 14 Peaks, and the Mountaineering Achievement of a Lifetime.”)

“Look, even if I didn’t have the team from Project Possible, I would still have
made it. If today I chose five completely different guys, I could make it,
because [the task] needs leadership,” Nims said. “Ninety-nine percent of the
Sherpas are at the same level.

“You need to convince people—to give them that inner energy,” he went on.
“That’s when you become extraordinary. And that’s what I did for K2 winter. I
said, ‘Guys, I’m going in. Do you want to come?’ And some of them said no.”

The view of Namche Bazaar from a helicopter.

But Nims’s right-hand man, Mingma David, was still ride-or-die. Geljen, another
Sherpa, was game. Nims had wanted to hold off at least until the Netflix movie
came out the following November, but rumor was that winter 2021 would be the
year. Nearly 100 climbers were descending on the Karakoram. It seemed unlikely
that K2 would fend off the onslaught much longer.

Mingma David lined up his friend Mingma Tenzi, a world-beating climber with
nearly thirty 8,000-meter summits under his belt. Pemchhiri and Dawa Temba were
both fully accredited international guides with some twenty Everest ascents
between them. Along with two cooks, a swarm of Pakistani porters, and their
base camp manager, they set off from Skardu, Pakistan, on December 21, 2020. As
they rolled out, Nims cautioned reporters about dishing “from the comfort of
their warm couch at home.” On Instagram he wrote: “You don’t know anything about
my plans, and you will never know unless I want you to!”

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

As a team, Nims’s K2 squad was stacked with Sherpas, just like the crews that
had come before them. As early as the 1922 British expedition of Everest,
Westerners relied on Sherpas for support. Seven of them died on the job during
that first outing a hundred years ago. While it’s since become vogue for the
best foreigners to climb without Sherpa support, the innovative wrinkle on
Nims’s trip was that it involved Sherpas climbing without Western oversight.
It’s been a long time coming.

While universally loved, and admired for their strength, work ethic, and
commitment to helping foreigners reach the tallest summits, Sherpas tend to get
mentioned in the collective sense even when their accomplishments are utterly
singular. Achievements are casually diluted, attributed to evolutionary
adaptations for handling their homeland’s dizzying altitudes.

Ethnic Sherpas migrated into the Khumbu region from Tibet about 600 years ago.
Their language is spoken, not written, so there are no classic Sherpa memoirs or
histories other than oral ones. The community was tiny, subsisting on potatoes
grown on terraces scratched into some of the planet’s most challenging farmland.
Like many ethnicities in Nepal, they use Sherpa as a surname. And most Sherpa
given names—regardless of gender—are days of the week: Dawa, Mingma, Lakpa,
Phurba, Pasang, Pemba, Ngima.

The net effect is that a Sherpa phone book would be the most useless document of
all time. Mingma Gyabu Sherpa was a star on the Travel Channel’s 2016
series Everest Air, where as a 27-year-old he performed 52 rescues in a single
season. He noticed the phone book problem as he was trying to raise his profile.
“All of the people had the same name,” he told me. “And I’m trying to find a
[new] name. I added the middle name David. After that, I was easier to
recognize.”

Nims's personalized hip flask.

The story of Mingma David could be the story of any climbing Sherpa in Nepal. He
was born in 1989 in Lelep, in the Taplejung district on the slopes of
Kanchenjunga. When he was 17 he got a job as a porter. He carried two
foreigners’ trekking bags, weighing a total of nearly 70 pounds, despite being
just 120 pounds himself. “It’s a lot,” said Mingma David, wincing. “I cried a
lot.” For his trouble, he was paid 300 rupees per day, about $4.15. In 2009, he
landed a job as a kitchen helper at Manaslu base camp. For that trip he got a
10,000-rupee ($134) gear stipend and 800 rupees ($11) per day.

By 2010, at age 21, he was ready to climb. “I did two trainings in Kathmandu,”
Mingma David explained. “A seven-day basic introductory training and seven days
of rescue technique. And straight to Everest.”

A local outfitter gave him about $1,600 as a gear stipend. His pay was still 800
rupees per day, but he made an additional $500 if he reached the summit with a
client, which he did on his first attempt. Not long after, his uncle Dorjee
Khatri wanted him to meet “that military guy” he’d been guiding. This, of
course, was Nims.

“We started talking and chatting, and then we became close friends,” recalled
Mingma David. They crossed paths at the South Col of Everest in 2016, when Nims
went for his first summit, though it wasn’t until 2018 that they climbed
together for the first time. It’s here that Mingma David’s story diverges from
the ordinary.

During those years, Sherpas typically made about $6,000 per Everest climbing
season. It’s a bit more today. When Nims decided to get into the guiding
business, he began to pay his top guides up to $70,000 a year—more in line with
what foreign guides are paid—and in the case of Mingma David, and later Mingma
Tenzi, offer them a combined 25 percent equity stake in Elite Exped. Sherpas
living in Nepal already do well by local standards. The tourism industry, which
was projected to bring in about $300 million in 2022, has always been a bright
spot in the country’s subsistence economy, but earning deep into six figures is
life changing. “Me and Nims, we are never talking about money, because we built
this company together,” said Mingma David, who handles personnel, while Nims
drums up clients and investment.

Elite Exped director Mingma David and his daughter at home in Kathmandu.

Two people I spoke with who have a long history in Nepal’s climbing industry
told me that they wonder about Nims’s possible profit margins with such lavish
base camps and highly paid staff, while also charging thousands less than some
other outfitters (unless, of course, you want Nims himself as your guide). In
Nims’s book, he describes working with a business partner—“an anonymous
accomplice”—to contact a series of potential investors.

Perhaps as important as the money is the democratization of certain star-making
tools now available to everyone. For instance, Mingma David has his own social
media brand, which makes it impossible to lump him together with other Sherpas
as “the help.” This is the biggest thing Nims has changed; he’s shifted the
gravity in the room so the Sherpas in his orbit are holding the biggest
megaphone.

Instead of only supporting foreign climbers’ ambitions, they’re forming dream
teams to dunk on these mountains themselves. They’re flying their own drones and
shooting their own movies. Sponsors have ponied up. Fanbois flock to them
online. These guys aren’t trying to get sponsored by the North Face team—they’re
directly challenging the North Face team. There’s no going back.

Interestingly, multiple people have pointed out that Nims isn’t actually a
Sherpa himself, and is a British citizen. (Nepal doesn’t allow dual
citizenship.) The New York Times even pointed this out. But it feels like an
unfair attempt to rob Nims of his origin story because he left, had success in
the UK, and found his way to the climbing community as a client rather than a
porter. So I asked him point-blank: Does he consider himself a Sherpa?

“Yes,” he said. “Sherpa is not a caste, it’s a brand. It’s also an ethnic group,
and a climbing community.” The distinction he’s making is one that flows
directly out of 20th-century colonialism, according to which all porters on
early British Himalayan expeditions were aggregated as “sherpas,” regardless of
ethnicity, and all porters addressed their clients as “sahib,” or sir. As a
result the former term, when spelled with a lowercase s, still refers to a job
title—one that even extends to the person who guides U.S. Supreme Court nominees
through the confirmation process. In fact, many of the sherpas on British
expeditions were lowlanders from a mix of ethnic groups, including the one Nims
hails from.

In his biography of Tenzing Norgay, British writer Ed Douglas notes that
“Sherpas are the most famous mountain tribe in the world, with an immediate
advantage over other ethnic groups in Nepal…. Until recently, all kinds of
tribes adjacent to the Sherpas would adopt the name ‘Sherpa’ to boost their
prospects of employment.”

Nims shares the sentiment but doesn’t appear to view it as appropriation. “If
you look into the history of climbing, Magar were some of the first to climb
with the British expeditions,” said Nims. “Now Tamang are climbing; Rai are
climbing.” It’s the mantle of the underdog that Nims has assumed, even though
he’s no longer the underdog. “That is my identity,” Nims proclaimed. “I define
my identity.”

Elite Exped director Mingma Tenzi, who has nearly thirty 8,000-meter summits to
his name.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

K2 Base Camp, deep in the Pakistani Karakoram, was a mosh pit of humanity when
Nims and his guys set up their camp in late December 2020. Not only were three
sprawling teams there but two of them had even signed up commercial clients for
what would surely be a nasty and perilous undertaking.

The pandemic had shut down the spring and summer seasons across the Himalayas,
and about 85 stir-crazy hardmen were eager to make questionable life choices on
the standard Abruzzi Spur route. In addition to Nims’s, there were two other
Sherpa teams, one from Imagine Nepal and the other from Seven Summit Treks,
who’d arrived earlier in the month.

Because of the valuable prize at stake, inter-team meetings had an air of
gamesmanship. “We were competing against everyone,” said Nims. “I was like,
‘Hey, guys. You think you are really good? Why you want to know our plans?’ ”

During their first acclimatization rotation, Nims proposed an alliance with
Mingma G from Imagine Nepal. “I said, ‘Bro, why you want to compete?’ ” Nims
recounted. “You got three guys, and I’m a team of six. Rather than having all
this rivalry between the same Nepalese team, why don’t we work together?’ ”

Then the three returned to base camp to recuperate, which on Planet Nims means
only one thing. “After the plan, we make party,” said Mingma Tenzi. “All-night
party.”

“We finished more than 12 bottles of whiskey,” said Nims. “That’s the first time
I threw up.” Here the extreme cold came in handy, as Nims was able to simply
toss the frozen barf brick from his tent the following morning.

Nims playing volleyball with his staff at base camp.

Climbers watching from afar paid close attention. Among them was respected
German climber Ralf Dujmovits, who on December 28 took to Instagram to warn that
K2 might be brought low by mountaineering’s ultimate performance-enhancing drug.
“I would find it a real pity if someone steals the first winter ascent of K2 by
using supplemental oxygen,” he wrote. “The general public might see this
‘conquering’ of K2 as a great feat, but the first winter ascent should be left
to those who can do it by fair means.”

Interestingly, when Krzysztof Wielicki subdued Everest in winter, back in 1980,
he’d used bottled oxygen and nobody tried to discredit him. Indeed, by the
standard of Dujmovits (and many other alpinists), Everest has seen only a single
winter ascent by fair means. That was when Ang Rita Sherpa, known as the Snow
Leopard, did it with little fanfare on December 22, 1987, while guiding a Korean
climber. Ang Rita was easily the strongest and most prolific high-altitude
climber of the late-20th century, but his talents were always in support of
others. He died humbly in 2020, at age 72, after suffering a stroke in 2017
probably due to complications from his many years at altitude.

Between New Year’s and the second week of January, the weather was abominable.
Then came a report that a climbing window might open up after January 13. Nims
gathered up his ad hoc team, which now included Mingma G and the latter’s two
Sherpa compatriots, Dawa Tenjin and Kilu Pemba. Additionally, they’d recruited
Sona Sherpa from Seven Summit Treks. Nims had strategized not just against the
mountain but against the remaining teams—and the detractors he knew would be
watching from home.

“My biggest thing was how to make this clear-cut to the rest of the world, where
the evidence speaks that the Nepalese climbers are the best,” said Nims. He
didn’t just want to put himself on the summit and call it good. He’d been
chastened by the hard feelings after his 14 Peaks project. No, he wanted to show
the utter dominance of the Nepali climbers as a unit. They’d climb together and
summit as a team. The only way Nims knew he could enforce the gentleman’s
agreement was if he stayed near the front of the pack.

And, in order to confound the other climbers in base camp, Nims wanted to launch
for the peak from well below Camp Four, the usual departure point for a summit
push. “That’s why I changed the whole strategy, brother,” explained Nims. “I
planned to climb from Camp Three so nobody could follow us.”

Lastly, there was the issue of climbing style. The team had always planned to
use oxygen, but Nims had other ideas and tried to have others join him in his
temperance. Mingma David recalled being a little shocked when Nims told him that
one or two people from their team would need to climb without oxygen. “He tried
to convince me, ‘Mingma, you want to do without oxygen?’ He tried hard, and I
said no.” Mingma David was a veteran of several K2 expeditions. He knew what lay
ahead.

At that point, Nims knew that he’d have to be the one to try without oxygen. He
told only Mingma David and Mingma Tenzi of his plan. They left base camp on
January 13. By 2:30 a.m. on the night of January 15, they were at Camp Three
ready to launch. Mingma Tenzi took the lead with Imagine Nepal’s Dawa Tenjin
belaying him as he fixed pitch after pitch of rope above Camp Four. Nims and
Mingma David stayed just behind the leaders, passing them rope as they needed
it. Mingma Tenzi was a force, pounding snow stakes, wrenching ice screws,
fastening length after length. They were 10 of the strongest mountaineers in
history, all pulling toward their own goal, with no clients to slow them down.

Just before 5 p.m. local time on January 16, Mingma Tenzi finished his heroic
push. The men grouped up and then, while singing the Nepali national anthem and
walking arm in arm, they knocked the bastard off.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The climbing world was in shock. The Nepalis had gone up the mountain, and
suddenly there was a post on Nims’s social channels announcing victory by all 10
of them. Not only had they succeeded but they’d made it look kinda easy. The
post was uploaded by Nims’s base camp manager, Ashok Rai, after Nims radioed
down from the summit. He couldn’t have anyone scoop him. After that, he went
dark. The team still needed to make it off the mountain, as the sun was
setting.

Mingma Tenzi’s oxygen regulator malfunctioned during the descent, and Nims
easily passed him as they headed for the safety of Camp Four. “Even I could not
follow Nimsdai,” said Mingma Tenzi of his leader’s speed.

Forty-eight hours after summiting, Nims posted the summit picture and made his
big reveal: He’d climbed the mountain without oxygen. No, he told me, he hadn’t
used it in his tent or while he slept or on the descent.

“His capacity and ability at that altitude has to be superhuman,” Jimmy Chin
later told me.

At Nims's Ama Dablam base camp, a 30-foot-tall dome tent served as the dining
hall—and a late-night disco.

One of the A-Star B3 helicopters transporting climbers from Kathmandu to the
Sherpa town of Namche Bazaar.

Nims’s foils were incredulous, and his insistence on controlling the narrative
may have fueled their doubts. To compound the tension, five climbers—Sergi
Mingote, Juan Pablo Mohr, John Snorri, Ali Sadpara, and Atanas Skatov—all died
on the mountain before the winter season was finished. Onlookers surmised that
Nims’s team had cut the fixed ropes as they descended so nobody could follow
them. Nims stayed silent.

But when climbers returned to the mountain the following summer, the Sherpas’
ropes were still fixed all the way to the summit. “Thank God,” said Nims.
“Mother Nature speaks. The people who died were still attached to the rope.”

Denis Urubko, the veteran Russian-Polish alpinist who climbed the 14 peaks
without oxygen and notched the first winter ascents of both Gasherbrum II and
Makalu, was the most outspoken. “The press often buys shit because it looks like
chocolate,” Urubko told Explorerweb. “I saw his pictures and the summit video.
It is impossible to be like that on K2’s summit without oxygen. Least of all to
keep pace with a crew of climbers on oxygen.”

Notably, when Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler claimed the first ascent of
Everest without oxygen in 1978—taking a mere eight hours to ascend from Camp
Four, and only 45 minutes to descend—none other than Tenzing Norgay told Reuters
that he didn’t believe them. Climbers on oxygen typically take 12 to 14 hours on
the way up. “Some experts,” Habeler later wrote, believed that the two alpinists
“had allowed a sniff of [oxygen], at least at intervals.”

Chin has no problem accepting Nims’s claims. “They had an opportunity to show
the world what they’re actually capable of when they were climbing for
themselves,” he said, adding, “It’s arguably the most difficult winter ascent
ever done. And they did it in a style that was very respectable.” If Nims was
lying, there are nine men who would have seen the telltale hose running from his
face mask into his jacket. If there is a conspiracy, nine men would have to
maintain it.

When I met with Nims at his base camp in November, he was still fuming at
Urubko. “Bro, why are you even saying that?” he grumbled to me. “You’re just
lowering yourself. You will see in the movie, ’cause everything is documented.
Your extreme is my normal.”

Elite Exped client Alex Uddin catching up on work after his 20-plus-hour summit
push.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

During my time with Nims, I found him to be charming and charismatic. I watched
him manage the ambitions of his two dozen clients while also juggling logistics
and a wife and young daughter back home in Britain.

Nims is at the point where the greatest risks to his success—falling into a
crevasse notwithstanding—are of his own making. The three l’s of billionaire
Charlie Munger’s warning to successful people—liquor, ladies, and leverage—all
appeared to be in plentiful supply. There was the steady flow of attractive
influencers moving through camp, the nightly rum-fueled dance party, and the
high stakes of launching an outfitter and quickly growing it to scale. The
temptation for somebody like Nims is to start believing in his own myth.

Though their stories are wildly different, the latter years of the most famous
climber Nepal has ever produced, Tenzing Norgay, may offer a cautionary tale.
Tenzing was fabulously unprepared for the level of global fame he met with upon
his return from Everest in 1953. In the aftermath, he became the face of all
Nepali people, revered by millions. He was the director of a climbing school in
Darjeeling and met thousands of fans alongside Mickey Mantle at home plate in
Yankee Stadium. Tenzing had three wives and seven children and wasn’t always
faithful. “Towards the end of his life,” Douglas wrote in The Guardian after
Norgay’s death, “Tenzing had struggled with loneliness and alcoholism.”

Recently, Nims has had a string of what he hopes is just bad luck. On September
21, when he turned on his phone after landing in Kathmandu to begin the fall
guiding season, he learned that there had been a fire at the offices of Elite
Exped, in the residential Kapan neighborhood of Kathmandu. Three of his staff
died: Ashok Rai, the base camp manager from K2; Karsang Tenjing Sherpa, who was
Mingma David’s brother; and their liaison officer Tsewang Sherpa. They’d been
storing highly flammable oxygen cylinders in the office, which exploded, but the
cause of the fire is still under investigation.

Among the businesses Nims is starting is a school for skydiving, skills honed in
his 10 years as a special forces operator. But about a month after the fire, on
October 14, while training with professional skydiver Dean Waldo in Spain, the
two became entangled during a training exercise. Waldo was above and behind
Nims, and punched through Nims’s parachute, becoming trapped in the fabric about
3,500 feet up. Nims cut away his primary chute and landed safely with his
reserve, but Waldo cratered and died. All of this occurred only two weeks before
our meeting.

“I’m one of those extreme athletes right now who have seen more death than
anybody else in the world,” he said. “So yeah, somehow I have got this ability
to be able to box things off and then move on.”

One of many shops in Kathmandu selling counterfeit outdoor gear.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

At breakfast on the second morning at Ama Dablam base camp, Nims picked up the
radio to talk to Madison Loyola, who’d just reached the summit. Through the
plastic window of the giant dome, we could just make out the antlike dots of
climbers on the final push to the top. “It’s so beautiful,” said Loyola. “I’m
crying frozen tears.”

“There’s no such thing as bad weather,” Nims radioed back as an affirmation.
“Only bad effort.” (He might need to workshop that one before printing it on a
shirt.)

I shared a helicopter back to Kathmandu with several of Nims’s clients,
including Agnes Fischer, one of the @SwissAlpineGirls. She’d climbed Lobuche
East but had been battling a stomach bug and decided not to climb Ama Dablam
with her friends. That evening I met her and a couple of Nims’s other clients at
the Marriott bar for drinks. The room features high ceilings and a tall bookcase
full of expensive-looking magnums.

Suddenly, Fischer was staring at her phone with a hand over her mouth. Somebody
had just died on Lobuche, she said. He was one of Nims’s Elite Exped clients,
maybe one she’d met. A few seconds later Nims texted her. “Can you not tell
people before it comes from official plz,” he asked.

The client was a British man who’d felt sick while going for the summit. His
Sherpa guide walked him back down to camp, and later that afternoon, he was
offered an evacuation by helicopter. Instead, he entered his tent, fell asleep,
and never woke up. “It was a reminder that we’re not invincible,” said Nims
weeks later. “I’m just extremely sorry that it happened under the banner of
Elite Exped.” But he will do everything in his power to prevent loss of life in
the short run. Like during 14 Peaks, after he’d mortgaged his house to fund the
project and still stopped to rescue other climbers. “I risked my summit chances
on Dhauligiri,” said Nims. “I risked the mission of climbing all 14 peaks.”

Nims has seen so much death in his career that his view of it isn’t like yours
or mine. And he isn’t about to start second-guessing his purpose just because
he’s suffered a client casualty. “Death is certain once you are born,” said
Nims.

He was calling from LA, where he was doing some motivational speaking. He was
already looking ahead to 2023, when he would be guiding thirteen of the fourteen
8,000-meter peaks, including Everest. Soon he would be back in the mountains,
leading clients, rescuing victims, sparring with rivals, and scripting the next
chapter of his mythos. You can almost see him squinting into the sun as he
delivers his final line: “I must continue my journey because I have a bigger
goal.”

Nims at the base of Ama Dablam.

Grayson Schaffer is a writer based in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and an editor at
large at Outside.

A version of this story originally appeared in the February 2023 issue of GQ
with the title “The Hype Man of the Himalayas”

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