Avalanche Buries 10-Person Team on Pakistan's Broad Peak, Two Bodies Recovered, Nims Purja Among Missing

An avalanche slammed into a 10-person mountaineering team on Broad Peak in Pakistan's Karakoram range around midday Thursday, July 30, cutting off all communication with the group and triggering a search-and-rescue effort still underway as of Friday, July 31.

The expedition was led by Nirmal "Nims" Purja, the 43-year-old Nepalese climber and former Gurkha soldier who later served in the UK Special Forces, famous for climbing all 14 of the world's mountains over 8,000 meters in just over six months back in 2019, a feat chronicled in the Netflix documentary "14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible," according to the Guardian and the New York Post.

According to GPS data reviewed by Climbing Magazine, the avalanche struck between 8:57 a.m. and 9:30 a.m. local time at roughly 6,579 meters (21,580 feet), on the standard West Ridge route between Camp II and Camp III. American climber Mallory Geis's tracker registered a sudden 543-meter (1,784-foot) drop. Omani climber Nadhira Al Harthy's tracker showed a far larger fall of 1,651 meters (5,417 feet), according to the same GPS data cited by Climbing Magazine.

The team included five Nepalese climbers, Pakistani guide Sohail Sakhi of Hunza, Geis of San Antonio, Texas, Al Harthy of Oman, a Chinese climber identified only as Mr. Wang, and one additional unidentified foreign climber, according to the Alpine Club of Pakistan as reported by the Guardian and the Post.

Karrar Haidri, senior vice president of the Alpine Club of Pakistan, said the club received "deeply concerning" reports of the avalanche Thursday and has had no contact with the team since. The club said it is working with government officials to mobilize search-and-rescue resources, including helicopters, when weather allows.

Two bodies have been located at the avalanche site, though their identities had not been confirmed as of Friday, according to Thaneshwar Guragain, general manager of Seven Summit Treks, who spoke to the outlet Kantipur. Guragain said helicopters could not fly Thursday because of poor weather, forcing rescue teams to search on foot. Some climbers caught in the avalanche were brought back to base camp by those ground teams, and the two bodies were found during that operation, according to Guragain's account reported by SnowBrains.

Search helicopters are expected to launch from Skardu once conditions improve, Haidri said. Climbing Magazine reported that the Alpine Club has said search-and-rescue teams are prepared and will be deployed, though the outlet noted that, given the scale of the avalanche and the total loss of communication, all climbers are being treated as feared dead pending confirmation.

A potential sign of life emerged Friday. Mingma Gyabu Sherpa, Purja's business partner and co-founder of their guiding company Elite Exped, said tracking-device data suggested movement from Purja's equipment after the avalanche. Sherpa told the Kathmandu Post that it initially appeared Purja had been swept downhill, but that the location shifted again after the tracker had stopped. Sherpa was careful to caution that this data does not confirm Purja's condition and cannot distinguish whether the movement came from Purja himself, a malfunctioning device, or shifting avalanche debris. A moving GPS signal is not the same as a located, breathing climber, and families of the other nine missing team members have received no comparable signal at all.

An American high-altitude climber, Napier Sandford Fuller, who led a separate expedition up Broad Peak the week before the avalanche, told the New York Post he suspected the mountain was primed for disaster. Fuller said it had been raining daily at lower elevations, which meant heavy snow accumulation at altitude. "I remember thinking, sh-t, they're going to have a hell of a problem," Fuller said. Fuller described his own near-fatal fall on the same route days earlier, when a fixed rope anchor snapped, and said concerns about anchor quality led him and his sherpa to abandon their own summit attempt short of the top.

Fuller also said Geis, a travel photographer based in San Antonio, had struggled with altitude sickness on an earlier attempt and hesitated before trying again, but was told by a local guide she was strong enough. Broad Peak, at 8,047 meters (26,401 feet), is the world's 12th highest mountain and is generally considered less technically demanding than peaks like K2 or Everest, according to Climbing Magazine, though its West Ridge crosses avalanche-prone terrain that Samson Sharaf, a Pakistani mountaineer who mentors missing guide Sohail Sakhi, described as a slope where "the entire snow-laden face moved, sweeping the entire traverse."

The climbers were working under at least three different outfitters on the same expedition: Seven Summit Treks, Elite Exped, and Imagine Nepal, according to Guragain. No official casualty confirmation had been issued as of Friday. The identities of the two recovered bodies remain unconfirmed, and the fate of the other eight climbers, including Purja, hinges on helicopter access to the site once weather clears over the Karakoram range.