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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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“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.”
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.”
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.”
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.”
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”
