24 The Times Magazinen October 29 last year, a little
before 9am local time, Nirmal- or Nims – Purja reached the
summit of Shishapangma, a remote
Tibetan peak rising more than
8km above sea level. It had been
a gruelling ascent over rock,
snow and ice – an extreme test
of physical and psychological
endurance – and as Purja stood
at the very top of the mountain, he could see
the sun reflecting off far distant ranges while,
beneath him, an ocean of thick white cloud
obscured the rest of the world from view. The
only sounds were the wind, the occasional
crump of snow underfoot and the breathless
congratulations shared between Purja and his
small team of fellow Nepalese mountaineers.
This moment marked the completion of an
endeavour Purja had become consumed by. It
was an endeavour deemed so wildly unlikely,
however, that when he had first announced
his intention to attempt it at the start of 2019,
he had been greeted with disbelief, disapproval
and no small amount of scorn from sections of
the international mountaineering community.
“It was beyond their imagination,” says Purja
today, talking quickly. “People were like, ‘It’s
not humanly possible.’ ”
What wasn’t humanly possible? Climbing
Shishapangma, although an impressive feat in
itself, was not what the former Gurkha and
Special Boat Service operative was celebrating
at the summit. Rather, Purja had just set a
new speed record for climbing the world’s
14 highest mountains, which is to say, every
Himalayan peak on the planet above 8,000m,
from Mount Everest (8,848m) to Shishapangma
(8,027m). In 1987, Polish alpinist Jerzy Kukuczka
had set the record, completing all 14 mountains
over 7 years, 11 months and 14 days. This
record was broken by South Korean Kim
Chang-ho, who, in 2013, was able to shave
more than a month off Kukuczka’s time.
But Purja? Purja’s plan had been to knock
off every mountain in just, well, seven months.
To compress this 14-peak odyssey – which, in
terms of total height ascended, is basically the
equivalent of climbing vertically from sea level
to space – into a time frame shorter than a
football season. This is why he was not taken
seriously when he set out. Having grown up in
lowland Nepal and spent almost all his adult
life in the British military, it wasn’t even as
though he was a mountaineer with years of
experience and an established reputation.
“People were like, ‘Who is this guy? We’ve
never heard of him. Does he even have a clue
what it takes to climb an 8,000m mountain?’ ”
The answer, it turned out, was yes. In the
end, the 37-year-old managed to climb all
14 peaks in 6 months and 1 week. That’s pretty
quick, isn’t it? He smiles and says, yeah, it is
pretty quick. “I’m the sort of person who, you
know, makes things happen.”
I’m with Purja in a photo studio in central
London. He is smallish, outgoing and confident- he repeatedly calls me “buddy” and is very
big on eye contact – and has driven up from
his home in Eastleigh, Hampshire, where he
lives with his wife, Suchi, a dental hygienist
he met and married when he was 23 and first
deployed to the UK. Part of the problem with
getting your head around Purja is that, unless
you happen to know a lot about the reality of
Himalayan mountaineering, his achievements
can end up seeming impressive yet somehow
abstract: a litany of heights and times and,
Everest and K2 aside, unfamiliar mountain
names (Kangchenjunga, Annapurna, Makalu,
Lhotse etc). So, to start, Purja talks, without
bravado, about why climbing incredibly tall
mountains is so hard and so dangerous. To
help explain, as he puts it, “the physics of it”.
And the first thing he says we need to
understand is that as you get higher up a
mountain, the air becomes thinner. “So what
that means is that there is not enough oxygen
getting supplied to your body.” As a result, he
continues, you try to breathe faster in order to
get the air into your lungs, so end up panting
uncontrollably while every movement you
attempt becomes more strained and difficult.
“If you’re carrying 30kg of kit at 8,000m, then
it feels like dragging a car at sea level.”
Operating at these heights means you are
also vulnerable to dangerous conditions. If
you ascend above 3,000m or so too quickly,
you run the risk of developing high-altitude
pulmonary edema (HAPE), in which fluid
from your blood vessels leaks into your lungs.
“The simplest way I can explain it is that it’s
like you’re drowning,” says Purja, who says
it can also cause your skin to turn blue. The
only remedy is to get down off the mountain
as quickly as you are able, although this is
often easier said than done. Then there’s
HACE (high altitude cerebral edema), which
involves your brain swelling with fluid and can
cause you to become disorientated or make
you drift away from reality. To operate underO
HIS PLAN WAS TO CLIMB THE EQUIVALENT OF SEA LEVEL TO SPACE – IN SEVEN MONTHS
At the base camp of
Gasherbrum I and
Gasherbrum IIAt the summit of Nanga
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