The Times Magazine 25dangerous delusions. “You can be on an
8,000m peak and people will start taking
their clothes off, thinking that it’s warm.”
For most of the time you are climbing, you
are running on fumes through physical effort
and sleep deprivation. During the Pakistan
leg of his record-breaking project, Purja went
without sleep “for almost 19 days”, during
which time he summited five peaks, including
K2. To stop themselves from succumbing to
exhaustion during their ascents, he and his
team would stop and “slap snow in our faces”
as they climbed. Other times, he would scream
as he made painstaking progress, hoping the
noise would be enough to stop him slumping
to the ground and giving himself over to a
sleep from which he would likely never wake.
“You’re on your own, just shouting at the
mountain,” he says. “But even that is fatiguing.”
Death, in other words, is everywhere on
these mountains. Avalanches wipe out entire
base camps. Winds can strafe you at up to
160km/h. People lose their footing and vanish
down icy crevasses, their bodies never to be
recovered. On his ascent of Lhotse, the fourth
highest mountain in the world, Purja passed at
least three frozen corpses. More grisly yet are
the statistics. Mount Everest, for example, is
relatively benign: the ratio of deaths on the
mountain relative to the number of people
who make it to the summit alive is just under
4 per cent. On Kanchenjunga, this fatality rate
rises to 14 per cent. Nanga Parbat’s is around
20 per cent, K2’s is 29 per cent and Annapurna
- “the deadliest mountain in the world” – has
an estimated fatality rate of 32 per cent. The
more of these mountains you attempt to
climb, the greater the odds of being on the
wrong side of a statistic. Both Kukuczka and
Kim Chang-ho would die in mountaineering
accidents within a year or so of achieving the
records that Purja set out to smash.
During one descent, Purja and his team
encountered a disorientated mountaineer from
India suffering with either HAPE, HACE or a
combination of the two. Despite attempting to
arrange a rescue and giving him their back-up
oxygen cylinders, the Indian mountaineer
would die more or less in Purja’s arms. “It was
a terrible experience,” he says, matter-of-factly.
During the same descent, Purja met a Chilean
climber making a desperate push for the
summit, despite being close to exhaustion and
conditions closing in on him. Purja strongly
advised him to turn back, but he refused. “He
was there on a mission: ‘Either I do it or die,’ ”
says Purja. Despite the warnings, the Chilean
too died on the mountain. “It’s a very fine
line between being brave and very stupid,
you know? You could be brave enough to
undertake the climb in those conditions. But
then that decision could also get you killed.”
Purja describes, in fine detail, his
experience of climbing the world’s 14 highest
mountains in record time in a new book,
Beyond Possible. He wrote it over the summer,
during lockdown, which he says gave him
the chance to actually take a step back and
process everything he had been through,
an opportunity he had been denied in the
immediate aftermath. “Within two days I was
flying all over the world to do speaking gigs.It was a rollercoaster. I didn’t really have time
to think about what actually happened.”
Just as interesting as the “what”, though, is
the “why”. Why did Purja feel the need to do
what he did and take all the associated risks,
including remortgaging his house and leaving
the armed forces, in order to dedicate himself
to what seemed a quixotic dream? He describes
growing up poor but content in a village in
western Nepal. “We would pay our neighbours
five rupees to watch their TV at the weekends,”
he says. “We didn’t have much, but I wasn’t
really fussed about what I wore or material
things. I would just be happy wandering
around the jungle or playing in the river.”
What seemed to set him apart, though,
was an intensity of purpose. So when he
would go looking for crabs and prawns in thenearby river, he would not stop until he had
examined under every rock, even if it took
him all day. He discovered he had exceptional
endurance. He would come first in school
running races, even competing against boys
several years above him. His two older brothers
had been selected for service in the British
Army’s Brigade of Gurkhas and from a young
age Purja knew he wanted to do the same. “I’d
see my brothers when they were back home
on leave, and I’d see the respect they were
treated with. I wanted that. As a kid, that
was all I wanted,” he says. Purja developed
a tunnel-vision obsession with becoming a
Gurkha, forcing himself out of bed for early
morning training runs with backpack and
boots. “I was a kid who loved a challenge. And
I would always keep my promises. If I said I
was going to get up and run in order to join
the Gurkhas, then I would make that happen.”
He passed selection and arrived in the UK
in 2003. Getting off the plane at Heathrow,
he expected shortly to be seeing “Big Ben,
the London Eye, Buckingham Palace, all the
places I had seen on my brothers’ postcards”.
Instead, he was put straight on a coach to the
barrack town of Catterick, North Yorkshire.
“I’d never been anywhere where the rain
can come sideways,” he says, shaking his head
and laughing. “It was almost worse than the
village in Nepal.” His English was subcontinent
schoolroom formal, but his first interaction
with a non-Nepalese soldier was a conversation
with a squaddie from Liverpool. “I didn’t
understand anything. Now, I would know he
was a Scouser. But I remember walking back
into my room where there were 11 soldiers
from my section and saying, ‘What was that?’ ”
He was deployed to Afghanistan in 2007.
The Gurkhas’ motto is, “Better to die than be a
coward”, and Purja describes feeling a personal
responsibility to uphold this reputation. Much
of the Gurkhas’ responsibility in Afghanistan
during this period involved supporting the
Royal Marines and sweeping for improvised
explosive devices (IEDs). “I remember one job.
We were clearing a compound and making
sure it was free from IEDs, bombs and all that.
You’ve got to be methodological, because if you
miss something, someone is going to die.”
On this occasion, however, a commanding
officer was becoming impatient with Purja
and kept telling him to hurry up. A sickening
thought occurred to Purja: the officer, he
convinced himself, was insinuating that he
was scared. Offended, Purja flipped out. “I lost
it,” he says. “I threw my mine detector on the
ground and said, ‘Mate, are you thinking that
I am scared of this? I’m not f***ing scared.
My life doesn’t matter at all to me. But if
somebody gets killed because a Gurkha
didn’t do their job properly? That’s not
my reputation to damage. Thousands of
Gurkhas have died in order to live up to the‘PEOPLE WERE LIKE,
“WHO IS THIS GUY? WE’VE
NEVER HEARD OF HIM.
DOES HE HAVE A CLUE?”’
From top: Purja on patrol when he was in the Special Boat
Service; with his parents in Kathmandu