The Terrifying Final Climb of The World's Best Climber

eXtreme

On 30 July 2026, an avalanche struck a group of 10 climbers attempting to summit Broad Peak in the Karakoram range of Pakistan. On 1 August, it was confirmed that all 10 climbers had died, including Nirmal Purja (Nimsdai), the most well-known mountain climber in the world. -------------------------------------------- Watch More:  The Deadly Race To Conquer K2 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nWkzbKyLbL0&t=1748s  One Last Rappel At 19,600 Feet: Annapurna's Crevasse Swallowed Anurag Malu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HCOiMBav1wE&t=5s  More eXtreme Stories - Subscribe: https://www.youtube.com/@TheExtreme-Edge  Every month there's a story that never goes on YouTube. You'll find it here: patreon.com/c/TheeXtreme   For business inquiries only - extremeedgeinfo@gmail.com Voiceover: https://jessegvoiceactor.com/

Transcript

00:00It's July 30th, 2026. Ten of the most experienced high-altitude climbers alive,

00:05including record holder Nirmal Persia, are crossing a mountain nobody really ever talks about.

00:12This heartbreaking day is about to become one of the deadliest mountaineering disasters

00:16in modern history. GPS trackers start reporting the impossible. One climber dropping 2,000 feet

00:23in 30 minutes, another losing 5,000 feet in elevation. These weren't inexperienced climbers

00:30who misjudged the mountain, they were legends in the climbing world that were considered invincible.

00:35So what actually happened up there, and why does nobody find out for another 10 hours?

00:41Welcome to the extreme edge, where the stakes are high, but nobody's just a headline.

00:47On the morning of July 30th, 2026, Nirmal Persia and nine other climbers were at roughly 21,000

00:53thousand six hundred feet on broad peak Pakistan and still climbing, or at least that's where his

00:59satellite tracker put him. That's high enough to be pushing toward the edge of the death zone,

01:04where the air pressure drops to about a third of what it is at sea level, and the amount of

01:09oxygen

01:09that actually makes it into a person's blood can fall to very low levels. Levels that anywhere else

01:16on earth would mean an ambulance and a hospital bed, but if there was anyone who could survive this,

01:22it was Nims. This was a man who in 2019 set the world record for fastest person alive to climb

01:29all 14 of the planet's tallest mountains. Most climbers who manage that at all take around seven

01:34years. Nims did it in six months and six days, and with him up there that morning were four different

01:41expedition teams composed of some of the best high-altitude climbers alive, guides who'd made

01:47history on K2 with experienced clients chasing world records of their own. This was about as

01:53safe a group as this sport has ever put on one slope, so there should have been nothing to worry

01:59about. That's what made what happened next so hard to explain, because roughly half an hour later,

02:05Nims' satellite tracker pinged again, and this one put him over 2,000 feet lower than the reading before

02:11it. And this was a bit...weird. At 26,414 feet, Broad Peak wasn't the kind of mountain you could drop

02:202,000 vertical feet in 30 minutes, unless something seriously wrong was going on.

02:26So what just happened? Before anyone could answer that, they checked a different tracker,

02:32and this time it was Nadhira Al-Hartis. Nadhira was the first Omani climber to summit Everest,

02:38and it also climbed K2 at Manaslu, and her tracker just showed her dropping 5,417 feet.

02:46That's more than a vertical mile at that exact time the team was supposed to be climbing very slowly

02:53up the mountain. Even if they had suddenly decided to turn around and go back,

02:58safely climbing down a full mile should take hours, not 30 minutes.

03:04Now, one weird GPS reading could just be a broken device, but two trackers suddenly dropping thousands

03:12of feet at the exact same time meant something darker. Hundreds of miles away, Ming Ma David Sherpa,

03:20Nims' co-founder at their expedition company, Elite Exped, and his long-time climbing partner,

03:26was one of the people watching the tracking data come in. Ming Ma knew better than anyone on Earth that

03:31if

03:32those numbers were showing what they appeared to show, there was massive trouble.

03:36But then Ming Ma noticed something else. Nims' tracker was still moving. It wasn't by much,

03:43but enough to give him hope. He typed out this message to the rest of his team.

03:48Nims' location is moving, brother. We hope he is still alive. We need rescue,

03:54because his GPS location is moving. His theory was that Nims had somehow survived whatever caused

04:00that enormous drop, and was somewhere down there, injured but alive. The problem with that theory,

04:07though, was that his tracker was moving, but it was also showing a speed of zero.

04:12That's like looking at a car's speedometer resting at zero while you watched the car roll down a hill.

04:17Nims wasn't moving, but his location was changing, and that made no sense. Unless, of course,

04:24something else was moving his body down the mountain. And to figure out what that something was,

04:31we have to look at what had been happening on Broad Peak for the previous week, because by July 30th,

04:37this wasn't exactly a normal mountain. Usually by the end of July, the climbing season in this part of

04:43the world is basically over. People get to the top, the weather holds, and everyone packs up and goes

04:49home. This was not a normal season. On July 18th, right when climbers should have been topping this

04:57mountain, a massive windstorm hit right there. Four days later, on the 22nd, it started snowing again,

05:04and this time, it was heavy and relentless. Now, for folks at home, I'm sure fresh snow on a mountain

05:10sounds normal, but imagine a steep driveway covered in solid, slick ice. Now, dump thousands of pounds

05:18of heavy, wet snow on top of it. That new snow doesn't just magically stick to the ice, it just

05:25rests on top, heavy and loose. For a mountain to become safe to climb after a big storm, it needs

05:31time.

05:32It needs a few clear, freezing days for that new snow to essentially either glue itself to the mountain,

05:38or get so heavy that it naturally slides off on its own. If you try to walk across it before

05:44either of

05:44those things happens, your footsteps can be the trigger that brings tons of snow crashing down.

05:50And climbers knew this. NIMS knew this. During his attempt to climb all 14 of the world's 26,000-foot

05:57mountains in under seven months back in 2019, his team had to pause their own record attempt more than

06:04once just to pull other climbers who'd misjudged exactly this kind of danger out of trouble.

06:10But this time, as snow started falling on broad peak, the mountain went from a busy campsite to a

06:17ghost town because expedition after expedition completely abandoned their climbs. But NIMS and

06:24his group stayed. So did a small outfit called Imagine Nepal, guiding a Chinese climber named Wang

06:31Zhang. He was one mountain away from finishing all 14 26,000-foot peaks. And so did a seven-summit

06:37tracks team guiding Nadira. And to round out the four, a Pakistani guide named Sohail Saki and his

06:44American client Mallory Geis, on her very first 26,000-foot mountain, chose to stay as well.

06:51That's 10 climbers in total. We're probably thinking the same thing at this point.

06:56If broad peak was really as dangerous as everyone thought, why were they still up there? Well,

07:02it's not because they didn't know about the fresh snow piling up. They knew what that meant,

07:07but they also knew that the weather was about to change. Because a short window of clearer skies

07:12was opening, and on a 26,000-foot mountain, a clear summit window can be incredibly tempting.

07:18You don't get many summit chances in a season like this. If they waited too long,

07:22who knew when another storm would come rolling in?

07:26For Nimsdai in particular though, he didn't even need to be on broad peak. His main goal that summer

07:32was his hat trick project. He wanted to be the first person to climb all 14 of the world's tallest

07:38mountains three separate times, but he had already climbed broad peak three times. For his main mission,

07:44broad peak was already finished. He was only in Pakistan to climb one specific mountain,

07:49Gashabroom 2. And on July 21, he did exactly that. But he climbed it without using extra oxygen.

07:57And that changed everything. He wrote in an Instagram post,

08:02This was never the plan. Initially, the plan was to climb just G2. But just before setting off for

08:08Pakistan, I ran the numbers on my 8,000-meter summits. That's when it hit me. If I tick off

08:15broad peak,

08:15whilst I'm here, only one remains, Cho Oyu. Then I become the first person in history to climb all 14

08:248,000-ers twice without oxygen. This wasn't planned. The hat trick project was the focus because it

08:31carried a bigger mission. But opportunities don't scream, they whisper to those already working in

08:38silence. Then, he closed the post with this line, I ask for nothing but safe passage up and back down.

08:45Now, there were four separate outfits at first. Nims with his elite Exped crew. Imagine Nepal with

08:52Kili Pemba Sherpa and Chinese climber Wang Zhong. Seven Summit track squad guiding Nadhira and Sohail Saki

09:00with Mallory. Four separate operations with separate plans that just happened to be running on almost the

09:06same clock. For days, they'd watched storm after storm batter the slopes while everyone else packed

09:14up and went home. But when that brief window of clear weather cracked open at the end of July,

09:19ambition and survival forced their hands. Everyone in base camp knew they were sharing the mountain with

09:25Nims Dai and his all-star crew. And when an icon like Nims decides to make a move, it acts

09:31as a

09:31gravitational pull. They pooled their resources, aligned their schedules, and decided to move as

09:37one unified line. So, on Wednesday, July 29th, the 10 climbers made their move, pushing up the mountain

09:44towards Camp 2, which sits about 20,300 feet above sea level. There were no incidents, no warnings.

09:52Before settling in for the night, Nims checked his phone out of habit and saw an old message from a

09:58journalist back home. He tapped out a quick voice note, almost casually, that he was at Camp 2,

10:04going for his 58th 26,000-foot summit.

10:08Hey, brother, greetings and namaste. Right now, I'm at Camp 2, up Road Peak, which is a thousand-meter

10:16mountains. I'm now currently running for 58th summit of a thousand-meter peaks, which is the

10:23highest in the world. I just opened the internet to check the weather forecast, but this message

10:32got downloaded as well, so I will be in touch after the summit.

10:35He sounded perfectly calm, like he always did. The plan was to spend that Wednesday

10:40resting in their tents. Then, early the next morning, on July 30th, they would leave Camp 2

10:46and push up a steep, highly exposed section of the mountain to reach Camp 3 at 23,000 feet,

10:53spend Thursday night resting there, wake up on Friday, July 31st, for their final push to the very top.

11:00There was a fast, aggressive schedule designed to get them up to the summit and back down before the

11:06weather could turn again. So, on the morning of July 30th, hours before the sun had any intention of

11:12showing up over the Karakorum, all ten climbers crawled out of their tents at Camp 2, clipped into a

11:18single line of fixed rope, and started climbing into the dark toward Camp 3. And for a few hours,

11:24everything looked perfect. We know this because their satellite trackers, strapped to their harnesses,

11:30were pinging away in the cold and kept a steady, almost boring record of the climb as it happened.

11:36At 5.33 in the morning, moments after leaving Camp, NIMS's tracker pinged at just over 20,400 feet.

11:44An hour and a half later, at 7.03, they were moving fast, chewing through the altitude,

11:49exactly the way an elite team led by NIMS should. By 9 am, the trackers showed them reaching roughly

11:5621,850 feet. At this point, they were making their way across a steep, highly exposed section of the

12:03mountain. They knew they were walking directly over all that fresh, unbonded snow from the storm,

12:09so they probably took extra care to walk softly. But, it did not matter how softly they walked,

12:16because while they were focused on the snow beneath their boots, the real danger was hanging thousands

12:22of feet above their heads. High up on the mountain, far above the route the climbers were crossing,

12:29a massive block of compacted ice and snow just... snapped. It hit the slopes below, and violently

12:38scooped up all of that fresh, loose July snow the climbers had been so worried about. In seconds,

12:44one Serac drop became this massive, highway speed wall of white destruction, accelerating straight

12:51down the face of the mountain. And those ten climbers were directly in its path. They had

12:57absolutely zero warning, and even if they had heard the roar of the ice cracking above them,

13:02they had nowhere to go, because they were crossing the slope horizontally, so they were clipped into a

13:07single fixed safety line. They couldn't just unclip and outrun this wall of snow and ice gathering speed,

13:14coming down right at them. There was nothing to do but pray. The avalanche washed completely over them,

13:22and the sheer violence of the impact physically ripped all ten climbers from the ridge and threw

13:28them down into the steep, deep, unconfined gullies that flank the sides of Broad Peak. Then, silence.

13:37No one at base camp knew what just happened, because almost nobody was there to look. Most of the people

13:43who would normally be watching that slope were either up on Broad Peak themselves, across the valley at the

13:49K2 base camp, or, in the case of Mingmah David Sherpa, hundreds of miles away, watching numbers on a screen

13:56instead of the mountain itself. They had no idea, and to make things worse, the exact stretch where it

14:03happened wasn't even clearly visible from where base camp sat. A few people did catch a slide out of

14:10the corner of their eye that morning. They didn't think much of it. Avalanches happen out there all the

14:16time, and most of them don't mean anything. This was supposed to be one of those.

14:22Across the valley on K2, a climber named Jenjen Lama from Seven Summit Tracks, the same company

14:29guiding Nadira Alharthi on Broad Peak, had his camera pointed at Broad Peak. He was casually filming

14:35the surroundings of K2, the way you film a mountain when nothing's supposed to be happening on it.

14:41You can hear a voice on that footage, watching the Wall of White come down the slope, casually asking,

14:47that's not going to reach us, is it?

14:51Oh my god!

14:55That's not going to reach us, is it? No.

14:58You sure? No.

15:01He had no idea what just happened, but, just to be safe,

15:04Jenjen Lama pulled out his VHF radio. He tried to call across the valley to two of the guides on

15:11that Broad Peak team, Kyalu and Nawang Tindu, just to check in. He got nothing but static,

15:18but even then, he didn't panic. He just made a completely logical assumption that the team had

15:23simply switched their radios off, because, up there, in the extreme, biting cold of the death zone,

15:29batteries drain ridiculously fast. It's standard practice to power down your radio between scheduled

15:35check-ins to save the battery. Lama figured they were just keeping their heads down, saving power,

15:41and pushing hard for Camp 3. He called base camp, told them to keep an ear out for a check

15:47-in,

15:47and went back to his own climb. And for the next several hours, that offhand comment was the entire

15:54extent of anyone's worry. For over ten hours, the radios stayed quiet from the climbers at the top.

16:01But nobody panicked. Avalanches happen all the time up there, and at that altitude, a team can take

16:08hours longer than planned. The climbers were moving through difficult terrain, and the weather could

16:14slow them down at any moment. Besides, this wasn't some group of beginners who had wandered too high

16:19up a mountain. The support crews at base camp knew the folks up there were the all-star dream team

16:25of high-altitude climbing. You had the guy who had climbed a 26,000-foot mountain peak 57 times,

16:31more than anyone alive. Right beside him was poor Bahadur Gurung, his deeply trusted right-hand man,

16:38a guide who'd already helped bring clients down some of the most dangerous ski descents on earth.

16:45There was Kili Pemba Sherpa, who just a few weeks prior had finished climbing all 14 of the highest

16:51peaks himself, and was part of the legendary Nepali team that made the very first winter ascent of K2

16:57back in 2021. There was also Nima Sherpa, a young guide from a farming family near Makalu,

17:05who had already summited four 26,000-foot peaks. Then there was Nadira Al-Harthi,

17:12the first Omani woman to ever climb Everest, K2, and Manaslu, here to add another summit for her own

17:1914-peak record. Wang Zhang, a Chinese climber two summits away from finishing that same quest himself.

17:27Gyalu Sherpa, who held a Guinness World Record for climbing Khanchunjunga three times in a single

17:33season. Sohail Saki, a Pakistani guide who'd already climbed K2, Nanga Parbat, and G2 without bottled

17:41oxygen. This was supposed to be his last expedition before retiring from the mountains for good,

17:47and he was here to guide Mallory Geis. Even 28-year-old Noong Thindu Sherpa, the youngest

17:54climber in the group, already had five 26,000-foot summits and had worked on high-altitude recoveries.

18:01These were the people you called for help, not the folks you rescue. So if the radios were quiet,

18:07the assumption down at base camp was that this climb was just taking a long time. But by 7pm,

18:13the sun was setting, and it began to dawn on them that even for the strongest team on Earth,

18:19radio silence doesn't take this long. By now, they should have reached Camp 3.

18:25They should have been melting ice for drinking water, having dinner, and chit-chatting,

18:30celebrating their summit. They should have at least given base camp an update, as they'd always done.

18:35But there was nothing. Just total, suffocating silence. The anxiety finally became too much to

18:45ignore. Someone at base camp finally made a satellite phone call to Seven Summit Treks

18:49headquarters in Kathmandu, hundreds of miles away, where they actually had high-speed internet.

18:55They asked the SST team there to log in and pull up the climbers' tracking data so they could see

19:01where

19:01they were, just in case. And when the people at Seven Summit Treks opened that map, they finally

19:07saw a digital nightmare. Instead of ten dots maybe spread out along the route to Camp 3,

19:13they saw chaotic dots, all scattered across thousands of feet, way down the mountain.

19:20This wasn't a group of strong climbers grinding through difficult terrain in bad light.

19:25Whatever happened up there, happened to all of them, all at once. And everyone below had spent

19:32the entire day assuming the silence just meant they were busy. That means somewhere between 10

19:38and 13 hours passed between that avalanche and a response. But even as the panic set in,

19:45the technology played one last incredibly cruel trick on the people watching those screens.

19:52When Ming Ma David Sherpa, co-founder of Nim's expedition company Elite Exped, heard what had

19:58happened, he was horrified. They had built their business together and they had survived the death

20:03zone together on multiple mountains. And as Ming Ma pulled up the GPS tracking data and stared at that

20:09horrifying scatter of dropped dots, trying to process what happened, he noticed one tiny detail that

20:17stopped his heart. Nim's tracker was updating. The little digital dot was actually shifting its position

20:25on the map. It wasn't moving fast, but the coordinates were definitely changing. In the middle of an unfolding

20:31nightmare, it sparked a desperate wave of optimism. Ming Ma quickly sent out a message.

20:38Nim's location is moving, brother. We hope, brother, he is still alive.

20:43Maybe Nim's somehow survived the massive fall and was out there in the freezing dark, badly injured,

20:49but slowly crawling his way to safety. Yes, the tracker's speed was showing exactly zero,

20:55even though the location was changing and nobody looking at that screen had an answer for that yet,

21:00because it made no sense. But they had something far more important to deal with first, because

21:06if Nim's was alive, they had to find him. The office in Kathmandu didn't hesitate. They picked up the phone

21:13and finally called the Alpine Club of Pakistan. That's the organization responsible for coordinating

21:19exactly this kind of emergency in Pakistan's 26,000-foot peaks. From there, it went straight to

21:25Pakistan's military. The army has the only aircraft capable of operating anywhere near that altitude in the

21:32Karakorum, and by around 7.30 that evening, they'd been formally asked to scramble a response.

21:39Nyla Kiani, one of the Alpine Club's own climbers, would later put the timeline bluntly to reporters.

21:46We didn't fully grasp what they were dealing with until close to 10pm that night. And the hard,

21:53unbreakable rule of flying in the Karakorum range is that helicopters do not fly at night. It's simply

22:00too dangerous for rescue pilots and teams to navigate those jagged, unpredictable peaks in the dark.

22:07Which meant, for the rest of that long, freezing night, whatever was left of the 10 climbers

22:12remains completely alone in the dark, somewhere at the bottom of a massive gully on Broad Peak.

22:19By morning, Pakistan's military had aircraft in the air at 20,000 feet over Broad Peak,

22:25and at that altitude, the air was so incredibly thin that the only thing the helicopters could do was fly

22:31long, slow passes over the debris field of the avalanche scanning for bodies. The real search had

22:38to happen on foot, with rescue volunteers like Mingma, Gyalje, Sherpa, who had been on K2 themselves,

22:45and had been monitoring this exact climb by radio from across the valley that same morning the avalanche

22:51hit. They had turned around mid-expedition, abandoned their own summit attempts, and crossed the glacier on

22:58foot to search for men and women they'd shared meals with days earlier. They were hoping for a miracle.

23:04They were hoping to find survivors huddled in the snow. But when the ground team finally reached the

23:10debris field at the bottom of the gully, well, one of the rescuers, Habid Baig, put it bluntly,

23:17when we arrived at the scene, we realized that there is nothing left to be hopeful about.

23:23The climbers were looking at a debris field that stretched across more than 3,000 vertical feet

23:29down the mountain. Climbing here meant risking their lives, because every step of that search

23:35meant walking back on that unstable slope. But, maybe, somehow against all hope,

23:43someone was still alive. Maybe Nims was. It was worth the risk. That same evening, they found the

23:50bodies of Nadira al-Harthi, poor Bahadur Gurung, and what would later be confirmed as part of Mallory

23:58Geis, near the very base where the avalanche slide had finally run out of force and dropped what it was

24:04carrying. By the next morning, the ground teams kept pushing higher into terrain that got more

24:10dangerous the further up they went. At one point in the search, two Pakistani climbers, Abid Baig,

24:17and Serbaj Khan nearly got caught in a second, smaller avalanche somewhere during their search.

24:24They barely escaped with their lives, which showed everyone just how unstable this mountain was.

24:30The rescue team kept going up anyway. They were now very close to where Nims' GPS tracker placed him.

24:38Somehow, against all logic and all sense, he might still be alive.

24:44This was a former Special Forces commando who routinely survived things that would literally

24:49kill anyone else on Earth. If anyone could ride a 2,000-foot avalanche down a mountain,

24:55dig himself out, and survive a freezing night in the Karakorum, it should have been Nims.

25:00But on Sunday, August 2nd, 2026, at roughly 18,700 feet, two rescuers stopped moving.

25:09One of them had seen something in the snow that wasn't ice or rock. They called out to the other

25:16almost quietly to confirm what they suspected. And when the others climbed over and confirmed what

25:22those rescuers were looking at, hope was finally over. Because right there in that gully were four

25:30bodies. Wang Zhong, Nima Sherpa, Kili Pemba Sherpa, and Nims Persia. One of the greatest climbers in history

25:42was gone. What happened next was almost routine in comparison. Army helicopters lifted all the

25:49recovered bodies off the mountain and flew them down to the town of Skardu. Of the ten, the mountain

25:57kept Gyalu Sherpa, a powerhouse guide who held a Guinness World Record for summiting Kanchenjunga three

26:04times in a single season. It kept 28-year-old Nawang Thindu Sherpa. He was the youngest climber on the

26:11team,

26:12but he was no rookie. He already had five 26,000-foot summits to his name and had previously risked

26:19his own life

26:20participating in high-altitude body recoveries for other fallen climbers. And it kept Sohail Saki,

26:28the veteran Pakistani guide who had been leading the American client, Mallory Geis. For them,

26:34the search would eventually be called off. The mountain was just too unstable right now,

26:40and risking more lives for what was now clearly a recovery mission made no sense. And way back in

26:46Kathmandu, the tracker that had given Mingmah David Sherpa hope, was still transmitting. A tracker

26:53doesn't know where a person is, it only estimates where the device itself thinks it is, based on a

27:00signal bounced down from satellites passing overhead. And when a GPS device gets buried deep under thousands

27:07of tons of avalanche snow and mountain rock, it struggles to connect with the satellites in orbit.

27:13The signal bounces and scatters off the solid walls of ice and rock inside the gully. By the time those

27:20confused, bounced signals reach the tracking software hundreds of miles away, the system

27:26misinterprets them. It takes those scattered pings and makes a completely stationary device look like

27:33it's slowly wandering around. What was happening with those pings was that it wasn't because he was

27:39trying to crawl to safety. It was because the massive pile of snow he was buried under was likely

27:44physically dragging his lifeless body and the tracker slowly down the mountain. It was the last echo of

27:52a disaster that had already happened. Ten of the greatest climbers of their generation were gone. And the

27:59next question on everyone's lips was, how could this happen? Because for one, they didn't even need to

28:06climb to summit Broad Peak. In fact, on July 25th, just five days before the avalanche, this Hungarian

28:13climber David Klein and his climbing partner Ian Overton were only 230 vertical feet off the summit of Broad Peak

28:20when they saw all that fresh, heavy snow and knew a disaster was waiting to happen. They knew the only

28:28way this

28:28mountain was going to be safe to climb again was if everyone waited for a long, clear weather window to

28:34let the snowpack glue itself to the mountain. David and Ian, literally just a couple hundred feet from the top,

28:41packed up and went down Broad Peak. So it makes no sense if even David, who to be fair, was

28:48experienced in

28:49his own right, but not as much as those climbers, saw this danger so clearly. Why did other elite teams

28:56look at those exact same slopes and decide to keep climbing? Why did NIMS? And if anyone in the climbing

29:02world had earned the right to ask these questions, it was Reinhold Messner. Reinhold was the first person

29:08to climb all 14 of the world's tallest peaks, and he wasn't exactly NIMS's biggest fan because they both had

29:15different ideas on how mountains should be summited. But when he spoke publicly about NIMS's death,

29:21there was no lecture in it. He simply wrote, Nirmal chose his own path with courage and passion.

29:27What remains is not only the sorrow of his passing, but the memory of a life truly lived. Even the

29:35sport's

29:36harshest critic, this time, chose to only grieve. The truth is, we'll never know what calculations made

29:44these elite climbers look at this risk and decide the reward was worth it. NIMS made that same bet once

29:50before on a mountain that had never been climbed in winter before due to the harsh conditions. Wind strong

29:57enough to tear a tent off the mountain with people still inside it. The odds said whoever went there

30:03wasn't coming back down. NIMS, alongside nine climbers, went up into that. Some of them were even rivals.

30:12This is what happened in the first winter ascent of K2.

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