Nims Purja
Annapurna, April 2019
to boarding school, where, by his own estimation, he excelled. “I used to be top five; I could have been first, but I’d finish a two-hour exam in an hour so I could be first to leave the test room. But I didn’t want to be a doctor or an engineer, I had two options: one was to be the Robin Hood of Nepal, seeing off those rich people who don’t pay tax – you know, politicians and all that – and distributing that money to the poor.” He chose option two: the Gurkhas. “Getting in was tough. In my time, 32,000 young Nepalese applied and only 36
320 made it. I started training at 15, in a hostel. I’d wake up at 3am and run with weights strapped to my legs. I had no clue what that did, but I used to go back to bed at 5am and pretend I hadn’t left. I passed the selection on my second attempt.” Purja’s time in the armed forces – he joined the Gurkhas in 2002 and moved to their UK Infantry Training Centre in Catterick (he now lives in Hampshire), and the SBS in 2009 – is one he is deeply proud of, but for every detail he isn’t willing to reveal (“What I can say is I have been shot; I have been into the most
sensitive operations across the globe.”), he is candid about one aspect: “I had what others didn’t have – I could climb an 8,000m peak in two weeks. When I got leave I’d empty my savings and go climb.” Indeed, when Purja finished partying after his five-day tour of Everest, Lhotse and Makalu in 2017, he had to go straight back to work. “I was supposed to get a heli ride to a Special Forces mission, but the heli didn’t come because of the weather, so I ran all the way from base camp – six days’ worth of trekking in 18 hours, THE RED BULLETIN
NIRMAL PURJA/PROJECT POSSIBLE
More than 30 per cent of climbers who attempt to summit the world’s 10th highest mountain perish. Avalanche risk forced Purja’s team to ascend along a rarely-traversed route called the ‘Dutch Rib’ (pictured).