He Wasn't Chasing Mountains - by Hassan Khan

Infinite Flow

SubscribeSign in

He Wasn't Chasing Mountains<br>Nims Purja and the cost of feeling alive

Hassan Khan<br>Aug 02, 2026

119

31<br>26

Share

I haven’t been able to stop thinking about Nirmal Purja since I heard the terrible news last night. I watched 14 Peaks a while ago, the documentary chronicling his astonishing mission to climb all 14 of the world’s 8000 metre peaks in just six months, a feat many believed impossible, and sat there in complete awe. I was blown away by Nims’ courage, his almost unimaginable sense of adventure and the sheer audacity of what he was attempting. It’s tough to put into words, but there was something wonderfully outrageous about him. He seemed to have made peace with fear in a way most of us never will. He kept walking towards places that every instinct tells us to avoid, and somehow made the impossible look almost ordinary.<br>So when I read that Nims had been killed in an avalanche on Broad Peak in Pakistan, it genuinely floored me. And I don’t think it was because death in the mountains is unimaginable. Death is an accepted part of the bargain in high altitude mountaineering, every climber knows that and every expedition carries that possibility with it. What shocked me was something else entirely, and it’s a harder thing to explain. There comes a point with people like Nims, after they’ve defied the odds again and again, when you almost stop believing they’re subject to the same rules as everyone else. They survive storms that should have claimed them. They rescue others when self preservation would tell most of us to turn around. They repeatedly walk into places where the margin for error is measured in millimetres and seconds, and somehow keep coming back. They begin to feel almost mythological, as though the normal rules of mortality no longer quite apply to them. Until one day they do.<br>Thanks for reading Infinite Flow! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.

Subscribe

For all the incredible records he broke, I don’t think that is what people will remember most. Nims spent his life trying to convince us that our limits are rarely as fixed as we believe they are. By the way he chose to live and his refusal to accept what everyone else considered impossible, he invited millions of people to think bigger about their own lives. That more than any summit he ever stood upon feels like his real legacy.<br>Ever since I heard the news, I’ve found myself thinking about the same question that tragedies like this always seem to leave behind. Why? Why keep going back? Why wasn’t Everest enough? Or K2? Or all fourteen in six months? Or doing it all over again without oxygen? At what point does someone finally decide they’ve done enough? Most of us ask these questions because we instinctively imagine the calculation differently. We think in terms of risk. We picture the avalanche, the crevasse, the fall, the families left behind. We see danger first and wonder how anyone could willingly step towards it.<br>But I suspect people like Nims see something entirely different. They don’t spend their lives chasing death. They spend their lives chasing a way of being that most of us only experience by accident. I think Nims was trying to tell us exactly that in 14 peaks. You never get the sense that he is chasing records for the sake of records or mountains for the sake of mountains. He is chasing something far more difficult to describe. Again and again he speaks about purpose, about possibility and about feeling truly alive. At one point he reflects that death is certain for all of us once we are born, so why spend our lives shrinking from it? His responsibility, as he saw it, was to keep moving towards something bigger than himself.<br>Watching him I couldn’t help thinking that the mountains were almost incidental. They were simply where he found the deepest version of himself. Where the noise disappeared and there was no audience to impress, no reputation to protect, no past to regret or future to worry about. There was only the climb. I have heard remarkably similar things from a close friend of mine who has spent much of his life exploring the world’s wildest places. He once described standing high on a mountain and feeling the boundary between himself and the landscape dissolve completely. He spoke about an overwhelming sense of love, purpose and connection, of being exactly where he was meant to be. Then he smiled and said something I’ll never forget. “There is no other drug quite like it in the world.”<br>Alex Honnold has spoken about it like this too (the same climber incidentally who free soloed El Capitan without a rope back in 2017 and more recently climbed Taipei 101 without so much as a harness). People constantly ask why he would risk everything. His answer is so simple. He says nothing else compares to how it feels when he is climbing. That is where he feels most alive. What is that feeling? What is it about...