By the Monterosa Booking team, with the support of IFMGA mountain guides from Monte Rosa
Gift, ego and our brief time
A reflection on the way we speak about mountaineering, after the death of Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja on Broad Peak.
On 30 July 2026, Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja died on Broad Peak, swept away by an avalanche together with other members of the expedition.
The news is still close. In the world of mountaineering, his name was not an ordinary one: the fourteen eight-thousanders climbed in just over six months, the records, the first winter ascent of K2, a presence capable of dividing opinions and attracting attention like few others.
In the days before the climb, Nimsdai had addressed a simple prayer to the mountain: “Broad Peak, I ask only for a safe passage to go up and come back.” He had also written that he had never taken any mountain for granted.
After his death, those words remain there. Not as a sentence to turn into legend, but as a difficult question.
Did the mountain not listen?
In moments like this, the temptation is to take refuge in a familiar expression. To say that the mountain wanted him, that it kept him, that in some way it chose him. These words try to console us, but they risk making poetic something that is not poetic.
An avalanche does not choose.
It does not reward and it does not punish. It does not recognise merit, it does not measure respect, it does not make agreements with those who approach it. The mountain owes nothing to those who pray to it, love it, know it or have climbed it many times before.
If we read those words as a concrete request to return home, Nimsdai did not receive what he asked for. Yet this does not make his prayer meaningless. Perhaps it reveals its most serious meaning: praying does not mean controlling the answer. It means recognising that the answer does not belong to us.
This is where we should begin every time we use the verb “to conquer” when speaking about a mountain.
To conquer means to take possession, to submit something to one’s will, to turn an external reality into a territory over which we exercise control. In the mountains, none of this happens.
When we reach a summit, the mountain does not change owner. It does not lose a battle. It does not recognise our superiority. It remains what it was. We are the ones who have crossed, for a few hours, a part of its surface.
The word conquest speaks mostly about us. It tells the way our time imagines the individual: autonomous, determined, able to set a goal, prepare for it and reach it through will, method and discipline.
This vision also has something valuable. It recognises personal responsibility, the freedom to act, the possibility of not remaining trapped in the place where we started. But it becomes an illusion when autonomy is confused with self-sufficiency, and the desire to succeed becomes the claim to control every outcome.
The contemporary story of mountaineering often reflects this distortion.
I decided. I trained. I endured. I reached the summit.
The mountain becomes the background on which individual value is displayed. The summit photo no longer documents only an experience: it publicly certifies an identity. It says that we are the ones who made it.
And yet, behind every sentence that begins with “I did”, there is a wider network that is almost always removed from the story.
There are the people who taught the techniques, those who studied the route, those who built and manage the huts, those who prepare the lifts, those who observe the conditions, those who accompany or intervene in an emergency. On the great Himalayan mountains, there are porters and high-altitude guides whose work has long been hidden behind achievements attributed to a single name.
Even in the Alps, where the organisation is different, no ascent comes from nothing. Every gesture uses knowledge received from others, equipment designed by others and a collective system that makes our passage possible.
To say “I climbed it” is not false. It is incomplete.
The human being is incomplete too.
We are born with extraordinary possibilities, but not with the ability to already know how to live in the world. We need time to learn how to speak, recognise danger, use the body, interpret the environment and live with others. We do not become people despite dependence: we become people through it.
Having an ability does not mean knowing how to use it in every situation. We can be strong without knowing when to stop, experienced without being able to read a change, prepared without being able to govern the unexpected.
Maturity does not mean eliminating this incompleteness. It means recognising it and continuing to learn.
In the mountains, this becomes very concrete. It means understanding what we do not know, relying on the competence of others, changing a decision and accepting that turning back does not reduce our value.
This is the same principle we try to share when we speak about preparation for high altitude: the point is not to turn the mountain into a test to pass, but to arrive with more margin, more clarity and more respect.
We speak about this in our article on how to train for a 4,000-metre peak, where the real difference is not between those who “make it” and those who “do not”, but between those who improvise and those who build.
The death of an experienced mountaineer does not necessarily prove a lack of competence. It shows something harder to accept: even exceptional competence does not make the human being sovereign in the face of uncertainty.
Knowledge reduces risk, guides decisions and allows us to act with greater awareness. But it does not turn a complex environment into a fully predictable system.
Confusing preparation with invulnerability means asking technique for a promise that no technique can keep.
There is another measure capable of reducing the ego: time.
Homo sapiens has existed for a very short time when compared with the history of the Earth. Other forms of life remained on the planet for millions and millions of years longer than us. If we compressed Earth’s history into a single day, our species would appear only in the last moments before midnight.
All our expeditions, records, summit photos and discussions about peaks would occupy an almost imperceptible fraction of that final moment.
Even mountains are not eternal. They rise, deform, erode and change.
But their time does not coincide with ours. A human life can observe a glacier retreating, a wall collapsing or a route changing; it cannot embrace the geological process to which all this belongs.
This comparison is not meant to make the human being insignificant.
It is meant to place us.
Being brief does not mean having no value. It means we cannot confuse our presence with possession.
This is where the idea of gift can help us think about the mountain differently.
In The Gift, Marcel Mauss showed that a gift is not only a free gesture. It is a relationship. Whoever gives opens a bond, whoever receives accepts it, and whoever gives back does not simply close a debt, but recognises and maintains that relationship.
There is no need to force this idea or turn it into a rigid theory about mountains. A mountain does not give in the way a person gives. A prayer does not oblige it to grant the summit or safety.
And yet this image helps us shift our gaze.
The experience we receive in the mountains is not only ours. It contains a place, a community, accumulated knowledge, favourable environmental conditions and decisions taken together. It also contains what we did not obtain: the limit we met, the summit we missed, the fear that made us more lucid, the return we chose when continuing no longer made sense.
If we consider all this a gift, giving back cannot simply mean reaching the summit.
The summit is not the payment owed to our preparation, and prayer is not the price of protection.
Giving back means taking responsibility for what made our passage possible.
Preparing honestly. Not unloading the consequences of our carelessness onto others. Listening to those who know the terrain. Respecting work that often remains invisible. Reducing our trace. Turning back when conditions ask for it.
These are different forms of the same response.
We do not settle a debt with the mountain. We keep the relationship open.
The same is true even on mountains that appear more accessible. An ascent to Capanna Margherita, a first 4,000-metre peak or a glacier day are not experiences to consume quickly and archive with a photo. They are passages that ask for preparation, listening and the ability to stay inside an environment larger than ourselves.
This perspective does not require us to eliminate the ego.
That would be another claim to purity and, perhaps, another way of putting ourselves back at the centre. The desire to arrive, to measure ourselves, to understand our possibilities and to reach an important objective belongs to human experience.
The problem begins when the ego no longer accepts being only one part and wants to become the whole; when it turns ambition into a right, the summit into a certificate of value and retreat into failure.
The mountain can then perform a function that individualist society tends to avoid: it reminds us of dependence without humiliating us.
It shows us that we can act without controlling everything, be competent without being invulnerable, have a desire without expecting the world to satisfy it.
It teaches us that freedom does not mean being free from every bond, but consciously recognising the bonds we depend on and taking responsibility for our actions within them.
This is why the work of a mountain guide on Monte Rosa is not only to accompany someone towards a summit. It is to read conditions, people, timing and margins. It is to help make decisions inside an environment that cannot be reduced to a simple performance.
Nimsdai’s prayer remains.
We cannot say that the mountain listened, because the mountain is not a judge to whom we can attribute human intentions. We cannot even say that it was useless, as if the value of a prayer depended on obtaining what it asks for.
Those words were not a guarantee. They were the recognition that, from the moment he left base camp, the decision no longer belonged only to him.
Perhaps, then, the decisive question is not whether the mountain listened to Nimsdai.
It is whether we are capable of listening to what his prayer admitted: we do not conquer what owes us nothing.
We enter, for a brief time, a reality that precedes and exceeds us. And the value of our passage does not depend only on how high we arrived, but on what we understood, how we behaved and what we will be able to give back.
Thank you, Nimsdai, for praying.
Source note: the news of the death of Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja and the other climbers involved in the avalanche on Broad Peak was checked against international journalistic sources, including Associated Press and The Guardian.
