Quick Facts:
- Pur Bahadur Gurung, known as Yukta, has been confirmed dead after an avalanche on Pakistan’s Broad Peak, according to the Alpine Club of Pakistan and Nepal’s National Mountain Guide Association
- Born in 1989 in Laprak, Dharche Rural Municipality-4, Gorkha district, Nepal
- Died at age 37 while working as a guide for Nirmal Purja’s Elite Exped team
- Summited Mount Everest ten times and climbed 12 of the world’s 14 eight-thousand metre peaks
Pur Bahadur Gurung, the IFMGA-certified mountain guide known across Nepal’s climbing community as Yukta, has been confirmed dead after an avalanche struck his team below Camp III on Pakistan’s Broad Peak. The Alpine Club of Pakistan and Nepal’s National Mountain Guide Association both confirmed his identity on Friday, 31 July 2026, making him one of the first two climbers named among the four bodies recovered so far. He was 37 years old, and he was guiding for Elite Exped, the company founded by his friend and fellow climber Nirmal Purja, who remains among the six climbers still unaccounted for.
This piece looks at who Yukta was, how his identity was confirmed, and what his death means for a Nepali guiding community that rarely gets its names printed the way its Western clients do.
Who Was Pur Bahadur Gurung?
Yukta was born in 1989 in Laprak, a village in Dharche Rural Municipality-4, in the northern reaches of Gorkha district, a region better known to trekkers as the starting point for the Manaslu Circuit. He grew up in the shadow of the Himalayas, and as a young man he once hoped to join the British Army, a path that many young Gurung and Gurkha families in the region still pursue. That route closed to him, and he left home instead to work at a hotel in Manang, in the Annapurna region, where daily contact with trekking guides and their clients drew him toward the profession that would define his life.
From Manang, he moved to Kathmandu and began working his way up through Nepal’s mountain guiding system, starting, as many of the country’s most respected guides do, as a porter. Abiral Rai, a board member of the Nepal National Mountain Guide Association who helped train him, described him as someone who started from nothing and rose through the ranks unusually quickly. That rise eventually earned him IFMGA certification, an internationally recognised qualification so demanding it is sometimes called the PhD of mountain guiding, requiring years of training across rock, ice and alpine terrain before a guide is certified to lead clients independently anywhere in the world.
Where Is Pur Bahadur Gurung From, and What Was His Climbing Record?
Gorkha district sits in Gandaki Province, in Nepal’s mid-hills, and is best known internationally as the home of the Gurkha regiments and as the trailhead region for the Manaslu Circuit trek. Yukta carried that district’s name onto the world’s highest peaks. He summited Mount Everest ten times, more than any other climber from the Gurung community, beginning with his first ascent in 2011. Over the following years he added 12 of the world’s 14 eight-thousand-metre peaks to his record, missing only two of the full set. He also completed a rapid ascent of K2, summiting Pakistan’s most feared mountain within 24 hours, a pace that put him among a small circle of elite Nepali climbers capable of moving that fast at extreme altitude.
Beyond his own summits, Yukta was known for his involvement in mountain rescue work, regularly stepping in to help stranded trekkers and climbers caught in trouble on Nepal’s peaks. Tulsi Singh, a fellow climber who spoke about his record, noted that of the 14 mountains above 8,000 metres, eight sit inside Nepal, and that Yukta had climbed all but two of the full global set. It is the kind of record that, among Sherpa and Gurung guides, rarely reaches an international audience the way a foreign client’s summit photo does, even when the guide standing beside them has climbed the mountain more times than anyone else on the team.
How Was His Identity Confirmed?
Yukta was one of two climbers formally identified among the first four bodies recovered from the Broad Peak avalanche site, alongside Omani climber Nadhira Al Harthy, the first Omani woman to summit Everest. Both identifications came from the Alpine Club of Pakistan, the official body overseeing mountaineering in the country, working alongside Nepal’s National Mountain Guide Association. His body was recovered from the base of the avalanche debris, opposite Broad Peak Base Camp, where a ground rescue team brought the victims down after helicopters were grounded by poor weather for much of Friday. Arrangements to transport his remains back toward Skardu, and eventually home to Nepal, were underway as of the latest reporting.
A third body, believed to belong to American climber Mallory Geis, was reportedly identified shortly afterward by Gilgit-Baltistan regional authorities, though that confirmation has moved through separate channels than the two names confirmed directly by the Alpine Club. Six climbers, including Nirmal Purja, Kili Pemba Sherpa, Nima Sherpa, Gyalu Sherpa, Nawang Thindu Sherpa and Pakistani guide Sohail Sakhi, remained unconfirmed at the time of writing, though drone footage relayed through climbers assisting the search has suggested a grimmer picture for at least some of them.
What Happened on Broad Peak
An avalanche struck a 10-member international team below Camp III on Broad Peak, at 8,047 metres, the 12th highest mountain in the world, around midday on Thursday, 30 July. Reports describe two separate slides hitting the group within a short span of each other, severing radio and satellite contact almost immediately. Confusion over who had been alerted meant Base Camp did not fully register the scale of what had happened until many hours later, delaying the formal search until Friday morning.
Yukta was part of the Elite Exped contingent that day, working alongside Purja rather than as a paying client’s guide on that particular stretch. Reporting on the makeup of the team suggests there were few or no clients on that section of the route, meaning the group caught in the slide was largely working guides, the people whose job it is to fix ropes, break trail, and carry the risk that makes summit attempts possible for everyone behind them. Nima Sherpa, also part of the Elite Exped team, remains among the missing, though less has surfaced publicly about his individual record so far, a quiet reminder of how unevenly attention falls even within the same tragedy.
Why Broad Peak Still Turns Deadly
Broad Peak does not carry the reputation of its infamous neighbour K2, a few kilometres away in the same Karakoram range. It lacks K2’s technical sections, nothing resembling the Bottleneck, nothing with the sustained exposure of a mountain like Annapurna. That relative accessibility is exactly why so many climbers, guides and clients alike, use Broad Peak as a stepping stone toward the full set of eight-thousanders.
What the mountain does share with its neighbours is altitude risk that has nothing to do with technical grade. Above roughly 8,000 metres, climbers enter what mountaineers call the death zone, where the human body cannot properly absorb oxygen from the thin air and begins to deteriorate regardless of experience or fitness. Broad Peak’s slopes above Camp 2 are known for storms and avalanches that build with little warning, and the mountain has a history to prove it. In 2013, three Iranian climbers died on the descent after reaching the summit. In 2021, a Russian American climber died on a solo winter attempt after refusing to turn back with his teammate. Pakistan’s deadliest mountaineering disaster remains the 2008 avalanche on K2 itself, which killed 11 climbers in a single incident. This week’s avalanche sits inside that same pattern of isolation and sudden weather deciding outcomes that technical skill alone cannot prevent.
What This Means for Nepal’s Guiding Community
Yukta’s death lands hard inside a guiding community that has spent years pushing for more recognition of the Nepali climbers who make Western summit attempts possible. He spoke publicly about wanting to open doors for guides like himself, the people who fix the ropes and carry the loads but rarely see their names printed alongside a client’s summit photo. His own path, from porter to IFMGA certification to ten Everest summits, was often cited within Nepal’s mountaineering circles as proof of what that path could look like when it worked.
Six of the ten climbers caught in Thursday’s avalanche are Nepali, a fact that has made this story as much a national one as an international one. Nepal’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said its embassy in Islamabad is coordinating directly with Pakistani authorities to support the search, and climbers who abandoned their own K2 summit attempts, including expedition leader Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, known as Mingma G, have taken on lead roles in the recovery effort on the ground.
For readers wanting to understand more about the guides and porters who support expeditions across Nepal’s own mountains, our piece on hiring a porter for the Everest Base Camp trek explains how that same guiding pathway works closer to home, and our coverage of Everest’s death zone lays out the physiological risks that shape every high altitude expedition, in Nepal or across the border in Pakistan. Readers following the full story of this avalanche can also read our earlier coverage of the search for the ten missing climbers and our update on Nirmal Purja’s own status, which remained unconfirmed as of this piece’s publication.
What Happens Next
Search and rescue operations on Broad Peak remain active, and officials have repeatedly urged the public to wait for verified information rather than draw conclusions from field reports. Ground teams are expected to keep working the debris field as weather allows, and identification of the remaining bodies is ongoing. For Yukta’s family and the wider Nepali climbing community, attention has already begun shifting from the search itself toward the process of bringing him home, a journey that will retrace, in reverse, the one he made three weeks earlier when he left Nepal for what would be his final expedition.
This is a developing story, and details here reflect verified and reported information as of 31 July 2026. Figures, identifications and the status of the remaining missing climbers may change as search and rescue operations continue.
Sources: OnlineKhabar English News, Outside Online, ExplorersWeb, The Tourism Times, Nepal on the Web, Sali Trekking, Nepal National Mountain Guide Association
