This story was published by RedBull.com, October 2019.
Until October 2019, the fastest-known time for climbing all 14 of the world's 8000-metre mountains was eight years. An upstart Nepalese mountaineer has just done it six months. World, meet Nims Dai.
At around 2pm on the 23rd of April 2019, Nepalese climber Nirmal Purja summited Annapurna, one of Nepal’s eight 8000-ers (8000-plus-metre peaks), and the deadliest mountain in the world.
Since the first ascent of Annapurna by French mountaineers Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal in 1950, some 191 climbers have summited successfully while 61 have died trying. For every 100 people who came back, 34 didn’t.
But that’s not what’s impressive about Purja’s (who goes by ‘Nimsdai’, or ‘Nims’, for short) ascent. What’s impressive is that Annapurna was just the beginning of a much more audacious plan — a world record-breaking mission to summit all 14 of the world’s 8000-ers in just seven months.
When word of Nims’ plan, dubbed ‘Project Possible’, began to spread around mountaineering circles, nobody took him seriously. And on paper, it’s not hard to understand why.
For a start, Nims, an ex-British Special Forces soldier, was pretty new to the mountaineering scene – nobody knew who he was. Then there’s the small fact that the previous fastest-known time for conquering the 8000-ers was seven years, 10 months and six days, and was set by South Korean Kim Chang-ho in in 2013.
Before Chang-ho, the previous fastest time, set by Polish climber Jerzy Kukuczka, was seven years, 11 months and 14 days (though it's worth mentioning that neither Chang-ho or Kukuczka were aiming for speed).
Still, Nims’ 14/7 proposition didn’t just sound absurd, it sounded like a fantasy — he might as well have told everyone that he was going to swim to the moon.