The Climber who did the Impossible
Nims Purja — a hero for our troubled times
It was the last summit of 14 and the Chinese government had declared the mountain closed for business.
But Nims Purja wasn’t about to be wrong-footed, not after scaling the other 13 of the world’s highest peaks in less than six months, smashing a string of world records in a feat almost everyone but the man himself described as impossible.
Meetings with ministers were sought, fans solicited to bombard the Chinese with emails, which flew in from all four corners of the world.
The mountaineering community couldn’t believe what had happened. Reinhold Messner, the legendary Alpinist had taken more than 15 years to complete the same challenge, although admittedly without oxygen.
Conrad Anker and Jimmy Chin, two of the best mountaineers in the world, whose own Netflix climbing documentary Meru sits comfortably alongside the recently released 14 Peaks, were clearly awestruck.
As Chin says at the beginning of 14 Peaks, no-one in the mountaineering community had ever heard of Nims Purja; he was a total wild card, but carried deep in his heart the mustard-seed belief that he could literally move mountains.
And because he believed it, he did it, accompanied by a group of equally determined Nepalese climbers, who provide an interesting sub-plot to the intensity of the mountain drama.
For as Nims, ever cheerful, a pick-me-up for his fellow man, sometimes in the most literal way says, Western climbers often forget to refer to their hard-working Sherpas by name, a failing he fully intends to correct.
Why is his story so timely? Precisely because if ever the world needs heroes, it is now, and whenever I need inspiration to take my own small fight to the door of our oppressors, I find myself thrilled by those brave men and women who literally risk everything for their sport.
More than that, I challenge anyone — good guy or bad — not to be affected by the contagion of joy this young man exudes, literally rising above the corrupt world to an altitude where only the gods thrive yet is the birthright of us all.
I had recently watched Meru with my son Noah, for the second time and began to understand the death-defying logic of the mountaineer, which is really no logic at all, but a taste of an elixir that few will ever find.
As Messner says, meditation and mountaineering are ultimately the same, but I suspect only when passed through a certain portal, like that hidden entrance to Shangri-La in the old Hollywood epic Lost Horizon.
What Purna cleverly reveals is what the new human being should be, not the planned AI trans-human whose life is lived from behind a pair of ominous goggles, but a radiant, joy-filled, body-present, spirit whose soul lives on the high passes.
At times, the film moves to London where Nims lives with his wife Suchi, seemingly in a permanent state of shock about the superhuman she married who, before deciding to go for a place in the British special forces after training as a Gurkha like his father, would rise at 2am to run 20 kilometres with a 70lb pack.
He would then do a full day’s work before heading to the gym and home by 11pn. As he says, from the side of one of the many mountains he skips over, believe it and you will see it.
He is the first Nepalese soldier to make it into the Special Boat Service,
What is extraordinary is that after the first 8,000-metre peak, Nims and his team return up the mountain while utterly exhausted to rescue a fellow climber. He tells the camera he has never left a man behind and he won’t be starting any time soon.
It is not the only rescue the team mounts after its own assent, one sadly ending in death as calls to base camp for oxygen falls on deaf ears.
Towards the end of the series on K2, another notoriously difficult climb, Nims and his team find base camp in a terrible depression, most not wanting to return to the mountain after a recent failure.
But the newcomers hold a party and a pep talk when everything changes. K2 is vanquished by the Nepalese and others, no longer dispirited, follow suit.
What is most relevant about rare people like Nims is their appeal to what lives beyond the egoic world and the dead cul-de-sacs of money, power and fame, which we see can be exchanged for the life of the spirit.
His aging mother, who died last year, appears as inspiration alongside the ever-supportive Suchi who most often refers to her husband as ‘crazy’.
At the heart of this extraordinary tale is the simple love of mother and son which in the end moves mountains in the way that only love can.
I recommend everyone watch this film and await the next adventure of a humble man while surely igniting the hero in our own lives, perhaps even diverting those now on the wrong side of history, back up the mountain path and the refined air of the soul at rest.
COPYRIGHT Simon Heathcote
