Sometimes a climbing season turns on one brutal shift in weather, and the story stops being about summits at all. On Broad Peak, that shift came on July 30, when an avalanche swept ten climbers down the mountain’s main west-facing gully and turned a high-altitude expedition into a rescue and recovery mission.
The avalanche struck at around 9 a.m. local time on Broad Peak, the 26,414-foot peak in Pakistan that is the 12th highest mountain in the world. By Friday, the Alpine Club of Pakistan said the bodies of Nadhira Al-Harthy and Pur Bahadur Gurung had been recovered. The remaining climbers caught in the slide were still part of a developing emergency on a mountain already made more dangerous by heavy snowfall.
That context matters because this was not a surprise in the broadest sense, even if the timing was devastating. David Klein had said in mid-July that conditions on Broad Peak were relatively good and that avalanche danger was low, but he also noted that heavy snowfall had already driven other teams off the mountain. In other words, the mountain was changing before the avalanche ever hit.
Klein’s own timeline shows how quickly those conditions deteriorated. On July 19, he followed a Pakistani rope-fixing team up Broad Peak’s west side for 19 hours and turned around below the summit. Around July 22, heavy snowfall began. By July 25, Klein and Ian Overton had packed up and left Broad Peak. That sequence suggests the mountain’s surface never fully stabilized after the snow arrived.
His explanation for waiting after snowfall gets to the heart of why avalanche seasons are so unforgiving. After lots of snowfall, as he put it, you do not only want good weather. You want a few days of good weather in which there is no snowfall, because the snow has to do one of two things: stick to the mountain or slide down. Broad Peak did the second.
The presence of Nirmal Purja added another layer of attention to the incident. Purja, who rose to fame in 2019 after summiting all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks in record time, was among the climbers caught in the avalanche. He had broadcast his position for four hours after leaving Camp 2, a reminder of how exposed even elite expeditions can become once weather closes in and terrain turns unstable.
There is also a broader pattern here. This was not just a single team on a single peak. The mountain had drawn climbers with different histories and motives, including David Klein and Ian Overton, who had tried Nanga Parbat together in winter 2012, and Pur Bahadur Gurung, who had been part of a team that climbed Everest’s north face last fall to support Jim Morrison’s first ski descent of the Hornbein Couloir. Broad Peak brought them together under far less forgiving conditions.
What happened next will be judged in the most practical terms available on a mountain: who was found, who was recovered, and what could still be done after the slide. But the larger lesson is already clear. Even when elite expeditions think they are reading the weather correctly, a mountain like Broad Peak can still rewrite the script in an instant.
