Kili Pemba Sherpa: The Rolwaling Climber Who Stood on K2 in Winter

Overview

Kili Pemba Sherpa, known to everyone in the industry as Kilu, was born in 1980 in Beding, a village high in the Rolwaling valley of Dolakha district. He died on 30 July 2026 in the avalanche on Broad Peak that killed ten climbers, including Nirmal "Nims Dai" Purja.

He was 46, and by any measure other than fame he was one of the most accomplished mountaineers Nepal has produced. He was one of the ten men who made the first winter ascent of K2. He had summited Everest fifteen times. Four weeks before he died he had completed all fourteen eight-thousand-metre peaks. Outside Nepal, almost nobody had heard of him.

This page exists because of that gap. He is one of two climbers from the Broad Peak group, alongside Pur Bahadur Gurung, for whom enough is on the public record to tell a proper story; the rest are remembered on our memorial to all ten.

Beding, and Starting at Sixteen

Beding sits at about 3,700 m in the Rolwaling valley, a steep, narrow, glacier-headed valley between the Khumbu and Langtang regions, hard against the Tibetan border. It is Sherpa country, and it has produced a disproportionate number of serious climbers for a place of its size — the valley is remote enough that until recently there was no road anywhere near it, and getting anywhere meant walking over a pass.

He went to work on the mountains at sixteen, in 1996, as a support worker on a Manaslu expedition. That was the ordinary route into the trade for a boy from a village like Beding, and it is worth being clear about what it involved: carrying loads to high camps, repeatedly, on the most dangerous ground on the mountain, for a fraction of what the climbers above him were paying to be there.

He spent the next three decades climbing out of that role and into the top of the profession, eventually with Imagine Nepal, one of the Nepali-owned operators that took a growing share of the high-end expedition market in the 2020s. He was not a self-promoter. Almost everything on this page is something he did rather than something he said.

K2 in Winter

On 16 January 2021, Kili Pemba Sherpa was one of ten Nepali climbers who reached the summit of K2 (8,611 m) in winter, at 16:58 local time. It was the last great unclaimed prize in high-altitude mountaineering. Every other eight-thousander had been climbed in winter; K2 had turned back every attempt since 1987.

The detail that has outlived the record is what the team did in the final ten metres. They stopped below the summit, waited until all ten of them were together, linked arms, and walked onto the top singing the Nepali national anthem. In a sport organised almost entirely around individual firsts, they refused to let the summit belong to one name.

He came back to that mountain in the years afterwards as a working guide, as did most of the ten. Purja was on the slope with him when he died; so, in a sense, was the rest of that winter. The full account of the winter K2 ascent is on our Nims Dai page →

Fifteen Everests, and All Fourteen

His record reads like a career total for an entire expedition company.

• 15 summits of Everest. To put that in proportion: a single Everest summit is the defining achievement of most climbing lives. He did it fifteen times, as a working guide, which means fifteen times up through the Khumbu Icefall and back.
• All 14 eight-thousanders, completed on Nanga Parbat on 3 July 2026 — twenty-seven days before Broad Peak. Fewer than sixty people in history have climbed all fourteen.
• First winter ascent of K2, 16 January 2021, with nine other Nepali climbers.
• The true summit of Manaslu. In 2021 he was part of the effort, with Mingma Gyalje Sherpa ("Mingma G"), to establish the route to the actual highest point of Manaslu. For decades climbers had been stopping at a lower fore-summit and recording it as the top; research by the chronicler Eberhard Jurgalski had shown how widespread the problem was. Sorting it out required someone to go and find the real line along a corniced ridge. That work retroactively corrected the record books for one of the fourteen, and it is the sort of contribution that never makes a headline.

Broad Peak, when he died on it, was a mountain he had already climbed.

The Climbers Nobody Else Would Take

The part of his record that says most about him is the part with no record in it.

He climbed with people that commercial expeditions generally decline. In 2018 he was on the team that guided the Chinese climber Xia Boyu to the summit of Everest. Xia Boyu had lost both feet to frostbite after an Everest attempt in 1975; he came back four more times, and on 13 May 2018, aged 69, became the first double amputee to summit Everest from the Nepal side. In 2021 Kili Pemba was part of the team supporting Rustam Nabiev, a 29-year-old former Russian paratrooper who had lost both legs when his barracks collapsed in 2015, on Manaslu (8,163 m). Nabiev spent 34 days on the mountain and hauled himself up much of it on his arms, becoming the first person without legs to climb an eight-thousander.

Neither of those summits belongs to Kili Pemba. That is rather the point. Guiding a climber who cannot walk up a mountain at 8,000 m is slower, more dangerous and more physically punishing than climbing it yourself, and the name in the headline is never yours. He did it at least twice.

A note on sourcing: his obituary in the Kathmandu Post credits him with guiding both climbers, while other reporting names different lead guides on those expeditions. Both are consistent with him being one of the climbing Sherpas on those teams, which is how we have described it here.

Broad Peak, 30 July 2026

He was on Broad Peak (8,051 m) in the Karakoram with a group drawn from three Nepali-run operators — Imagine Nepal, Elite Exped and Seven Summit Treks. The mountain had been loading with snow since about 22 July, and most teams had left base camp around 25 July.

At around 9.30 a.m. local time on Thursday 30 July 2026, at roughly 6,600 m between Camp 2 and Camp 3, an avalanche released into the mountain's main west-facing gully and carried ten climbers down it. There were no survivors. His body was recovered in the days that followed.

His uncle, speaking to the Kathmandu Post afterwards, did not talk about K2 or the fourteen peaks. He said that Kili Pemba had successfully summited Everest fifteen times during his career.

In memory of the Broad Peak Ten: all ten climbers who died, with a biography of each →

Rolwaling: His Valley

If you want to understand where climbers like him come from, the honest answer is that you have to walk in. Rolwaling is one of the least-visited serious trekking valleys in Nepal, and Beding is on the trail.

The Rolwaling valley trek runs up from Dolakha through Sherpa villages including Beding to Tsho Rolpa, one of Nepal's largest and most closely monitored glacial lakes, and can be extended over the Tashi Lapcha pass into the Khumbu. It is a demanding route with restricted-area requirements on the pass, far quieter than Everest Base Camp, and it needs a guide.

Before you go anywhere at that altitude, read our altitude sickness guide, and check the best time to visit Nepal — Rolwaling is an autumn and spring route.

Sources

Biographical detail on this page is drawn from the Kathmandu Post's account of the Nepali climbers lost on Broad Peak, Wikipedia's record of the avalanche, ExplorersWeb, Al Jazeera, and contemporary reporting on the 2021 winter K2 ascent, the Xia Boyu Everest summit of 2018 and the Rustam Nabiev Manaslu summit of 2021.

Photograph: Beding, the Sherpa village in the Rolwaling valley where he was born, by Michael Wandinger via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 DE.

Details for several of the climbers lost on Broad Peak are still incomplete, and transliterations of Nepali names vary between sources. If you knew Kili Pemba Sherpa and something here is wrong or missing, please tell us — we would rather be corrected than be approximately right about someone's life.