Pur Bahadur "Yukta" Gurung: Ten Times Up Everest, from a Village the Earthquake Took

Overview

Pur Bahadur Gurung, known throughout the industry as Yukta, was an IFMGA-certified mountain guide from Laprak in Gorkha district and the first Gurung climber to summit Everest ten times. He died on 30 July 2026 in the Broad Peak avalanche that killed ten climbers, including Nirmal "Nims Dai" Purja, whose company Elite Exped he worked for.

His tenth Everest summit was on 20 May 2026. He was dead ten weeks later.

He had climbed 12 of the 14 eight-thousanders, among them K2, Makalu, Annapurna and Lhotse. He is one of two climbers from the Broad Peak group, with Kili Pemba Sherpa, for whom enough is publicly documented to carry a page; the rest are remembered on our memorial to all ten.

Laprak, Gorkha

He came from Laprak, in what is now Dharche Rural Municipality-4, a historic Gurung settlement in the hills of Gorkha district below the Manaslu massif.

On 25 April 2015, the earthquake that killed nearly 9,000 people in Nepal had its epicentre at Barpak, a few ridges from Laprak. The village was destroyed beyond repair. An integrated "model settlement" of some 600 houses was later built for its residents at Gupsipakha, and most families eventually drifted back to the old village site: the new houses were small, far from the fields, with nowhere for livestock and no easy water. It is one of the better-known stories of what reconstruction actually looked like in the Nepali hills.

This is the economic backdrop to Nepali high-altitude climbing, and it is worth stating plainly rather than romanticising. Gorkha is Gurkha recruiting country and it is earthquake country, and for a young man from a village like Laprak the mountains were one of very few routes to a real income. Yukta took that route and then did something less common with it: he did not stay a load carrier. He qualified as an IFMGA guide, the international standard that takes years of training and assessment and puts a Nepali guide on the same professional footing as a Chamonix or Swiss guide.

His home country is walked on the Manaslu Circuit, one of Nepal's finest and still relatively quiet long treks.

Ten Times Up Everest

He first summited Everest in 2011 and reached the top for the tenth time on 20 May 2026, becoming the first climber from the Gurung community to do so.

That distinction needs a word of explanation for readers outside Nepal. High-altitude climbing in Nepal is popularly identified with the Sherpa, an ethnic community from the eastern Himalayan valleys — so much so that "sherpa" has been flattened into a job description in English. In fact Nepal's mountain workforce is drawn from many communities: Gurung, Magar, Tamang, Rai and others. The Gurung are a hill people of central Nepal, from the Annapurna and Manaslu regions, best known abroad for their long history in the Gurkha regiments. For a Gurung climber to reach ten Everest summits was a marker for everyone from those communities working on the mountains, and it is why Nepali coverage of his death led with it.

Beyond Everest he had climbed 12 of the 14 eight-thousanders, including K2 — by consensus the hardest of them — along with Makalu, Annapurna and Lhotse. He was, in other words, two mountains from the fourteen, as was Kili Pemba Sherpa before he finished them in July 2026, and as was Purja from a record of his own. Broad Peak was carrying an unusual number of nearly-finished projects that morning.

Asked once what took him back up, he gave an answer with no mountaineering vocabulary in it at all:

The moment I head for the mountains, my spirit soars; standing on the summit fills me with pure energy.

Pur Bahadur "Yukta" Gurung

Broad Peak, 30 July 2026

He was on Broad Peak (8,051 m) in Pakistan's Karakoram range with the Elite Exped team. The mountain had been loading with heavy snow since about 22 July; most other 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 main west-facing gully and swept ten climbers down the mountain. There were no survivors.

He was among the first three climbers to be identified, on 31 July, along with Nadhira Al Harthy and Mallory Geis, after their bodies were recovered from below the mountain opposite base camp by a team from Karakorum Expeditions. The Alpine Club of Pakistan, which coordinated the search, confirmed the identifications.

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

Sources

Biographical detail here is drawn from the Kathmandu Post's account of the Nepali climbers lost on Broad Peak, Wikipedia's record of the avalanche, Al Jazeera and ExplorersWeb, with the Laprak reconstruction background from the Kathmandu Post, Nepali Times and OnlineKhabar.

Photograph: Laprak, his home village in Gorkha, by Suzalgurungz via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

Reporting gives conflicting ages for him, so none is stated here. Details for several of the Broad Peak climbers remain incomplete. If you knew Yukta and something on this page is wrong or missing, please tell us — we would rather be corrected than be approximately right about someone's life.