THE TEN · #03

01 AUG 2026

KILI PEMBA SHERPA:
All Fourteen. Eighteen Everests. One Final Ridge.

He had stood on every 8,000-metre peak on Earth and climbed Everest eighteen times. The dream he carried was not his own.

Among the ten who fell together on Broad Peak, Kili Pemba Sherpa carried a record that few on Earth could claim: he had stood on all fourteen of the world’s eight-thousanders, and he had made the journey to the top of Everest a staggering eighteen times.

A Life Measured in Summits

Kili Pemba was a container of the high Himalaya’s memory. In Khumbu his name was shorthand for trust: a guide who had seen every condition the great mountains could throw, and who always came back. His own fourteen-summit list was climbed quietly, for the love of it rather than the record — though it placed him among the finest mountaineers ever produced.

The Dream He Carried for Others

On Broad Peak in 2026 he was guiding once more. The line up the west side was to be the team’s window of weather. On 30 July, when the slide came, Kili Pemba was among those swept from the face. He had carried the dream of the summit for countless climbers across his years; that day the mountain took his feet while he was still carrying that dream. Meet the ten →

“Eighteen Everest passages. He carried the dream of the summit, if not his feet.” from the memorial

The fourteen lost one of their rarest members. The brotherhood lost Kili Pemba — and with him, a lifetime of high-altitude memory that can never be replaced.