Updated September 26, 2024 01:03PM
Death on Shishapangma
Last October, two American women and two Sherpa guides perished while racing for a record. The tragedy raises questions about the recent rush to climb the world’s 14 highest mountains.
Shishapangma is the smallest of the 14 peaks above 8,000 meters, but it’s avalanche-prone and has claimed lives. (Photo: Naoki Ishikawa)
I. Four Dead
Around 10:30 A.M. on October 7, 2023, Elena Cebanova’s phone rang at her home in Affi, Italy. When the slim, blond mother of two picked up, she learned that her younger sister, 33-year-old Anna Gutu, had been caught in an avalanche in Tibet and was missing.
Elena didn’t know much about mountaineering. Her sister had dived headlong into the sport less than two years earlier. She did know that this was an important climb for Anna. If she summited the mountain, she might achieve her dream of becoming the first American woman to climb all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks.
Elena was sure that Anna was OK. Whenever the family worried about her climbing, Anna always told them that she was guided by professionals. Now these people would find her, Elena thought.
An hour and a half later, her phone rang again. The caller spoke English, and Elena, who spoke only Italian and Russian, couldn’t follow what he was saying. Her partner opened Google Translate. Using the app, they learned that Anna was dead.
Similar Reads
Two hours later, around 8 A.M. Eastern time, a phone rang in a leafy Massachusetts neighborhood. Seventy-five-year-old Susan Rzucidlo picked up. Susan, her cousin said, I’m not sure how to tell you this, but someone called saying that Gina died in an avalanche. I don’t know if it’s a prank.
This can’t be true, Susan thought. She would have gotten a call from the expedition’s organizers. She couldn’t remember the name of the mountain that her second-eldest daughter was climbing, but she knew that it was in China, because the permitting process had been agonizingly convoluted, and Gina had waited anxiously for weeks, hoping to beat another woman to the top. So Susan googled something like “most recent avalanche China.” And then she saw her daughter’s name.
The accidents made international news: Two American women and two Sherpas had perished in a pair of avalanches on Shishapangma, an 8,027-meter peak in Tibet. The climbers, it was reported, had been racing each other to become the first American woman to scale all 14 of the world’s 8,000-meter peaks, a feat widely popularized by 40-year-old Nepali mountaineer Nirmal “Nims” Purja, who in 2019 proved that the mountains—all of them located in the Himalaya and Karakoram Ranges of South Asia—could be climbed in just months. Purja himself had been on the mountain that day; Anna Gutu was a client of his climbing company, Elite Exped, and had been led by one of its Sherpas, 27-year-old Mingmar Sherpa. Gina Rzucidlo, 45, had been led by a 35-year-old Sherpa named Tenjen “Lama” Sherpa, who earlier that year guided Norway’s Kristin Harila, a former professional skier, in a successful attempt to beat Purja’s record. (They trounced it, climbing all the peaks in 92 days.) Both Mingmar and Tenjen died roped to their clients.
Climbers spoke to reporters about what they considered a dangerous trend of record chasing on 8,000-meter peaks, inspired by Purja and Harila and fueled by social media. (Gutu had a sizable Instagram following.) Several of those on the mountain that day were also pursuing their 14th peak; Purja had been trying to reach a new goal of summiting all of them without supplemental oxygen. Members of the climbing community pointed to recent snowfall that likely worsened the risk of avalanches, and criticized what they said was a failure of leadership on the mountain. But one expedition leader, Mingma Gyalje Sherpa of Imagine Nepal, known as Mingma G, said that the race was to blame. “Everything was going smoothly,” he told a reporter for Explorers Web, “but the competition between the two ladies ruined everything.”
Questions remained. Several years ago, one might have been lucky to climb a handful of those peaks in a lifetime. Now two women had ticked off 13 in rapid succession, converging upon the same final mountain on the same day. Who were Gina Rzucidlo and Anna Gutu? How did they end up racing to the roof of the world? And why did they, and their guides, die?
II. Fourteen Fever
In 2019, a brash and intense Nepali flatlander and former UK Special Forces soldier decided to climb all of the world’s highest peaks faster than anyone had climbed them before. Nims Purja, a mountaineering no-name before he devised and took on this mission, made it clear that speed, not style, was his objective. He let the supplemental oxygen flow. He sometimes swooped in by helicopter. And he assembled an all-star Nepali support team to show what his people could do when they weren’t hauling foreign clients uphill. In just over six months, Purja accomplished what had taken the previous record holder, South Korean climber Kim Chang-ho, almost eight years to do. (Kim still holds the speed record for achieving the feat without the use of bottled oxygen.) Some devotees of the traditional light-and-fast style of alpine climbing—without the benefit of oxygen or fixed ropes—threw shade, dismissing Purja’s accomplishment as a triumph mainly of logistics. But his endeavor, depicted in the hit 2021 Netflix documentary 14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible, ignited the public’s imagination about the world’s highest peaks and who could climb them.
Until several years ago, the only 8,000-meter peaks that were routinely attempted by commercial expeditions were Mount Everest, Tibet’s Cho Oyu, and Nepal’s Manaslu, the latter two often as preparation climbs for the former. Other than that, only very serious and skilled climbers attempted more dangerous peaks like K2 and Annapurna I. Climbing all 14 was an even more obscure goal, pursued by a small, elite group of alpinists. According to Billi Bierling, managing director of the Himalayan Database, an online expedition archive, interest in the other 8,000-meter peaks began to grow in the past decade, as the proliferation of fixed ropes and bottled oxygen rendered the mountains easier to climb, and as the use of helicopters cut out days- or weeks-long approaches and allowed some clients to be shuttled between base camps, parlaying the acclimatization from one peak into an attempt on another. If a climber was lucky, they could top a few peaks a year, on expeditions that lasted a couple of weeks.
Purja, however, turbocharged this approach, showing that with the right setup—helicopters, oxygen, and armies of Sherpas to fix ropes—the most imposing 8,000er could be managed in just days, even by people who lacked extensive mountaineering backgrounds. Suddenly, for those who could afford it, climbing an 8,000-meter peak looked a lot like any other ultra-endurance activity. Climbers could knock out several summits in a season, chasing a variety of new firsts that were now up for grabs: the first of some nationality to climb all 14 peaks, the youngest, and so forth. By July 22, 2022, partway through that year’s climbing season, 145 climbers had summited K2, more than doubling the previous annual record of 62, mountaineering expert Alan Arnette reported.
“The scene was kind of set on fire,” says Canadian climber Jill Wheatley, who decided to climb all 14 peaks in 2021, when she was living in Kathmandu. “What followed really resembled a Hollywood cast—costumes, makeup, crowds, competition.” Wheatley told me about women posing for Instagram photos in front of K2 with their shirts off, and people throwing garbage and gear off the mountain instead of carrying it down. The guiding companies, she says, seemed to stoke the record fever, introducing climbers to one another according to the potential titles they might acquire.
Anna Gutu was one of many inspired by Purja’s 14-peaks vision. She grew up in Moldova in the 1990s and early 2000s, during the country’s lean post-Soviet period. Her family used food stamps for bread and sugar, and she dreamed of a better life, her sister says. Gutu got good grades in school and moved to the United States with her husband at the time, when she was 21, after finishing college. (They divorced soon after, but she kept his last name.) Gutu had not been particularly sporty as a child—she was “chubby,” nicknamed “little croissant” by a gymnastics coach, Cebanova told me on Zoom through an interpreter, smiling at the memory. But as an adult she discovered her athletic side: hiking, yoga, lifting weights, and running. “She wasn’t ever still,” Cebanova said.
The pandemic was an awakening for Gutu. “It was time for me to reset my life and follow my dreams that I have been putting aside,” she wrote on Instagram. One of those dreams was to see Everest. “Climbing it didn’t really cross my mind,” she continued. “I always thought you have to be some kind of special human being with some super power to conquer this beast.”
In 2021, she watched Purja’s documentary and began following him online. She reached out to the Elite Exped office that winter, and signed up to trek to Everest Base Camp in April 2022. On that trip, she also climbed neighboring 6,000-meter Lobuche East. “Never be afraid to try something new,” she posted alongside a photo of her balancing on a ladder in crampons.
That May, Gutu graduated from a prestigious French pastry school she’d moved to Paris to attend; then she put her plan of opening a bakery on hold. During the next year, she climbed or attempted a big mountain almost every other month, topping Manaslu, the 8,000er that Purja had recommended she tackle first, as well as 6,800-meter Ama Dablam, 6,900-meter Aconcagua (in Argentina), and her second 8,000-meter peak, Annapurna I.
Philosophical and romantic, Gutu often examined her motives for climbing. “Why would I choose to climb … one of the deadliest mountains on earth?” she wrote after Annapurna. “Is the answer to reach the top altitudes on earth? Or is climbing simply a way of seeing how far you can take yourself?” She posted prolifically, and it was clear that she felt genuinely awed and transformed by her experiences. “When you reach the summit of an 8,000m peak,” she wrote, you “realize how tiny you are compared to everything around you.” Gutu had a keen fashion sense—she used to buy clothes for her sister, but Cebanova asked for her hand-me-downs instead—and her feed was once dominated by glamorous photos of herself in heels and dresses. Now she shared videos displaying her windburned cheeks and chapped lips. “To everyone who doesn’t climb,” she wrote in one post, “please accept my love of mountaineering. Please know that this is what makes me alive.”
Gina Rzucidlo’s journey to climbing began earlier. Raised about an hour outside Boston in an Italian-Polish family, Gina was always restless, her mother told me; at 14 months old, she climbed repeatedly out of her crib. “I’d put her back,” Susan Rzucidlo says, “she’d climb right back out. It ended nap time for Gina.”
Gina’s father owned a painting and carpet-installation business, and her mother wrangled their seven children. The family wasn’t wealthy; summers were spent taking swim lessons and splashing around in the aboveground pool. Perhaps because she missed out on travel in her youth, Susan thinks, Gina developed a love for it as an adult, along with hiking. These interests brought her to Everest Base Camp in 2008. For the next decade she flew from her home in Manhattan—she worked at various points as a flight attendant, a realtor, and an aesthetician—to summit Mount Rainier in Washington, ice-climb in Colorado, and trek to the top of Kilimanjaro in Tanzania. In 2018 she summited Everest, then Denali, as part of her goal to complete the Seven Summits. She completed her seventh, Australia’s Mount Kosciuszko, on her 41st birthday, toting a balloon to the top.
On Denali, Rzucidlo met Dawa Yangzum Sherpa, who had recently become the first Asian woman to obtain certification from the elite International Federation of Mountain Guides Associations (IFMGA). As the only women on the expedition, the two became friends. The Nepali guide and professional climber, who grew up in a village with no electricity, enjoyed the beautiful American with the loud, contagious laugh. “She was from New York City, a different world, but she was not too picky and very easygoing,” Dawa Yangzum says. She was generous, too: after Denali, Rzucidlo occasionally flew Dawa Yangzum to visit her in New York, treating her to nice dinners and hosting her in her high-rise apartment. Rzucidlo was also known to tip her guides and Sherpas generously.
In the spring of 2021, Dawa Yangzum invited Rzucidlo to climb Annapurna I with her. Rzucidlo knew that the mountain was dangerous; she considered it for a week before saying yes. The women eventually pushed from base camp to the summit in less than two weeks, even though Rzucidlo was suffering from giardia. (Her tenacity was remarked upon by other climbers, who watched her grind through similarly painful stomach bugs on future expeditions.) After Annapurna, her second 8,000-meter peak, Rzucidlo decided that she wanted to complete all 14, according to Dawa Yangzum. “Then it was the next mountain, next mountain,” she says.
From September 2021 to July 2022, Rzucidlo climbed five more 8,000-meter peaks in Nepal and Pakistan. At some point, she realized that she had an opportunity to achieve a first. In December 2022, halfway to her goal, she messaged her family: “I’m going to be the first and only American woman to have finished [all 14] and only the second American ever.”
Her niece replied, “Don’t push your body to extremes.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Rzucidlo said. “I know my body and when to call it quits.”
III. Paths Cross
Gutu wasn’t on anyone’s radar for months. When she stood atop her first 8,000er in September 2022, Rzucidlo was already halfway done with the 14. Even when the two women met for the first time in May 2023, at Everest Base Camp, it’s unlikely that Rzucidlo viewed Gutu as competition.
Rzucidlo was climbing Lhotse, her eighth peak, which shares its base camp and part of its route to the top with Everest; Gutu was attempting back-to-back ascents of the two mountains as her third and fourth. Dawa Yangzum, who by this point had also met and befriended Gutu, introduced the two women at the Elite Exped coffee-lounge tent. They got along, Dawa Yangzum says, Gutu even complimenting Rzucidlo on her beautiful eyes.
In July, however, when the three met again at Gasherbrum II base camp in Pakistan, Rzucidlo texted a friend that she had met “this Ukrainian girl who I guess has an American passport.… She just climbed 5 peaks in Nepal and is now trying to climb all of the Pakistans.” She was frustrated that Gutu was aiming for the American title while holding multiple citizenships (American, Moldovan, and Ukrainian, according to Gutu’s family). “A typical Instagram climber,” Rzucidlo wrote. “I don’t understand why these people just jump into climbing and try to rush all of these mountains. It’s taken me soooo many years to get to where I am.”
Rzucidlo, who friends described as very private, did not at this point have an Instagram account. She resented what she saw as an incursion of influencer types onto the 8,000-meter peaks. Many of these newcomers, she believed, posted filtered photos and climbed for likes. She seems to have pegged Gutu as one of them. (In a profile of Purja for GQ, Grayson Schaffer, an Outside contributing editor, noted that he often attracted clients who had large Instagram followings.) “She always respected real climbers,” Dawa Yangzum says, “people who wanted to climb mountains just for themselves.”
Neither Gutu nor Rzucidlo were sponsored athletes; both privately funded their climbs, which likely cost hundreds of thousands of dollars in total. (Their families declined to elaborate on those funding sources.) For Gutu, the prospect of becoming the first American woman to climb all the 8,000ers seemed to have been an important personal challenge and, according to friend and fellow climber Viridiana Álvarez, “a dream.” Gutu’s sister also suggested that she wanted to become famous like Purja. While Rzucidlo’s family was less sure about her motivations to achieve a first, they thought that she may have viewed the 14 peaks as the ultimate mark of achievement for a mountaineer; she told her sister that after she finished, she planned to back off climbing and spend more time with family, especially her nieces and nephews. Both women aspired to document their journeys: Rzucidlo hoped to write a book; a cameraman filmed Gutu’s climbs.
By the end of July, Gutu had summited all five 8,000ers in Pakistan, bringing her count to 11, just one behind Rzucidlo. She still needed 8,167-meter Dhaulagiri, which had twice eluded her attempts, and both women still had the two Tibetan peaks to climb, Cho Oyu and Shishapangma, to reach 14. In August, they returned home—Rzucidlo to New York, Gutu to Paris—while they waited for permits from China.
Obtaining permission to climb in Tibet is often the logistical crux of a 14-peaks mission, because China’s permitting process can be abstruse and unpredictable. In August, Rzucidlo fretted as permitting took weeks longer than expected. China eventually granted entry to a company called Climbalaya, and to a combined team formed by Elite Exped and Imagine Nepal.(Nepalese outfitters often pool teams to increase their odds of obtaining Chinese permits.) But China turned down 8K Expeditions, the company Rzucidlo had been climbing with since the summer. 8K owner Pemba Sherpa told me he then passed Rzucidlo to Climbalaya as a client, paying the latter for the responsibility of guiding her. (Climbalaya owner Dawa Sherpa declined to be interviewed.) Joining Rzucidlo on her final climbs would be her good friend Dawa Yangzum, who had also secured a spot on the Climbalaya expeditions to Cho Oyu and Shishapangma.
By the end of August, Rzucidlo had tired of changing her schedule. She returned to Nepal on September 1 to await the green light on Tibet. Meanwhile, the delayed start for the Tibetan climbs allowed Gutu to return to Nepal as well, to chase her 12th peak, Dhaulagiri.
On September 27, Rzucidlo, who had finally been allowed to fly into Tibet, messaged her family that she and Dawa Yangzum were moving quickly to stay ahead of Gutu. “She won’t beat me regardless,” she wrote, “but it is pressure.” Rzucidlo never expected Gutu to summit Dhaulagiri so late in the year, Dawa Yangzum says. But two days later, Gutu posted a photo of herself holding a string of prayer flags at the top. “Do not dare to give up,” she wrote. With the door to Tibet open, the women were now even.
IV. Go, Go, Go
On October 1, Rzucidlo, Dawa Yangzum, and their Sherpas summited Cho Oyu in weather so clear they could see Everest 17.5 miles away. Rzucidlo was in good spirits walking down the mountain. But below camp one they ran into Gutu, who was headed up with her team.
Rzucidlo became stressed. The group did not celebrate when they returned to base camp; the next morning they rushed to the outpost town of Tingri. Rzucidlo wanted to leave for Shishapangma immediately, but Climbalaya’s three Sherpas wanted to wait for the rest of the teams so they could cooperate in breaking trail and fixing ropes. There seemed to have been a lapse in communication in the handoff from 8K to Climbalaya, Dawa Yangzum says; the Sherpas said that 8K didn’t inform them that Rzucidlo wanted to be first on the mountain or they would have arranged for extra manpower. The three of them couldn’t do it on their own. (8K declined to comment.)
Desperate, Rzucidlo contacted Seven Summit Treks, the only other guiding company permitted for Shishapangma not attached to Gutu’s expedition. According to Seven Summit general manager Thaneswar Guragai, she requested the help of Tenjen “Lama” Sherpa, who had led Kristin Harila to her 92-day record just months before, or someone like him capable of opening a route up the mountain. Lama was already on Cho Oyu with another client, and the amount requested by Seven Summit to send its star Sherpa at the last minute was significant. According to Dawa Yangzum, Rzucidlo slept on the decision before agreeing the following morning, October 3. She paid the company a $30,000 deposit, and Lama arrived in Tingri that evening.
On the morning of October 4, as Rzucidlo and her team set off for Shishapangma, she sent what would be her last message to her family: “Summit should happen within the next couple of days. I may go quiet.”
“So excited,” her mother replied, and Rzucidlo sent a fingers-crossed emoji.
On October 2, the day after Rzucidlo ran into Gutu on Cho Oyu, the Elite and Imagine team pushed for the summit. The weather degraded throughout the day, and the climbers found themselves in a freezing whiteout about 150 meters from the top. Imagine Nepal owner Mingma G, who is also an IFMGA guide, would later write on Instagram that he considered turning everyone around at that point—he’d lost three Sherpas in the spring and had little appetite for risk. But Purja rallied the team to try for the summit, using what he said was a military technique for navigation. Gutu was “euphoric” at the top, one climber told me.
Purja and Gutu were close. “I think their dispositions were very similar,” says Viridiana Álvarez, who climbed Manaslu with Gutu and Elite. “They say what they’re thinking.” The two would get into heated debates, but then five minutes later, she says, they’d hug it out. Gutu admired Purja, who told her that he would help her become the first American woman to climb all 14 peaks. “He knows your abilities,” she said about him in an unpublished interview with Schaffer. “He says, ‘I’ve seen you climb. I know what you can do.’ ”
In late May, a New York Times story reported that two female climbers, one an Elite Exped client, had accused Purja of sexual misconduct. (Purja has “unequivocally” denied the allegations and called them “defamatory and false”; he says he has started pursuing legal action.) Gutu’s family doesn’t believe that she experienced similar treatment or was aware of the allegations, and friends of hers told me that she always spoke positively of Purja. Gutu appeared to trust him with her safety on the mountain—when her mother expressed concerns about climbing, Gutu insisted that she was in good hands. Nims and his company take care of me, she said. They’re professionals.
After Rzucidlo and Dawa Yangzum reached Shishapangma base camp on foot on the afternoon of October 4, they visited the dining tents, where they encountered other climbers, including Rzucidlo’s friend Tracee Metcalfe, a fellow American; Italian IFMGA guide Mario Vielmo; and Vielmo’s climbing partner, Sebastiano Valentini. It had been snowing up high for two days, with wind blowing plumes off the summit. At least two climbers, including Metcalfe, pointed out to Rzucidlo that the new snow and the wind created dangerous avalanche conditions; someone else suggested that it would be best to wait a day or two to allow the snow to settle. According to Valentini, Rzucidlo said that she and her group would still push forward tomorrow. Another climber, who asked to remain anonymous, remembers Rzucidlo expressing that she didn’t want to wait because she had the strongest Sherpa on the mountain.
The atmosphere felt hectic to the climbers in the dining tents. Metcalfe, who was climbing with Imagine, heard from expedition leader Mingma G that he and the rest of the team would come in from Cho Oyu, then quickly move from Shishapangma base camp to camp two, and that she should plan to meet them there in two days for the summit push. “So we’ve been sitting here doing nothing,” Metcalfe says, “and now suddenly it’s a big rush.”
“Everything was go, go, go,” Vielmo says. As more climbers arrived in the coming days, the Italians, who were traveling without Sherpas or supplemental oxygen, began to feel like dinosaurs. Some of these new-generation mountaineers were in their twenties and had only started a couple of years ago, yet they had already climbed several 8,000-meter mountains.
“I felt I was not in my world anymore,” Valentini says. From base camp you could see the bald, white northeasterly face of Shishapangma, which they would soon be climbing. But these “young guns,” he says, didn’t even look at the mountain.
V. Changes
The transformation of the Himalayan climbing industry began long before Nims Purja. From the 1990s through the early 2000s, commercial expeditions to Everest were dominated by Western companies like Mountain Madness, owned by American Scott Fischer, and Adventure Consultants, owned by Kiwis Rob Hall and Gary Ball. (In 1996, a fierce competition between the two outfitters to get the most climbers to the summit ended in eight deaths, as chronicled in Jon Krakauer’s book Into Thin Air.) These high-end companies charged as much as $65,000—equivalent to about $130,000 today—for the chance to stand on top of the world’s highest peak.
But as Billi Bierling points out, “Behind every Western company was always a Nepalese company.” Western outfitters hired local trekking outfits to provide porters and other logistical support for expeditions. These operators also began to offer expeditions themselves, at lower cost—as little as $20,000 in some instances. But clients still favored companies led by Western guides.
Around 2010, however, a shift occurred. A second wave of Nepali-owned companies emerged, founded by former Sherpas and guides who had deep firsthand experience working in the Himalayas. One such company was the outfitter Lama worked for, Seven Summit Treks, which was founded in 2009 by four brothers from a remote village in the Makalu region. Founders Chhang Dawa and Mingma Sherpa were the first two Nepalis to climb all 14 of the 8,000-meter peaks, and cofounder Tashi Sherpa told me that the brothers’ experiences led them to make decisions like increasing the Sherpa-to-client ratio and installing more amenities at base camp, like coffee lounges and movie theaters, compared with budget companies. “We made the mountains safer and more comfortable,” Tashi says.
Crucially, Seven Summit also offered attractive pricing. By cutting out Western middlemen, “they could operate at a less expensive amount,” says Chris Warner, who guided Everest in the early 2000s and last year became the second American to climb all 14 peaks. Warner says that the brothers were also adept at figuring out the logistics—more oxygen and Sherpas—that got more clients to the summit. By 2015, he says, the company was “a force,” leading the way for a new generation of Sherpa-owned businesses.
Today, Nepalese companies dominate the 8,000-meter climbing scene, with 8K, Elite Exped, Imagine Nepal, and Seven Summit among the industry’s leaders. The Western guiding presence is “a shadow of itself,” Warner says. These Nepalese companies offer a high level of service, and they aren’t cheap—Elite Exped’s Everest trips start at $45,000—but Western operators generally cost more. California-based Alpenglow Expeditions, for example, charges $98,000 per person for a group climb up Everest.
The guides and climbers I spoke to agreed that the handoff of a lucrative industry from foreign to Nepali hands over the past decade-plus is a positive change. “It’s Nepal,” Bierling says. “It’s their country.” The most accomplished Sherpas have become star climbers in their own right, with big social media followings, and Imagine Nepal’s Mingma G told me that Sherpas now enjoy better training and working conditions. “We’ve seen Sherpas struggling,” he says. “We know what we need.” Less expensive operators—not all of them Nepalese—have also opened the Himalayas to new markets, especially climbers from other Asian countries like India and China. This, too, is “a good thing,” says Adrian Ballinger, a British-American IFMGA-certified guide and the owner of Alpenglow. “Climbing is good for the world.”
Yet guides say that there’s also been an influx of inexperienced climbers like never before. Bierling and Warner believe that several factors have contributed to this: interest driven by social media, the burgeoning upper middle class in other Asian countries, and the widespread use of helicopters, oxygen, and fixed ropes. But it’s also clear that some companies allow climbers onto 8,000-meter peaks who have nowhere close to the requisite experience.
“It’s really weird up there now,” Warner says. Clients who don’t know how to put on their own crampons are a common sight, as are clients who don’t know how to change an oxygen bottle or are climbing without a pack, both of which can lead to extremely dangerous situations if they’re separated from the guide, Ballinger says. Even Rzucidlo—who worked on skills between expeditions and was probably above-average compared with her peers, according to Warner, who was a friend of hers—had mostly climbed as a guided client, with minimal experience making her own decisions in the mountains. Gutu was likely similar in that respect, as are many of today’s 8,000-meter climbers, Warner says. “In this commercial era, you have a lot of people up there that are along for the ride.”
These issues existed for years on Everest. But now “every single mountain is commercialized,” says Ballinger, “and every single mountain has inexperienced climbers led by huge teams of high-altitude workers.” Of particular concern to guides like Warner and Ballinger is the marketing of 100 percent summit success rates by some companies. That’s an imprudent approach to a big mountain, Ballinger says: five of the 13 seasons he guided on Everest, he tells me, no one from his team summited.
The marketing of high summit rates is not a new practice. Prior to the 1996 Everest disaster, Rob Hall advertised a 100 percent success rate, and Scott Fischer reportedly assured Krakauer that “experience is overrated.” But Warner says that the current combination of summit fever and inexperienced clients is a dangerous one. He recalls climbing Nanga Parbat in June 2023 with Rzucidlo and a group of about two dozen climbers, almost all of whom, he says, needed the summit “for their 14 dream.” About 500 meters from the top, at 2 A.M., the group ran out of fixed ropes. Warner estimates that it was snowing six inches an hour, a rate at which avalanche conditions form rapidly. “All we could think was, we’re about to witness a disaster,” he says.
He and his IFMGA-certified guide Chhiring Sherpa turned around, but the rest of the climbers continued. The storm waned, and the group summited. But Warner believes that they got lucky. Afterward he and Rzucidlo had a long conversation. “She’s like, yeah, you’re a classic American guide,” he recalls. She told him about another climb she did with an American guide who disagreed with the Sherpas on whether to continue. That group summited successfully, too. But mountaineering wisdom holds that getting away with a risky decision once or twice misleads climbers into believing that they’d made good decisions. “It’s the third mistake that kills you,” he says.
VI. Camp Two
Shishapangma is the smallest of the 14 peaks and is often considered one of the easiest 8,000ers, because it requires a minimal amount of technical climbing. But the mountain is also known to be avalanche-prone and has claimed many lives, including that of revered American climber Alex Lowe, who was killed by a slide in 1999.
Last October, the teams on Shishapangma planned to climb the mountain’s north face. Their journey would begin in Tingri, where off-road vehicles would carry them to a lower camp referred to as the Chinese drivers camp. From there they’d continue nine miles by foot (the route is also partly accessible by vehicle) to the advance base camp at 5,600 meters, where Rzucidlo met the Italians. Then they’d work their way through three more high camps, encountering one of their technical challenges on a steep headwall below camp three. After that they could choose from numerous routes for the final push to the summit.
On the afternoon of October 4, the same day Rzucidlo arrived at base camp, Gutu left Tingri, also bound for base camp, a day ahead of Purja and the rest of their team. She was traveling with climbing partner and friend Tejan Gurung (Purja’s brother-in-law), as well as a cameraman, a 33-year-old Sherpa named Karma Gyalzen, Mingmar, another Sherpa named Lakpa Dendi, and a Japanese photographer named Naoki Ishikawa, who was climbing with Imagine Nepal. When they arrived at the Chinese drivers camp, they planned to load their luggage onto yaks, then trek several hours to advance base camp, where Rzucidlo was.
But according to Ishikawa, when the group arrived at the drivers camp in the evening, they were told that they couldn’t travel in the dark and would have to wait until morning. Additionally, the yaks they’d booked weren’t there, so the next day they’d have to leave most of their food and gear, taking only what they could carry in their packs. That night, frustrated by the delay, Gutu recorded a voice memo on her GoPro. “My opponent, I would say, is playing dirty,” she said. “Last minute she changed her climbing company, she hired additional guides to trailblaze and open the route for her….” Rzucidlo, she claimed, also spread a rumor that Gutu had used a helicopter to do a rotation on Everest. (“I didn’t even do a rotation,” Gutu said.) To her the competition had become a matter of principle. “It’s not about the record, but I think the point has to be proven here.”
The following day, October 5, Rzucidlo, Lama, and Dawa Yangzum left base camp planning to push to camp two, but they encountered deep snow. It turned into a long, hard day, with Lama breaking trail, yet when they arrived at camp one, Dawa Yangzum says, Rzucidlo wanted to attempt the summit that evening. Lama spoke very little English, so Dawa Yangzum translated for him, the two of them convincing Rzucidlo that they should rest. Later, other climbers, including Metcalfe, arrived at camp one, and everyone spent the night.
Gutu was catching up. Early in the morning on October 6, Rzucidlo’s group left camp one for camp two. Just a few hours later, as dawn was breaking, Gutu, who had continued to push ahead of the bulk of the Elite and Imagine team with Gurung and their Sherpas, arrived at camp one. Here Metcalfe and other climbers noted that Gutu was using oxygen already, which was unusual at 6,300 meters. Soon after, some of the climbers packed up and headed for camp two with Gutu’s group.
(A note on timing: Shishapangma lies just three miles from the border with Nepal, and climbers on the mountain were using either Tibet time or Nepal time, which is two hours and 15 minutes later. The climbers weren’t always sure which time zone they were using or how their electronic devices were set. Unless otherwise specified, the times we were able to corroborate are given in Tibet time and should be considered approximate.)
All the climbers on their way from camp one to camp two on October 6 would have seen signs of a key event that occurred the day before: a large slab avalanche had broken loose above camp one, burying a Japanese climber before a Sherpa rescued her. Vielmo says that the avalanche should have made it clear that conditions on the mountain were dangerous, though Purja told me in a written statement that he wasn’t concerned, as the avalanche had occurred much lower down than the face they’d be climbing. (According to the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education, however, higher elevations tend to see more snow and wind, and thus more avalanches.)
By early afternoon on the sixth, Gutu and Rzucidlo’s groups converged at camp two. When Metcalfe arrived, she stuck her head into Rzucidlo’s tent to say hello. They didn’t talk much; her friend was inside with her Sherpas and Dawa Yangzum, resting with an oxygen mask on, and the atmosphere seemed tense. Gutu, Metcalfe recalled, was about a 15-minute walk away, a little below camp two. Her group didn’t have a tent or proper food, only snacks, since most of their supplies had been left at the drivers camp. Later, someone from Elite would grab a tent for them from camp one.
Dawa Yangzum was stressed. She was exhausted from translating for Lama and Rzucidlo, and being friends with most of the Sherpas on the various teams, she didn’t like how everyone was behaving toward the competition. She implored Lama and Gurung to persuade the two women to cooperate for the summit push, which would be safer for all. Lama, she says, asked Rzucidlo to consider this, showing her a video of him and Harila climbing K2 as a team. Chhepal Sherpa, who works for Seven Summit, told me that he also attempted to persuade Rzucidlo to share the title with Gutu, in the spirit of “sisterhood.”
In both instances, Rzucidlo refused. According to Dawa Yangzum, Lama also returned from speaking to Gutu’s group, saying that they, too, declined to climb together. Lama told Dawa Yangzum that he wanted to allow the larger Elite and Imagine team to leave earlier the next morning and break trail. Then they could follow their tracks. The trio went to sleep.
Gutu’s group waited for the rest of the Elite and Imagine team, including leaders Purja and Mingma G, to catch up to them at camp two. At 8:33 P.M. Nepal or Tibet time, Gurung, who made frequent cameos on Gutu’s Instagram, filmed a video in their tent. (Gurung declined to be interviewed for this story; the video was provided by Elena Cebanova.) His and Gutu’s feet were stuffed into a single backpack for warmth, their breath steaming in the frigid air. He panned past Mingmar Sherpa, who was described in an Elite Exped statement as being “always cheerful, and always happy.” Ming-mar waved and said hello. Gurung then panned to Gutu, who was lying on her side. “Destroyed,” she said hoarsely, in her light European accent, with a smile. Someone shook dry ramen noodles from a bag. “We have nothing, we’re eating dry noodles,” Gurung chuckled. “You know, I’m happy to have at least something,” Gutu answered, still smiling. The group had “scavenged” food from other teams, Gurung explained. Karma gave the camera a thumbs-up.
Shishapangma would be Gurung’s 14th peak, too. Soon their friends would arrive and they would begin their final push. They were, it appears, in good spirits.
VII. Summit Push
Up the hill, not much sleep was happening in Rzucidlo’s tent. She tossed and turned all night. “I told her we have time—sleep, sleep,” Dawa Yangzum says. But whenever they heard footsteps, Rzucidlo and Lama woke up and peeked outside.
In the middle of the night, Purja and Mingma G arrived at camp two with the rest of Elite and Imagine’s climbers. At 2:48 A.M., according to Metcalfe’s Strava file, the large team, including Gutu, Metcalfe, and 61-year-old Macedonian climber Sasko Kedev, set off for the summit in the cold darkness. Gutu seemed enthusiastic, Kedev recalls. “You could feel her winning attitude.”
The snow from camp two was deep, and a group of five or six Sherpas formed a paceline of sorts, breaking trail up front and then rotating back. Metcalfe, who did not know Gutu, was impressed to see her taking turns with the Sherpas. In a video shot from behind, Gutu, wearing an oxygen mask and a headlamp at the front of the line, plants steps in thigh-deep snow. “This is very fun,” she says, her voice muffled by her mask.
Around the time Gutu’s team left, Rzucidlo and Lama got up. Usually, Rzucidlo was slow to get going, but this time she was already in her boots while Dawa Yangzum was still in her bag. “I was like, wow, this is super fast,” Dawa Yangzum says. “They didn’t even have any tea.” She made an instant coffee to share with Lama, then told them to go ahead because Rzucidlo was ready.
As the sun began to rise, Dawa Yangzum caught up to Rzucidlo, Lama, and a few other Sherpas, including Seven Summit’s Chhepal, on the roughly two-mile flat section before the steep headwall to camp three. It was too late for a summit attempt, she thought—generally, she told me, the goal is to climb through the dark and be on the summit at sunrise. (A warming slope is at higher risk for avalanche.) Lama had mentioned before that there were crevasses on the northeasterly face they would be climbing, and that if an avalanche occurred, they were likely to be swept into the gaps. Now, she recalled to me, he repeated that there could be avalanche danger. In Nepali, Dawa Yangzum tried to persuade him to turn back and try again that night. The competition was between the Americans, she told him, and they shouldn’t risk their lives for it. Gutu was about an hour ahead. Lama seemed conflicted. “He wanted to turn around,” she says, “but also he wanted to be first.”
Dawa Yangzum says that, at this point, Chhepal of Seven Summit encouraged Lama and the rest of the group to continue, as they might find firmer snow and more efficient travel ahead. But Chhepal denies that he had authority over Lama. For whatever reason, Lama decided to keep climbing. He offered to let Dawa Yangzum rope up with them. “I’ll take you to the summit,” he told her. But Dawa Yangzum had only one oxygen bottle, which she would need to use conservatively. She wouldn’t be able to keep up. Again, she told them to go ahead. Rzucidlo and Lama took off, moving quickly toward camp three.
Around 8:15 A.M., the Elite and Imagine team arrived at the bottom of the steep, exposed, icy wall up to camp three. It had taken them five and a half hours to travel two miles through deep snow.
At this point, Ishikawa says, Gutu, Ming-mar, and Karma looked back and spotted Rzucidlo and Lama about 500 meters behind. The trio began to forge ahead up the face, separating from the team to stay ahead of Rzucidlo.
According to Mingma G, the Elite and Imagine team had a plan for the day, which included fixing ropes on the steep climb to camp three. At the top, they’d regroup before deciding between two routes to the summit, both of which they believed would mitigate some of the avalanche danger: One, the traditional route, went up the north-facing ridge to a false summit, where climbers either “rode” a knife-edge (as if on horseback) to the true summit or, if avalanche danger was deemed low, traversed the face. The other way was a route named for Spanish climber Iñaki Ochoa de Olza, which crossed a low, flat section of the northeast face before going up a broader ridge directly to the main summit. Purja agrees, looking back, that the team considered these options, but says that they also considered the route he took during his 14-peaks expedition in 2019.
The Sherpas began fixing the ropes as planned. But shortly after, Rzucidlo and Lama arrived. Roped to one another, they passed the group at what several climbers described as a stunning pace. After seeing both women apparently climbing without issue up the face, Mingma G says, the Sherpas stopped fixing. However, some clients told me they were dismayed that the route wasn’t fully protected in this technical section, as promised. “We paid for the ropes to be fixed,” says Seven Summit climber Uta Ibrahimi, from Kosovo. Instead, climbers told me that they negotiated the majority of the sheer face with their ice axes and crampons. The ascent took about an hour and a half, and a cold wind buffeted them all the way. “It was omnipresent,” Metcalfe recalls, “a constant irritation.”
By the time the Elite and Imagine team reached camp three, they could see that Gutu was headed up the traditional north- ridge route toward the false summit, while Rzucidlo was headed slightly looker’s left of the ridge, more directly up the face toward the main summit, on what they assumed was the route Lama had taken with Kristin Harila that spring. After some discussion, the team, including Purja and Mingma G, began to follow Lama’s tracks. The sky was blue. They could see the top. “Personally,” Kedev says, “I almost saw myself on the summit.”
The wind continued to blow. German IFMGA guide Ralf Dujmovits, who has guided 13 expeditions on Shishapangma, would later explain to me that in the fall, a stable high-pressure system over the Tibetan plateau causes winds to blow from the south, transporting snow from Shishapangma’s south side to its northerly face. Meanwhile, consistently cold temperatures and lack of sunshine preserve a sugary, noncohesive upper layer of snow on those north-facing slopes. When snow gets transported onto that face—either from storms like the one that occurred a few days prior, or from winds like the ones that had bothered the climbers all morning—it buries that sugary layer, resting atop it as if on ball bearings. On slopes of a certain angle—not steep enough to naturally avalanche, but steep enough for the snow to run fast and far when it does slide—the upper layer is “almost waiting to collapse,” as Dujmovits puts it, especially when subjected to lateral motion such as a climber moving across a slope. Much of the upper north face of Shishapangma is tilted at this grade.
It’s not clear why Mingmar, Gutu, and Karma chose the route they did. Ishikawa believes that they made the decision out of a desire to stay ahead of Rzucidlo, but Purja says that the route was always part of their plan. According to Mingma G, Purja was attempting to communicate with the group by radio, until Mingmar asked that they speak only when necessary, saying that it was slowing them down. (Purja denies this.) Karma, who had been carrying the group’s oxygen bottles, would later tell Gutu’s sister that the three had been rotating positions and were very tired.
At around 11:30 A.M., Gutu and her group reached a point close to the false summit. There they left the safety of the ridge and began to traverse the northeast face toward the main summit.
VIII. Avalanche
To the witnesses below, the avalanche was silent. The clamor came after the snow had unfurled like the white tongue of a beast: Elite team members shouting “Anna! Anna!,” a climber crying out that someone was down there moving.
Members of the Elite team made it to the site first. They reported by radio that Gutu and Mingmar, who had been roped together, were dead. Karma was alive.
From their position high on the slope, Rzucidlo, Lama, and a Climbalaya team member named Kami Rita Sherpa could see the avalanche and that three or four people had been caught in it. But it’s unclear whether all three were aware that Gutu was dead. Nima Rinji Sherpa, the 17-year-old son of Seven Summit cofounder Tashi Sherpa, says that he called from base camp to inform Lama that Gutu had been caught in an avalanche and passed away. He advised Lama to come down.
“I told Lama, ‘If you and the client summit, people will not respect her as a climber,’ ” he told me. Both Chhepal and Mingma G, who by this point had matched radio frequencies with Seven Summit, also recall this conversation. But Kami Rita, who agreed to a short video interview before declining to speak further, told Outside that he didn’t know whether Lama was aware that Gutu had died. If Lama knew, he says, he didn’t tell Rzucidlo and Kami Rita.
Whatever Lama knew, his teammates agreed that he didn’t speak much English, and that it would have been difficult for him to explain to Rzucidlo what had happened and what the risks of continuing might be. Those who were on the radio that day also agree that Lama told Rzucidlo that they should descend, and that she said no. Kami Rita, who witnessed this conversation, says that Rzucidlo did not want to go down because they were so close to the summit, and that there wasn’t much discussion because of Lama’s limited English. “Lama asked [to descend] only one time,” he told me, holding up one finger. (Kami Rita’s English is also limited.) Lama relayed Rzucidlo’s wishes by radio and they pushed on.
Lama was by all accounts a standout among Sherpas, a superathlete motivated not just by the financial rewards of climbing, but by a drive to see what he could achieve. “He was extraordinary,” Dawa Yangzum says. Besides his physical strength, colleagues say, he was among the most technically skilled rope fixers on his team, and always happy to take on difficult tasks. “If someone says, ‘We have to do this,’ he’s in the front,” says Tashi.
But even if Lama was driven by passion and not just profession, climbing was a financial necessity. He was born to a poor family in the same remote Makalu valley village as the founders of Seven Summit, where locals grew their own crops and made multiday treks to the closest city to buy staples like salt. He was quiet and shy as a boy, but villagers told the Seven Summit founders that he was strong, and the brothers recruited him at 17 or 18. Lama had a wife and two teenage sons in Kathmandu, and he was acutely aware of the dangers of his work: his elder brother, also an accomplished mountaineer, had died in a climbing accident.
It’s the impression of those on the radio that Lama wanted to descend. But even if he could have communicated that effectively to Rzucidlo, it might have been difficult for him to persuade her. Guides say that it’s always hard to talk a client down from a summit, and for Sherpas it may be particularly challenging, whether that’s due to cultural differences, a lack of training or authority, or Western attitudes toward non-Western workers. “If you’re climbing in Europe with guides and they say you have to go back, you will go back,” Ibrahimi says. “But in Nepal, when guides say let’s go down, sometimes the clients don’t listen.”
Lama couldn’t make the call to turn around, Chhepal told me. “He has to ask his client.”
“Whose decision is it?” I clarified.
“Gina’s decision.”
IX. Search
Climbers were understandably shaken after the avalanche. Most began to descend, while Mingma G, Chhepal, Dawa Yangzum, and several other Sherpas made the roughly 30-minute walk down to the avalanche site to help their injured colleague. There they found Gutu’s and Mingmar’s bodies lying in the snow. Mingmar was almost fully buried; someone had tried to dig out his face. Gutu lay on her side, partially buried. Someone covered her face with a cap.
Karma was badly injured and unable to walk, so Mingma G and some other Sherpas began to construct a stretcher out of packs. While the rescuers assisted Karma, Lama called again to say that his group was about 15 minutes from the summit. Around this time, the climbers who were descending saw them begin to traverse left beneath a large chunk of ice. Naoki Ishikawa snapped a photo of the trio less than 100 meters from the summit. They appear as a tiny, dark smudge on the frozen white face.
Not long after, someone yelled out, “Avalanche!”
The rescuers who had been tending to Karma looked up to see snow rushing down the mountain toward them. They left the injured Sherpa and ran. For a moment, Mingma G hesitated: Should he protect Karma? He was scared. He began to run, too.
As Dawa Yangzum fled, she heard a voice on the radio: Lama, Lama. Do you copy? No response. When the avalanche rushed by, it felt like being hit by a wall of air. For a moment she couldn’t see. It was hard to breathe. Then the atmosphere cleared. She looked back up at the mountain. The three dots she’d seen earlier were gone.
The second avalanche settled about 100 meters looker’s left from where Gutu and Mingmar lay. The rescuers scanned the area. They saw items in the snow and a person moving, which turned out to be Kami Rita, who was alive and in shock. The group began to search for Rzucidlo and Lama. Dawa Yangzum found Lama’s empty pack; the group found Rzucidlo’s boots in two different locations. Where Kami Rita had fallen, there was blood in the snow (likely his own, rescuers later said). There, Chhepal and Mingma G began to dig through the hard, chunky debris with their ice axes—carefully, in case someone was still alive. They heard hissing. It turned out to be an oxygen bottle attached to a broken regulator.
By now the sun was high in the sky. The second avalanche had run over at least two large crevasses, and the group thought it likely that Rzucidlo and Lama went into one of them. Concerned about the possibility of another avalanche, they shifted their focus to evacuating the injured Sherpas. The rescue effort would be long and arduous, and Mingma G would sustain a life-threatening fall of his own, fracturing his skull. Soon after, China would close the mountain to climbing and prohibit further recovery efforts. (Outside was unable to reach the China Tibet Mountaineering Association for comment.) Authorities allowed Elite’s team members to retrieve Gutu’s and Ming-mar’s bodies and transport them to camp two, where they were left in what Purja described on Instagram as “a safe location.”
After assisting the rescuers, Dawa Yangzum walked down to camp two with Gurung in a state of disbelief. In the following days, she grappled with hard questions. Why had Rzucidlo kept going? What would have happened if Dawa had gone with them? Could she have helped persuade Rzucidlo to go down?
There was something else she couldn’t wrap her head around: She and her Sherpa friends climbed for a living. Mingmar and Lama left behind families who had relied on them financially. (Outside was unable to reach Lama’s family, and Elite Exped declined an interview on behalf of Mingmar’s family.) Rzucidlo and Gutu, on the other hand, led “very successful lives,” as she put it to me on the phone two weeks after the accident. They didn’t need sponsors. They weren’t climbing as a job. “I just wonder why?” She sighed, grasping for words. “Is it just addiction, or people love it?” She was sad about the deaths of her American friends, who she says were both strong, positive, kind women. But Lama and Mingmar were her friends, too. Sherpas are very loyal, she told me. They keep their word and want to support their clients. “They were just helping those two,” she said, “and they both died.”
X. Mountain Guide
On October 24, climbing journalists Chris Kalous and Andrew Bisharat interviewed Alpenglow owner Adrian Ballinger about the accidents on their podcast, The RunOut. In the episode, Ballinger asserted that the roles of mountain guides and Sherpas have become muddled in the Himalayas.
“[Lama] and Mingmar are high-altitude workers, but they are not qualified mountain guides,” he said. Turning a client around from a summit, he argued, wasn’t in “their job description, because it takes years just to build the decision-making and judgment and ability to stand up against clients and money.” The lines became blurred, Ballinger contended, after the logistical support provided by Nepalese companies morphed into guiding services. “When a new client comes to the Himalayas,” he said, “do they think they’re signing up for mountain guiding when they’re actually signing up for logistics support?”
What qualifies a person to work as a mountain guide varies from country to country. The core Alpine nations in Europe—France, Switzerland, Italy, Austria, and Germany—require guides to be certified by the IFMGA, a process that involves 23 weeks of training and education over at least two years. But many countries, including the U.S. and Nepal, don’t require certification to qualify as a mountain guide. Among the roughly 3,000 mountaineers working in Nepal, fewer than 100 have earned, or are in the process of earning, IFMGA certification, says Tshiring Jangbu Sherpa, an IFMGA guide and general secretary of the Nepal National Mountain Guiding Association, a member of the IFMGA. The cost of certification, which can range from $15,000 to $40,000, is a major barrier in South Asia’s poorest country, though Tshiring says that more Nepalese companies are now seeking to hire IFMGA guides.
Whether Nepali mountaineers should have to pay large sums of money to become certified by a foreign governing body to work in their own country is a legitimate question. Nonetheless, Michael Lentrodt, an IFMGA managing-committee member, believes that widespread use of the term mountain guide in the Himalayas may lead clients to believe that they’re hiring someone with more training and education than they possess. Neither Mingmar Sherpa nor Tenjen Lama were IFMGA guides or aspirants, the IFMGA confirmed; nor is Nims Purja, though Purja bills himself as a guide. As Lentrodt said of Purja in an email: “He is definitely a good mountaineer, but that doesn’t necessarily qualify him as a good mountain guide, especially with regard to the ability to assess avalanches. This is a special skill that mountain guides are trained in.”
Another skill set IFMGA guides are taught is how to explain their risk assessments and related decision-making—such as abandoning a summit attempt—to clients. Lentrodt calls this “transparent leadership” and says that it can typically be effective in persuading a client to turn around in a dangerous situation. (Indeed, Tshiring told me that Nepali IFMGA guides are usually able to warn clients off from a summit attempt.) But if the client insists on continuing, Lentrodt says, it’s not a guide’s responsibility to stop them. In this situation, a trained guide knows they can inform the climber that their responsibility is finished and turn back alone.
Where the tragedies on Shishapangma are concerned, however, Lentrodt thinks that the question of roles and expectations is key. In an email, he told me, “One should shed light on whether this was really a mountain guide with leadership duties or more of a porter and organizer on-site, because the American victims who died were not inexperienced mountaineers.”
To that point, Seven Summit maintains that Rzucidlo did not hire Lama to guide her. “She was seeking a partner,” Guragai says, adding that Rzucidlo asked only for “additional hands” on the mountain to fix ropes. He pointed out that she already had a three-Sherpa team from Climbalaya, and that the latter had arranged every other aspect of her expedition. But Tracee Metcalfe, who climbed multiple mountains with Rzucidlo, says that in general her friend “fully believed the Sherpas were there to guide her. I never saw her questioning them.”
In response to the IFMGA’s statements about his qualifications, Purja wrote to Outside, “I have led 45 x 8,000ers… I was in Gurkhas [an elite unit of Nepali soldiers within the British Army] and UKSF [UK Special Forces] and was an extreme cold weather warfare instructor. I have trained and climbed in this environment for years. Mingmar and Lama were both incredibly talented and respected guides with years of experience and mountaineering knowledge. With respect to the IFMGA, just because you go on a training course and get a certificate, does not mean that you are the best and that your certificate is better than someone’s years of lived knowledge and experience on the mountains.”
Guragai of Seven Summit responded to the IFMGA’s statements as well, saying that it was easy to find fault with others and that he could offer plenty of criticisms of IFMGA guides. Yet he seemed to agree with the assessment that the term “guide” may mean something different in Nepal than it does in Europe or the U.S. In Nepal, he said the role of a guide “can be varied.”
I asked Guragai whether variable use of the term could mislead people. “If they’re beginner climbers or have worked with Western companies,” Guragai replied. “But if you have been to the Himalayas or Karakoram, there is no way to get confused.”
“People know what it is,” he continued. “Gina knew what it was.”
XI. Decisions
All the climbers and guides I spoke to agree that the incident on Shishapangma was caused by human error. Always a factor in the so-called Death Zone above 8,000 meters, where there’s insufficient oxygen to sustain human life, is the well-known impact of extreme altitude on decision-making. Rzucidlo’s family also claims that Lama may have felt pressure to reach the top, based on Dawa Yangzum’s understanding that Rzucidlo had promised additional payment to the company and to Lama if she summited. But it seems unlikely that he was motivated by a bonus, since at one point he suggested descending. Guragai also roundly dismisses the idea that Seven Summit would agree to a payment structure that hinged on something as uncertain as a summit. “It’s not logical,” he says, “and it’s not true.” He did think it likely that Rzucidlo promised Lama a summit bonus, but notes that Lama had savings and was already receiving a large fee regardless of a summit. “Lama has enough money,” he told me. “And he loves his family. He would not take a risk for [any] amount.”
As to whether Lama had a say in turning around, Guragai equivocates. “A person has a right to decide for his own life,” he says. But like Dawa Yangzum, he also told me that Sherpas are loyal and often consider other factors besides their own well-being, including that of the company and their client. “They always try to stay with the client,” he says. “This might risk their life, true.”
It does seem clear that well before the final hours of the summit push, the competition between Gutu and Rzucidlo contributed to an all-around rush. Guides like Chris Warner and Ralf Dujmovits, both of whom have been climbing in the Himalayas since the eighties, believe that it was too soon after a storm to ascend, especially in the wake of the smaller October 5 avalanche. According to Dujmovits, that slide occurred on a slope that was mellower but had a similar northeast-facing aspect to the summit routes, making it a clear warning sign of heightened avalanche danger. Financial considerations aside, Dawa Yangzum believes that Lama felt pressure to win the competition, despite his concerns about the conditions.
But even if the teams had waited, Dujmovits believes that it’s ill-advised to climb the north face of Shishapangma in the fall, due to the prevailing avalanche hazard. (“Everyone knows fall is avalanche season,” Warner agrees, adding that fall climbing in the Himalayas increased dramatically during the commercial era.) Dujmovits also questions the routes taken by Gutu’s and Rzucidlo’s teams, citing their objective exposure to avalanche danger. “You’re running constantly into pockets of this slope that could come down any time,” he says. Vielmo, the IFMGA guide who met Rzucidlo at base camp, wonders whether the teams would have chosen a less direct but potentially safer route, like the Iñaki route, if they hadn’t been racing.
Individual choices made to manage risk can be highly subjective—if Alex Honnold had fallen during his famed free solo of El Capitan, Adrian Ballinger points out, armchair experts could have identified any number of poor decisions on his part. However, the accidents raise questions about whether Rzucidlo and Gutu, and their Sherpas, should have been allowed to make as many decisions on the mountain as they did. In an environment where clients may be too inexperienced to make good judgment calls, and Sherpas can’t or won’t stand up to those clients, it’s the role of expedition leaders to manage risk to both clients and workers, Ballinger says.
On Rzucidlo’s side, those expedition leaders were absent. Climbalaya co-owner Mingma Sherpa was in charge for the company, but it’s unclear where he was, and he didn’t respond to multiple requests for comment. Seven Summit co-owner Chhang Dawa Sherpa was with a second team en route from Cho Oyu; the company says that, because the first team on Shishapangma was made up of veteran climbers, there was no need to send a leader with them.
On Gutu’s side, expedition leaders Purja and Mingma G were present, though both were pursuing their 14th peaks without oxygen and may have been compromised in terms of leadership capabilities. Some say the two should have known that conditions were dangerous and held the teams back. “They didn’t do their job,” says Romanian climber Adrian Laza, who was climbing with Seven Summit. Warner points out that the larger group, with both expedition leaders present, had followed Lama and Rzucidlo’s path. “It’s a miracle only two were caught,” he says.
Mingma G notes that the Imagine team had no fatalities, and that he was responsible only for his own clients. Both he and Purja say that climbing without oxygen is not a major impediment to their ability to guide.
Purja doesn’t think that he did anything wrong, as he explained in a written response to Outside. “Anybody can speak and have their opinion in hindsight—that’s easy, especially if they were not on the mountain that day,” he wrote. He explained that he was in fact following a route similar to the one he’d climbed in 2019, which mirrored the beginning of Lama’s, and that he had no concerns about avalanches on the summit day. Conditions were worse during his 2019 summit, he continued, and “I knew that there was a snow dump but also there was a huge amount of high winds. So, I knew the snow would be compacted.” (According to Sean Zimmerman-Wall, program manager for the American Institute for Avalanche Research and Education, “Anytime there’s new snow with a contributing factor of wind, avalanches are possible.”)
“Safety is our priority, and if I thought there was any avalanche risk, we would not have gone,” Purja concluded.
In the wake of the accidents, the companies hired by Rzucidlo have accepted limited responsibility for guiding her. According to Seven Summit, Rzucidlo was on her own program, having hired just “manpower,” as Tashi Sherpa put it, from the company. 8K’s Pemba Sherpa blames the delay in permitting for stoking the competition, and emphasizes that Climbalaya was responsible for Rzucidlo once she’d entered Tibet. Dawa Sherpa of Climbalaya declined to speak with me.
“No one is saying they’re responsible for anything,” Susan Rzucidlo, Gina’s mother, told me when we talked this spring. What happened on Shishapangma doesn’t make sense to her. “You pay so much money for these expeditions,” she says. “There should be somebody in charge.”
“They say, ‘Well, it was her final say,’ ” she says. “No. I’m not buying that. I’m not buying that.”
XII. “You Are Close to Her”
On a mild, sunny December day, I pulled up to the home of Angela Terry, Gina Rzucidlo’s sister, in Franklin, Massachusetts, about 45 minutes from where Gina grew up. The house lay at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac backing up to leafless woods. A full-size trampoline with netting, which Rzucidlo had bought her niece and nephew, sat in the yard.
Susan Rzucidlo answered the door, birdlike in frame, with short brown hair and glasses. Angela appeared next, looking fit and dewy skinned, in a ponytail and a crewneck Alo Yoga sweatshirt. They were warm and welcoming, quick to laugh even in the early days of their grief. We ate subs from a local deli in the kitchen, and the two women often finished each other’s sentences, eager to tell me about Gina—how she was a lifelong fashionista whose clothes Angela would steal in high school, how she was the fun aunt who the kids couldn’t wait to see. One Christmas, she surprised her nephew with a gas-powered go-kart, Angela told me, then ripped around in it herself, laughing her contagious laugh. I couldn’t help but see the similarities between Rzucidlo and Gutu: both were described as generous and restless, uninterested in the trappings of a conventional life. Both were close with their sisters, who coveted their fashion sense. Both felt freest in the mountains.
It also seems that neither woman considered their 14-peak attempt a competition until the very end. Neither family had even heard mention of the other American climber until the final weeks in Tibet, and friends of Rzucidlo told me that she seemed different during her last two climbs, uncharacteristically anxious and pressured. It’s an explanation that Dawa Yangzum has considered for why her friend kept going after the first avalanche. “At the last moment, she was very desperate and so tired,” she says. “Maybe she thought they were just injured. Maybe she was like, I’m so tired of this, I want to finish.”
The fact that Gina’s body remains missing is a cruelty. In April, after a winter of training, Angela Terry flew to Nepal with her sister’s climbing gear, planning to join the spring commercial expeditions on Shishapangma and an associated mission to recover the bodies. But after she’d spent a huge sum of money and three weeks waiting and acclimatizing, China canceled the expeditions.
The missing body has placed the family at an administrative impasse: they can’t obtain an official death certificate to gain full access to Rzucidlo’s records or accounts, and they haven’t held a memorial service. But it has also mired them in a different sort of purgatory.
In the days and weeks following the avalanches, Angela and Susan held out hope, however irrational, that Gina was still alive. Of course, they knew the chances were slim. But nobody had searched for her. Maybe she was lost up there. Maybe she was still trying to get home. As the months passed, though, they knew.
Nonetheless, when we spoke in April, Susan Rzucidlo told me that there’s a part of her that still doesn’t believe it. In January, a friend of Gina’s traveled to China. He arranged to visit the drivers camp in Tibet—as close as he could get to Shishapangma. There, in view of the snow-covered mountain, he set up a small memorial with photos of Rzucidlo and her three beloved dogs, a candle, and a white lily. More than three months had passed since the accident when he went. But Susan had still asked him: When you’re there, can you please just call her name?
Growing up, Gutu was close to her sister and their parents. “We always did things in four,” Elena Cebanova says. Even after Gutu moved to the U.S., she visited her family in Italy three times a year. When Gutu died, Cebanova changed her Whats-App profile to display a photo of the two sisters posing side by side. “Mi manchi 💔,” her status read. I miss you.
In November of 2023, Gutu’s family flew to Nepal, having been informed that the Chinese government was sending a recovery team to retrieve the bodies on Shishapangma. Weather canceled the mission, so instead the family toured the country that had become Gutu’s second home. They found some consolation in seeing why it had moved her so, with its beautiful mountains and kind people, who were poor but gave generously. Purja took them by helicopter to see Shishapangma from Nepal. In the sky he told them, You are close to her. They were only a few miles away from Gutu. “But we couldn’t do anything,” Cebanova says.
On May 17, three weeks after the Shishapangma expeditions and the mission to recover Rzucidlo’s and Lama’s bodies were canceled, Purja revealed on Instagram that China had granted special permission for him and a team to recover the bodies of Gutu and Mingmar, because their exact location was known. The recovery was harrowing, Purja wrote, but successful. A helicopter brought the bodies to an airport in Kathmandu, where Gutu’s family was waiting, having flown back from Italy. There, Cebanova saw her sister for the first time in nine months.
Seeing Gutu’s body helped Cebanova understand that everything had really happened. It was like her grief began anew, she says, “from zero.” They had just five minutes together, and then Gutu was transferred to an ambulance. Their parents brought her body back to Italy, where she was buried in a closed-casket ceremony in June.
When I ask if anything has brought her comfort in the past few months, Cebanova says no. But now, at least, Gutu is just five minutes from her house. “I can go say hello to her in the cemetery,” she tells me. Her sister is home, instead of some incomprehensible place in the snow.
Want more of Outside’s in-depth longform stories? Sign up for the Long Reads newsletter.
