American Climber Among Three Bodies Recovered on Broad Peak; Netflix's '14 Peaks' Star Still Missing

Pakistani rescue teams have recovered the remains of three climbers, including an American, after an avalanche swept a 10-member expedition on Broad Peak in the Karakoram range, officials said Friday. Seven people are still missing, among them one of the most celebrated high-altitude climbers alive.

The American was identified as Sarah Mallory Geis. Also recovered were Nadhira Ahmed Abdullah Al Harthy of Oman and Pur Bahadur Gurung of Nepal. The team went missing Thursday, and search crews have been working the slope since with drones and helicopters, conditions permitting.

Among the seven unaccounted for is Nirmal Purja, the Nepalese climber known widely as Nims Dai, who became internationally famous through the 2021 Netflix documentary "14 Peaks: Nothing Is Impossible." The film chronicled his effort to summit all fourteen of the world's 8,000-meter peaks in a single season, a feat that shattered the previous record by years. Pakistani climber Sohail Sakhi is also missing.

Broad Peak stands at 8,051 meters on the border between Pakistan and China, the twelfth-highest mountain on Earth and a neighbor to K2 in the Karakoram. It has a reputation among mountaineers as deceptively difficult: the summit ridge is long and exposed, the true summit is well beyond the false one, and the standard route runs beneath slopes prone to slab release. July and early August form the short window when teams attempt it.

Search operations were suspended and are set to resume Saturday. Recovery on Broad Peak is complicated by altitude — helicopters operate near the edge of their performance ceiling at those heights — and by the risk of secondary slides onto rescuers. Drones have increasingly been used on Himalayan and Karakoram searches to locate debris fields and bodies before committing crews to the slope.

The disaster is the deadliest reported on the mountain in years and lands in the middle of a busy Pakistani climbing season, with multiple international teams staged on Broad Peak and K2 base camps. Pakistan's Gilgit-Baltistan authorities coordinate rescues in the region alongside army aviation units, which fly most high-altitude recoveries.

Purja, a former Gurkha and UK Special Boat Service member, built a large following after "14 Peaks" and has since led commercial expeditions on the highest peaks. His guiding company has become one of the most prominent operators on the 8,000-meter circuit, and news of the avalanche spread quickly through the climbing world on Friday.

Officials have not released a cause or the precise elevation where the avalanche struck, and the total number of climbers on the mountain at the time has not been confirmed. The report was filed by ABC News correspondents Jon Haworth, Habibullah Khan, Jamie Dorrington and Ivan Pereira.