In Memory of Kili "Kilu" Pemba Sherpa — A Fund for His Family

I would not have finished my final four 8,000-meter peaks without Kili Pemba Sherpa.

Kili was killed in an avalanche on Broad Peak on July 30, 2026, at around 6,600 meters, between Camp 2 and Camp 3. It swept away all ten climbers in the party. There were no survivors. He was guiding when it happened, which is how he spent nearly every season of his adult life.

He was on ten of my expeditions with Imagine Nepal, most of them as part of the rope-fixing team, often leading it. For anyone reading this who isn't a climber: the fixing team goes first. They climb the dangerous ground unprotected, ahead of everyone else, and install the ropes the rest of us clip into. Everyone behind them is safer because they went ahead. It's the hardest, most exposed work on any big mountain, and it's done by people whose names almost never appear in the write-ups afterward.

Fixing rope isn't just hard work, it's judgment. Where the line goes, what the snow is doing, which slope will hold. Kili was enormously strong, but what set him apart was how he read terrain — he seemed to know what a mountain was going to do before it did it. And he was willing to say when something was too dangerous and we needed to turn around. That is harder than it sounds.

Kili was quiet and rarely talked about himself. But expedition by expedition I got to see more of the other side of him: extremely kind, and genuinely funny once he trusted you. You earned it slowly, and it was worth it.

In 2024, Kili and I climbed side by side in Pakistan for Gasherbrum II, then Gasherbrum I, then Broad Peak. Two months later the whole Imagine Nepal team moved to Tibet, and I summited Shishapangma with Kili up front, fixing rope for all of us. That was my fourteenth, and the first time a U.S. woman had finished them. He got me there.

Broad Peak is the mountain that killed him.

Kili finished his own 14 x 8000 meter peaks on July 3 this year, on Nanga Parbat. I know what that moment is supposed to be followed by. He got twenty-seven days, and he spent them working.

WHY A SEPARATE FUND

This page was created at the request of Mingma G Sherpa, founder of Imagine Nepal, the company Kili guided for throughout his career. They wanted a fund dedicated to his family alone.

This is a way for people who knew Kili personally — or who climbed with someone who did — to give directly to his family. If he carried your load, fixed your rope, or kept you safe. If your teammate or your friend came home because Kili was on that expedition. This page is for you.

Two other appeals are also supporting the families of all the guides lost on Broad Peak: The Juniper Fund's five-year commitment and the Nimsdai Foundation's Broad Peak Guides' Family Support Fund. Both include Kili's family, and both deserve your support. This page isn't in competition with them.

WHO KILI WAS

Born in 1980 in Rolwaling, a Sherpa village at 4,200 meters, he started as a teenage support climber on a Japanese Manaslu expedition in 1996 and never left the mountains. Over three decades he summited Everest 15 times and K2 twice.

On January 16, 2021, he was one of ten Nepali climbers who became the first in history to summit K2 in winter. They stepped onto the summit together, so that no one of them would be first.

He guided Xia Boyu, a double-leg amputee, to the top of Everest in 2018, on Xia's fifth attempt across forty years. He did it again for Rustam Nabiev on Manaslu in 2021. He helped establish the route to Manaslu's true summit, correcting a decades-old error.

Almost none of the headlines mentioned his name. Anyone who climbed with him will tell you that's exactly how he wanted it.

WHERE YOUR MONEY GOES

His family now faces a future without him.

I'm raising these funds in the United States and will wire them directly to Kili's wife, Tashi Lhamu Sherpa, in Nepal. I'm working with Imagine Nepal to make sure the money reaches her safely. I'll post an update here every time funds are sent — the amount, the date, and confirmation that they arrived. Nothing is held back for costs on my end.

Whatever you can give, and whatever you share, eases the weight on a family that gave the mountaineering world one of its finest climbers and asked for very little back.

Thank you for remembering Kili.