Fearless Nepali Mountaineer Nimsdai Purja - when personality and transits collide
I first learned of Nimsdaj Purja from the Netflix’ documentary The Peaks that came out in 2021. He and his team set an amazing world record summitting all fourteen higher than 8,000-meter peaks in a six-month timeframe, completely shattering prior record of seven years!
Nimsdaj is a Sun in Leo, in traditional astrology, Sun is considered to be in domicile (or “at home”) in the sign of Leo. I’m not sure if I’m biased because of my knowledge of this, but my observation is that people born under the Leo sun sign do tend to succeed more easily in the mundane world. The sun is at ease in its own sign. The Leo sun seeks to shine and gain outer world recognition in his own creative and sometimes dramatic way. There’s a confidence and charisma that comes naturally to Leos that perhaps other signs can only dream about. Note his Sun has a tight trine to Jupiter and Uranus, this is someone who is a rebel at heart and is destined to make new frontiers with his radical ideas - which he has so done, by showing the world that him and his Nepalese crew could summit the most challenging mountains way faster than any foreigners could.
Other famous people with Sun in Leo include American entrepreneur Martha Stewart, Jesse Livermore (one of the best traders of all times), Alex Honnold (world-renowned rock climber).
The insatiable thirst to achieve at all cost - Sun Moon Saturn Pluto
The most prominent and possibly dangerous aspects in Nim’s astrology chart is perhaps having both Sun and Moon squaring Saturn and Pluto that are tightly in conjunction at 25 degrees of Libra. Anyone born around that time would have Saturn Pluto in close proximity yet only if you’re born on a certain day and time would both your sun and moon also have aspects to Saturn and Pluto.
For Nim’s chart, his Sun and Moon both being squared to Saturn Pluto makes it a doubly challenging energy to contain. In astrology, different planetary patterns are like energetic blueprint of our psychological make-up, put simply, they are what makes of our personality. A square aspect is considered a challenging aspect so having this challenging aspect means the person will often exhibit an excess of what may be hard or bad of this personality pattern while say someone with easy aspect (eg. Sun is in trine to Saturn Pluto) may be able to express this personality trait in a more well-managed and balanced or self-aware manner.
Saturn craves whatever it touches, having Sun squaring Saturn alone implies someone craves being recognised (the sun seeks recognition and approval; it is what gives us our sense of identity in the outer world) and will do anything or endure any level of stress to achieve his goals. With Pluto in the cocktail we have a personality structure that can take this craving to a compulsive and highly intense level. Nim pretty much believed that he can basically achieve anything that he sets his mind to do. His faith in never giving up until a goal is achieved runs deep in his blood - it is Pluto in its extreme expression! The positive side to this is someone who is so resilient and powerful that he can truly achieve many great things that no others can, while the negative side may be that things can be taken too much to the extreme and lead to dangerous life and death situations (Saturn Pluto aspect is also associated with violence and death). With his moon also being part of this aspect, this personality or psychological pattern of his can be even more engrained. Our moon is representative of how we meet life on the more gut and instinctual level. Put simply, this Saturn Pluto energy is a HUGE life theme for him; his entire life is built around this identity of being invincible, controlled, intense and never giving up, believing he can achieve more and more.
In July 2026, Nims made a decision to climb Broad Peak under sub-optimal snow conditions. Apparently climbing Broad Peak wasn’t in his original plan as his original plan was only to climb G2 in July. But because he wanted to become the first ever person in the world to climb all fourteen higher than 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen supplementation a second time, he decided to make last minute changes to his plan to climb Broad Peak. News reported that many other climbing groups have actually left Broad Peak’s base camps around the 20th of July due to anticipated poor snow conditions (an abundance of fresh new snow arrived which meant higher risks of avalanche). On the other hand, Nims, being as experienced as he was, had decided to go ahead with the climb (along with other experienced climbers in other groups who also died the same day he did), knowing probably the risks he was taking. It would be hard to imagine that he didn’t know the risks or had not been able to read the snow conditions. It begs the question of whether some things are just fated.
Astrologically, Jupiter and Pluto were in opposition exact around the days of his accident. His accident which led to his death was on 30th July while Jupiter and Pluto exactly opposed on 22nd July. Coincidentally, the moon was only hours after being full (29th July evening) at the time of his accident that killed many others. Moon’s position often serves as triggers for event occurences. The Jupiter Pluto opposition and subsequent full moon landed almost exactly on his Sun and Moon opposition which were in square to Saturn Pluto. From my experience, when we get bad transits, we often do make poor decisions - this is truly the biggest value of astrology, is to know when we might land in these energetic patches that can skew our judgement!
There’s also a saying in Chinese that your personality decides your fate. So perhaps the only way we can circumvent fate (if fate is circumventable at all..) is practicing self-awareness and making tweaks to our personality. I personally don’t think we can “change” our personality in drastic ways (and we’re probably not meant to), but awareness can help us live out our personalities perhaps in more favourable and fuller ways.
So was it his personality that led him to his demise? Or was it fate and the fateful transits that led him to make erroneous judgements on the risks that he was taking and therefore the ultimate accident to occur? I certainly do not know for sure because noone knows exactly what was running in Nims’ mind right before his climb but it might be fair to say that personality plus perhaps bad luck (bad transits!) expose us to greater chances of poor outcomes in life.
