A former Gurkha who lost both of his legs serving with the British army in Afghanistan hopes to become the first double above-the-knee (DAK) amputee to scale Everest this summer.
Hari Budha Magar, who was “suicidal” after being medically discharged from the Royal Gurkha Regiment in 2010, is working with an all-Nepali team to attempt to conquer the world’s highest mountain in May.
Though he will be kitted out with special climbing legs fitted with battery-powered heaters to stave off frostbite, the 43-year-old will essentially be crawling up Everest using his hands.
He estimates it will take him three times longer than able-bodied climbers to reach the 8,848-metre summit, though he is confident he will be faster than average on the ladder sections because of his superior upper-body strength.
Two climbers with below-knee amputations have reached Everest’s summit before. But making the ascent without knees is significantly harder.
Budha Magar, an infectiously optimistic and cheerful man, describes his walking gait as “like a penguin”, propelled by his hips. In an interview with the Guardian, he joked about the advantages of living without legs, such as “no smelly socks” and “being able to lie down on very small sofas.”
As well as pushing his own body, Budha Magar wants to change perceptions around disability. “Even now, especially in remote places, disabled people are viewed as ‘the burden of the earth’, with disabilities seen as sins of a previous life,” he said.
In 2017 Budha Magar became the first DAK amputee to summit over 6,000 metres on Mera Peak, Nepal’s highest trekking peak (6,476 metres). He also scaled Mont Blanc (4,810 metres) and Kilimanjaro (5,895 metres). Last year he abandoned an attempt to climb another Himalayan peak, Mount Himlung (7,126 metres), after one of his team got sick and the whole crew were almost buried by snow.
Born in a cowshed in a remote part of Nepal, Budha Magar was married off at 11, becoming a father at 17. He left Nepal aged 19, one of 230 Nepalis chosen to join the British army from 10,000 applicants, lured by a salary that was higher than the prime minister of Nepal’s.
He served for 15 years but while on patrol in Afghanistan in April 2010, he stepped on an improvised explosive device (IED).
Suddenly legless, he spent at least 18 months depressed, “half suicidal” and “drinking too much” before a veteran charity, Battle Back, offered him the chance to go skydiving. “That was a big turning point for me, especially for my confidence,” he said.
“I said yes thinking: ‘Half my body is gone; if the other half goes too, so what?’ In the Gurkhas we have this motto: ‘It is better to die than be a coward’ so I can’t be a coward. And when we landed on the ground I realised that even without legs you are able to do lots of things.”
He realised that it was his mind as much as his body holding him back: “I didn’t know how powerful the mind is. I thought it is all about physical strength. If we set our minds, our body will follow.”
He began doing sports – kayaking, golf, rock climbing, archery, table tennis – before setting his sights on mountaineering. Before long, a childhood dream to climb Everest resurfaced, and he began training in earnest to make the ascent in 2018.
Then, at the end of 2017, the Nepali tourism ministry banned solo climbers, blind people and double amputees from climbing Everest in an attempt to reduce the number of deaths on the mountain.
Budha Magar led a campaign to overturn the ban, travelling to Geneva to address the United Nations, and citing the UN Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. “You can’t take away anyone’s rights just because they are different,” he told the Guardian.
But does everyone have a right to climb Everest, which is becoming dangerously overcrowded and litter-covered during the short climbing season? “Yes, yes. Everyone should have it,” he said this week. The key thing, he said, was preparation and making sure his attempt did not put anyone else in danger. “I need to make sure I am not slowing anyone else down.”
Now living in Canterbury, Kent, with his wife and their two sons, as well as his 26-year-old daughter from his first marriage, Budha Magar has raised more than £200,000 towards his Everest attempt. If he can find another £100,000 of sponsorship, he will travel to Nepal in spring with former Gurkha and SAS mountaineer Krishna Thapa, his expedition leader.
They will be accompanied by eight Sherpas to carry oxygen and other equipment, rather than the usual one or two, and plan five or six camps between base camp and the summit, rather than the usual four. This was not so excessive, he insisted, pointing to the first men to scale Everest: “Sir Edmund Hillary and [Sherpa] Tenzing Norgay had 10 camps and 500 porters.”
Success on the world’s highest mountain can never be guaranteed, but his expedition credo illustrates Budha Magar’s fearless mindset: no legs, no limits.
