SalxirOn 30 July, an avalanche on Broad Peak in the Karakoram killed ten climbers. Among them was Nirmal Purja, the Nepali mountaineer who climbed all fourteen 8,000 metre peaks in 189 days and spent much of the rest of his career arguing that the Nepali climbers who make other people's summits possible deserved to be named, paid and remembered. He was 43.
We are a small company that sells Shilajit. We did not know him. We have no business claiming a connection to his life, and we are not going to pretend otherwise or turn a funeral into a marketing moment. But it did not feel right to say nothing either, because the thing he spent years pushing for is the same thing this company was built around, and he said it far better and at far greater cost than we ever will.
The part that stays with us
What Purja kept returning to was simple. The mountains are not empty. There are people there. They carry the loads, fix the ropes, break the trail, and know the ground in a way no visitor ever will, and for most of the history of Himalayan climbing they were a footnote in someone else's story. He wanted the record corrected, and he was loud about it in a way that made some people uncomfortable, which is usually a sign that someone is telling the truth.
That is our whole business, in a smaller and much less dramatic way. Shilajit cannot be farmed or manufactured. Every gram of it exists because someone from a mountain community walked to a remote rock face at altitude and scraped it out by hand, using knowledge passed down for generations about where it seeps and when and how to tell the real thing from the wax that imitates it. Then it travels across the world and ends up on a shelf in Europe with a photo of a mountain on the label and no mention of any of them.
Salxir started because that gap bothered us. We are not going to overstate what a small company can do about it. What we can do is be specific about where things come from, publish what our lab reports actually say, and refuse to tell stories about Himalayan wisdom while treating the people who hold it as invisible.
Nine other people
Purja was the name in the headlines, but nine other climbers died on Broad Peak that day, from several countries, and their families are living through exactly the same week. We do not want to write a note that quietly treats them as background to a famous man's death. They were all somebody's.
Our thoughts are with all of their families, and with the search and recovery teams in Pakistan who went up the mountain afterwards.
Nothing to sell here
There is no product link on this page and there is not going to be one. If you came here looking for news about what happened on Broad Peak, the reporting from outlets covering the region will serve you far better than we can.
We just wanted to say that we noticed, and that the mountains are full of people, and that we try not to forget it.
#WithLoveFromEarth