Nirmal Purja has done it. His seemingly mission impossible dream project, aptly named "Project Possible 14/7", has been accomplished on October 29 atop Mount Shishapangma, in China.

Purja's extreme ambitious project of summiting each of the world's fourteen peaks with an elevation of 8,000 meters and above in just seven months saw a mind-blowingly perfect completion when he set his crampon-clad snow boots on the summit of the 8,027-meter peak at 11:18 pm. Believe it or not, he took just six months and six days to accomplish his mission after starting with a successful climb of Mount Annapurna in Nepal on April 23 this year.

"It has been a gruelling but humbling six months, and I hope to have proven that anything is possible with some determination, self-belief, and positivity," Purja said in a statement after his summit of the last "8000er" on his list on Tuesday.

Meanwhile, acknowledging Purja's mind-boggling milestone, Pema Tinley, deputy director of China's Tibet Mountaineering Association, mentioned, "Purja finished climbing 8,201 meters high Cho Oyu in China in September and applied for permission to climb Shishapangma in October."

Interestingly, the Nepalese-born British Gurkha ex-serviceman found himself hogging the limelight across international media a few months ago when he posted the viral photograph of the shocking traffic jam at the world's highest peak Mount Qomolangma. Purja highlighted the shocking summit push for the coveted peak during his Mount Qomolangma ascent as part of his Project Possible. On that fateful day, May 22, he made it to the summit with 320 others and his photograph describing the pathetic push and mad rush to the top opened a new debate, forcing the Nepal government to regulate the number of climbing permits from next year onwards.

"It was difficult to organize this mission as it's an uphill task to organize the accompanying sherpas, managing the logistics and other resources. The entire mission was of a never-seen-before scale and we are happy that Nirmal Purja has done it. It's a massive success," Mingma Sherpa of Seven Summit Treks told CGTN from Kathmandu.

Sherpa, who himself successfully summited all the 14 "8000er" between 2001 and 2010, is the managing director of the company that helped Purja accomplish his breathtaking mission.

"His fitness was the key and his indefatigable spirit and the strong will also played a huge role for his successful accomplishment of the mission," Sherpa highlighted. Such was the determination of Purja to climb the world's 14 highest peaks, that he had them tattooed across his back.

Climbing all fourteen "8000ers" is considered the mother of all mountaineering milestones since legendary Italian climber Reinhold Messner first achieved the unique feat in 1986, taking 16 years to do so. Till date, less than 40 climbers have followed in his footsteps while South Korea's Kim Chang-ho held the previous record of completing the gruesome task in seven years, 10 months and six days.

Sherpa, who had become the first climber from Nepal to conquer each of the 14 peaks, informed, "As an organizer of his ascents to each of the 14 above-8,000 meter peaks, the biggest and the foremost challenge was to arrange for his first climb of the season at Mount Annapurna. It was his first ascent and his entire mission was dependent on the success of the first climb at the summit. It also took a long time."

Born in a poor family in a village in western Nepal, Purja joined the Gurkhas brigade of the British regiment at the age of 18. Later, he served in the elite special forces as an extreme cold weather warfare specialist. Although he was born in Nepal, his village was not in the mountainous region of the country and thus, he had no prior mountaineering experience. However, his tryst with mountaineering began on a trek to Qomolangma base camp in 2012 when he summited the 6,119-metre (20,075 feet) Lobuche before he made a successful ascent to the first "8000er" – Dhaulagiri in western Nepal in 2014. He was subsequently, deployed to a war-torn Afghanistan and it was in 2016, he made his first successful ascent of Mount Qomolangma. The rest, as they say, is history as he swapped his army boots for crampons and achieved a milestone that no human ever had dared to dream before.

(With input from Xinhua News Agency)

(Cover image from VCG)