Remembering Nadhira Al Harthy
“Welcome to Bahrain.”
That was the first message I ever sent her. 27 December 2022.
I had been following her for seven months by then. Since May 2022, when I came back from the trek to Everest Base Camp and got bitten. That is what the mountains do to you. You go once, and then you start paying attention to the people who go properly.
So, when her Instagram Story put her in Bahrain, I knew exactly who was sitting in a hotel a short drive from me.
I added a second line, because I was not going to waste it. “I met two people who summited Everest; let’s make it three if your schedule permits.”
She wrote back: “I am here on an official visit, not sure if there will be a chance, maybe on Thursday morning.”
Thursday was the 29th. She made the chance.
I picked her up from the Golden Tulip in the Diplomatic Area and we drove to the Bahrain National Museum. We sat at Darseen Café, near the seafront. Mai Al Raisi joined us. She had been on my team to Base Camp. We stayed for a few hours.
And here is my confession.
I cannot tell you what we talked about.
I have tried to reconstruct it. I am certain the mountains came up. But the actual sentences are gone. What I can tell you is that a few hours went by, and it never once felt like sitting with a legend. It felt like coffee.
Then there was the cap.
She left it at the café and only realized when she got back to her room. She messaged me. I said I would go and get it. I did.
When I handed it over, she said:
“My apologies for making you drive back and forth.”
Read that again. She had come off K2 five months earlier. The first Omani ever to stand on it. And here she was, apologizing to me. About a cap.
For anyone who did not know her, this is who she was on paper. A government employee. Ministry of Education, then the Oman Scouts and Guides Organization. She decided at forty that she would climb Everest, gave herself two years to learn how, and kept it secret from everyone except Khalid Al Siyabi, the first Omani to reach the summit, who agreed to train her. She told her family two months before she flew. Al Siyabi passed away in Oman while she was on the mountain. She reached the top on 23 May 2019, exactly nine years to the day after he did, and left a piece of paper up there with his name on it. She was the first Omani woman to stand there. By the end, she had summited five of the world’s fourteen mountains above 8,000 meters.
And she never gave up the day job. Not once.
In May 2019, on the day she landed back in Muscat from Everest, a reporter asked her what the hardest part had been.
She did not say the summit push. She did not say the cold. She did not say the queues.
She said:
“The challenging part was to stay at the base camp. It was not easy.”
Forty-five days in a tent. Dehydrated food. Water boiled from melted ice. Waiting for a weather window that might never open. That is where she located the difficulty. Not at 8,848 meters. At 5,364.
I have stood at 5,364 for a few hours. I did not stay forty-five days.
She said something else, on Omani radio, long before any of this:
“You have to be ready to die on the summits. This sport is dangerous, and a person might lose their life.”
I have two regrets.
The first is the podcast. I asked her to come on Peak Leadership, and I asked her to nominate other guests, and she sent me names without hesitating. Generous, immediate, no conditions. Hers is the interview that never happened. Three years, and we never found the date.
The second is smaller and it bothers me far more. In October 2023 I recorded two videos of Omanis cheering for her and for what she had done in the mountains. Two different workshops. Two different audiences. I went back through our WhatsApp messages this week. I never sent them.
The last thing I sent her was on 31 May 2026. A photograph from the Ascent Summit in Kathmandu.
She passed away on 30 July 2026, in an avalanche on Broad Peak in the Karakoram. She was 48. She has come home to Oman, and she has been laid to rest.
Sometime in the three weeks before that, she posted from Pakistan that she was there to climb Broad Peak and Gasherbrum I, on her way to all fourteen of the 8,000-meter peaks.
Not a summit. Not a record. One line:
“Progress comes one step at a time.”
Nadhira Al Harthy
First published in Peak Perspectives, Mohamed’s LinkedIn newsletter, Edition #18, August 7, 2026.
