Shah Daulat was a Pakistani high-altitude mountaineer and mountain guide from Shimshal, a remote village in the Hunza Valley of Gilgit-Baltistan that has produced generations of the country's strongest climbers. In a professional career of only about four years he reached the summits of four of the world's fourteen 8,000-meter peaks: K2, Nanga Parbat, Gasherbrum II and Gasherbrum I. He died on 6 February 2026, aged 31, after falling nearly 400 meters while ice climbing near Khyber village in the Gojal area of Hunza.
Daulat grew up in Shimshal, a Wakhi-speaking settlement near the Chinese border whose families have long worked as guides and high-altitude porters in the Karakoram. He was a cousin of Samina Baig, the first Pakistani woman to climb Mount Everest, and the mountains were part of family life. He began working as a professional guide with the Karakoram Mountain Guides Association in 2022, and he also skied, competing at Malam Jabba in northern Pakistan that same year.
His rise was unusually fast. In 2022 he was part of Samina Baig's K2 expedition and summited K2 (8,611 meters), the second-highest mountain on earth and one of the most dangerous to climb. On 2 July 2023 he was among the Pakistani climbers who reached the top of Nanga Parbat (8,126 meters) with Naila Kiani and Samina Baig, the day the two women became the first Pakistani women to summit the peak. Climbing magazine reported that he made that ascent without supplemental oxygen. He added Gasherbrum II (8,035 meters) in 2024.
On Sunday 20 July 2025 he reached the summit of Gasherbrum I (8,080 meters), the world's 11th-highest mountain, at about 11 a.m. without supplemental oxygen. Pakistani media hailed the climb as a rare feat that marked him as one of the strongest climbers in the region, and he announced plans to attempt Broad Peak next. That same year he also climbed Laila Peak (6,096 meters) in the Hushe Valley.
He died close to home rather than on a giant peak. In winter a steep ice wall forms on the mountainside above Khyber village, and on the evening of Friday 6 February 2026 Daulat was practising ice climbing there with a foreign climber. According to officials he slipped on the ice and fell nearly 400 meters, sustaining fatal injuries, and died at the scene. Local volunteers recovered his body and took it to the government hospital in Sost, near the Khunjerab Pass on the Pakistan-China border. The next day his body was sent back to Shimshal for burial.
The news shook Pakistan's mountaineering community. The Alpine Club of Pakistan confirmed his death, and the Speaker of the National Assembly, Sardar Ayaz Sadiq, issued a condolence message. Samina Baig wrote on Facebook that he had been "a true gem in our family" and "a cherished younger brother (cousin) taken from us far too soon." A family member, Ibadat, told Climbing magazine that his journey from mountain guide to the world's most challenging peaks was something the family was incredibly proud of, and that he had dedicated his life to the mountains.
In September 2026 the villages of Shimshal and Khyber jointly installed a life-sized memorial sculpture of Daulat near the Khyber ice wall, which was renamed the Shah Daulat Ice Wall. He is remembered as part of the newest generation of Shimshali climbers, and as a young guide whose four 8,000-meter summits in four years, two of them reported without bottled oxygen, pointed to a career that was only beginning.
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5Posts by Shah, and posts about them, kept here so they are not lost.