Reinhold Messner

By Jon Krakauer

It was 22 summers ago that an impudent, slightly built young climber from the Italian Tirol declared his intention of scaling Pakistan's 26,470-foot Gasherbrum I with none of the bottled oxygen, fixed lines, or hoard of heavy alpine armaments considered essential for laying siege to the earth's loftiest summits. The mountaineering establishment greeted this reckless announcement with ridicule and predicted a short life for Reinhold Messner.

On August 10, 1975, accompanied by longtime partner Peter Habeler and carrying less equipment than other climbers would use on mountains half as high, Messner sprinted up Gasherbrum I with lightning speed, via a forbidding new route, and the jeering abruptly ceased. "That climb was a quantum leap," reflects Tom Hornbein, the renowned American climber who made the first ascent of Everest's West Ridge. "Like Copernicus, Messner had conceived a whole new way of seeing his world. He transformed mountaineering as we know it."

Messner had already soloed the fearsome north face of Les Droites and blitzed the Eiger Nordwand in an astounding ten hours. After pioneering an exceedingly nasty route up Nanga Parbat (losing his brother to an avalanche and seven toes to frostbite on the descent), he returned eight years later to climb the peak again, alone, by yet another hard new route. In 1978 he and Habeler accomplished the impossible by bagging Everest without bottled oxygen; two years later he came back and climbed it solo, during the height of the monsoon, a deed widely regarded as the greatest mountaineering feat of all time.

Messner is to climbing what Michael Jordan is to basketball ù he has taken the sport to a level not previously imagined ù except that Jordan doesn't have to confront death every time he steps onto the court. "Climbing by fair means" is how Messner has described his brazen style ù implying that to ascend in the customary manner is simply cheating.

In 1986, after ascending all 14 of the earth's 8,000-meter peaks, having nothing left to prove, he vowed that he would never again climb in the "Death Zone" above 26,000 feet and turned his attention to marathon polar journeys and away from the mountains. Nevertheless, just last summer, at 52, he broke that vow and went back to Gasherbrum I. He turned around at base camp because there were too many climbers on the peak for his taste, but he confesses that he's entertaining thoughts about returning to other 8,000-meter summits.

Whatever lies in his future, Messner ù who has become a very wealthy man ù has no intention of settling into a risk-free retirement snug in his castle in the Italian Alps. "Probing the edges of what may be possible," he says, "is the only thing I know how to do. It is too late now at my age to stop, not to do it. And more than anything ù I am like a child ù I would always be unhappy if I didn't try."