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Outside Magazine April 2001
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True EVEREST
Base Camp CONFIDENTIAL (Cont.)

Mr. Everest: Pete Athans, 1985 (Ed Webster/Mt. Imagery)
Perhaps no expedition has been touted for boldness like Reinhold Messner and Peter Habeler's 1978 summit of Everest without supplemental oxygen.

REINHOLD MESSNER, Italian Tyrolean climber considered by many of his peers to be the greatest alpinist of the modern era; in 1980, he completed the first solo climb of Everest via the North Face: Everest Base Camp in '78 was a cloudy, quiet, dirty place. It was dirty from many, many expeditions—25 years of Everest ascents. But it was acceptable. We were a dozen climbers, another dozen Sherpas, and half a dozen Base Camp staff—kitchen and so on. During the period we were there, there were more or less 32 trekkers who came to visit. They came for one hour, and then left. In my view this was the maximum the glacier could support. [Since then] I know there come 500 to 600 people in one season. Now it's a totally different thing. I was reading and writing and sitting together with the others and going to the mess tent. I did not do any strategizing. I will never do an expedition which I cannot write out or design on one piece of paper. It's a tragedy now at camp with all the computers there. It's like a huge factory. You don't need it. You need nothing for climbing Everest—surely not a computer.



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