Reinhold Don't Care What You Think (Cont.)

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Reinhold Don't Care What You Think (Cont.)


	Messner en garde in his mountain museum: now 58, he says the Himalayan game is behind him forever. (Anton Corbijn)

THE DOLOMITES ARE GIANT, rugged minarets of limestone that jut 12,000 feet out of the green valleys of South Tirol. They, more than any person or thing, shaped Reinhold Messner. Born to a Roman Catholic family in 1944 and raised in the tiny village of Villnöss, he climbed his first mountain, an 11,000-foot cone of rock called Geisler Peak, before age five.

Climbing had become an obsession by his teen years. The young idealist rejected the new practice of drilling bolts into the rock to make difficult climbs safer and easier. Instead he used the smallest amount of gear possible, usually just a rope and a handful of pitons. "The impossible doesn't exist anymore," he fumed in a local newspaper. "Why dare, why gamble, when you can proceed in perfect safety?"

In 1967 Messner enrolled at Padua University, where he climbed with his younger brother, Günther, in the Dolomites and elsewhere in the Alps. He graduated four years later with an architectural engineering degree.

But the big mountains called. In 1970 Reinhold, then 26, and Günther, 24, signed up for their first Himalayan expedition, to the ninth-highest peak in the world, Pakistan's 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat. Led by Karl Herrligkoffer, a notoriously strict Austrian, and run with traditional siege tactics, the expedition was not Messner's preferred style. But he badly wanted the experience, not to mention the prize: Nanga Parbat's Rupal Face, the highest continuous rock-and-ice wall in the world.

Bad weather plagued the climb, but Messner was ultimately given a chance to go for the summit alone. On the way up he looked back, and was surprised to see Günther on the ice face below, scrambling to catch up with him. Reinhold waited, and the two proceeded to the summit together. At the top, it became clear that they would not be able to return to their high camp before dark. Showing signs of altitude sickness, Günther was unable to head down.

What happened next is in dispute. According to Reinhold, after an overnight bivouac at 25,000 feet, he made a fateful judgment call. The Rupal Face was too steep for Günther, so he decided that their only chance was to climb down the other side of the mountain on the less steep Diamir Face. Günther, he felt sure, would recover as they descended.

As they slowly picked their way down, temperatures warmed, conditions improved, but Günther showed little sign of recovery. They spent another frigid night on the mountain. The next morning Reinhold instructed Günther to wait while he went ahead to scout out the best route. Reinhold says that, just minutes later, an avalanche swept Günther away. Though he scoured the mountainside, he found no trace of his brother. Crawling desperately on all fours, he continued down the face until he reached a meadow where two local Pakistani men came to his rescue and took him to their village.

This was not the Himalayas 101 course that Reinhold had hoped for. He had lost his younger brother, and doctors soon amputated seven of his badly frostbitten toes. To make matters worse, newspapers and other expedition members blamed him for his brother's death, a pattern of recrimination that continues today. Following the recent publication of Messner's German-language book The Naked Mountain: Nanga Parbat—Brother, Death, and Loneliness, several climbers who were on the mountain when Günther died, including Germany's Max Engelhardt von Kienlin, are now publicly questioning Messner's version of events and accusing him of being more concerned with his own mountaineering ambitions than with his brother's safety.

The climb still haunts him. "Nanga Parbat changed my life forever," he tells me. "But I had to take responsibility and live with the tragedy. In the end, my brother died. I was lucky to survive. I learned to accept death in the mountains."

Messner's career had reached a transformative point. "Without my toes, I could no longer climb on the rock at an elite level," he says. "So I became a mountaineer." He soon joined up with Habeler, whom he'd met during a climbing trip to South America in the mid-1960s. Habeler was slightly built, like Messner, and shared Messner's strong opinions about what constituted respectable tactics. The two immediately took the sport by storm. In 1974 they climbed the north face of the Eiger in ten hours, destroying the previous record of nearly 20 hours.

When it came time to make their biggest statement, there was only one choice: Everest, without supplemental oxygen. Scientists and doctors of the day said it was impossible. But Messner, having climbed extensively above 8,000 meters without bottled oxygen, thought the odds were pretty good. True to his stubborn personality, he would not back down.

On May 6, 1978, Messner and Habeler set out from Everest's Camp II, and within 48 hours they were trudging through the snow up the Southeast Ridge toward the top. Messner later described feeling as though he were "nothing more than a single narrow, gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits." On May 8, between 1 and 2 p.m., Messner and Habeler topped out.

They'd proved the experts wrong, and nobody was more surprised than Peter Hackett, a doctor who was on Everest at the time. A medical team had tested Messner for VO2 max and other factors, and Hackett recalls today that Messner "was physiologically very average," considerably less fit than most elite climbers are now. "There is nothing you can pick out that is very remarkable about him," he says.

Over the next five years, as Messner piled up climbing accomplishments, he accrued hundreds of thousands of dollars from his books and endorsements. He also became increasingly isolated. Other climbers were jealous of his money and fame. The public grew tired of his bull-in-a-china-shop ways, though his books continued to sell. By the early nineties rumors had begun to circulate that, as a result of all the time he'd spent at altitude, Messner had lost some mental capacity. He spoke of high-altitude hallucinations and launched an effort to discover the reality behind the Himalayan lore of the abominable snowman, or yeti. Whatever the reality, Messner's growing fame was inextricably bound to controversy.

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