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

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


	"A crosser of deserts": Messner and an employee, lugging a museum mural near the Schloss Juval (Anton Corbijn)

NOTHING HAS BROUGHT Messner more derision than his 12-year yeti investigation, which concluded in 1998 with the publication of his book My Quest for the Yeti: Confronting the Himalayas' Deepest Myth. But when you look closely, you find that what Messner did wasn't especially weird, and certainly doesn't seem like the product of a compromised mind.

In his book, Messner recounts how he chased large, furry animals all over the Himalayas in hopes of getting to the truth about the mysterious creature. He claims he first saw a yeti in Tibet in 1986, while trekking alone through the forest of the Mekong River valley. He described the creature as tall and menacing, "its face a gray shadow, its body a black outline." Covered with hair, it appeared to be more than seven feet tall. It stank horribly.

Unfortunately, Messner didn't come back with any proof of this bizarre episode. The creature ran off before he could photograph it. When he returned to civilization, he hit the books to learn about the origin of the age-old yeti myth. He decided there were two yetis: one living in people's imaginations, the other a real animal living in the high forests of the Himalayas. "I am searching for the animal that gave rise to the yeti legend," he wrote.

That distinction was lost on the public, which seemed amused by Messner's quest. Soon he was labeled a crackpot, possibly a delusional one. "Only when I returned to Europe did I realize to what extent my words had been misunderstood," he wrote in My Quest. "Self-proclaimed yeti experts declared me insane. More upsetting, some fellow climbers seemed to think my yeti search was a publicity stunt."

Unbowed, Messner advanced a theory: The yeti, he argued, was the rarely seen Himalayan brown bear, a nonmythical animal known to inhabit Tibetan forests. Messner remains convinced he's solved the mystery once and for all.

"You will see," he said to me. "Fifty years after my death, people will say this is the answer. There is no other answer."

Messner followed up that project with another unorthodox book, this one about British mountaineer George Mallory's attempts to climb Everest and his 1924 death on the mountain. It's called The Second Death of George Mallory, and its impetus was the 1999 discovery of Mallory's body just below Everest's North Ridge. That discovery, by a team of Americans led by Eric Simonson of Seattle, fueled much discussion about Mallory's fate, as well as speculation that Mallory might have made it to the summit before succumbing.

This incensed Messner, in part because he didn't think Mallory was skilled enough to handle the Second Step, a steep rock outcropping near the top. He also believed that, somehow, finding the body at all violated the mystery of what happened to Mallory and his partner, Andrew Irvine. Removing this magic from the equation constituted Mallory's "second death."

It's a harmless if eccentric argument, but what really irritated critics was the book's style. Messner constructed the story as a narrative told in three different voices: his own, Mallory's voice at the time of his climb, and the voice of Mallory's ghost. The ghost is rather cranky, not unlike a certain Tirolean superman. "How strange to have one's death announced to the world by satellite," the wraith complains. "Oddly, I have never felt more alone."

All of which prompted one critic to snipe, "Jeepers, Reinhold. You might be the Michael Jordan of climbing, but, trust us, public channeling of dead British climbers is a sure sign of oxygen deprivation."

Messner shrugs off the censure. "I know they say I am, how you say, unbalanced," he says. "They can't believe it's me with more new theories. They say, 'Why Messner again?'" He pauses. "I say Mallory was just a beautiful story, and he was a great man. I liked him."

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