Translator’s Introduction

Any Compilation Of Texts by mountaineers would be incomplete without including Reinhold Messner, a controversial figure in climbing circles but probably also the most well-known living mountaineer among the general public. His solicited (and often unsolicited) commentary on a wide range of topics, from gender politics in mountaineering to mass tourism in the Himalaya, have secured Messner a prominent presence in talk shows, newspapers, and lifestyle magazines. Over the decades, Messner has frequently changed his fields of activity and repeatedly reinvented himself. Initially, his reputation rested on a series of daring first ascents in the Dolomites during the second half of the 1960s through which he claimed his place as one of the world’s foremost rock climbers. After the successful, but fateful, ascent of Nanga Parbat via the Rupal face, which resulted in the death of his brother Günther and led to the amputation of the majority of his toes due to frostbite, Messner pivoted from climbing to high-alpine mountaineering.

Messner views his successful ascents of the world’s fourteen peaks above eight thousand meters and his so-called “Seven Summits” tour as proof that his version of mountaineering, a so-called Verzichtsalpinismus (alpinism of renunciation), is the best way to reproduce man’s exposure to primal experiences in a world dominated by guardrails. Already during his earlier phase as a rock climber, Messner had criticized the increasing use of modern technology to climb ever higher and faster. In his subsequent high-alpine mountaineering projects, Messner eschewed the military-style, large-scale expeditions in which local guides would lead, and sometimes carry, a handful of paying European clients onto the Himalayan peaks with the aid of ladders, cable winches, and supplemental oxygen. Messner was the first person to climb Everest alone; he was also the first to summit it without supplemental oxygen, two achievements that he would later repeat on mountains across the globe and turn into his trademark approach. Following these ascents of the world’s highest peaks, Messner began to explore ice and sand deserts. In 1989–90 he and German explorer Arved Fuchs trekked across Antarctica; in 1993 he and his brother Hubert walked the length of Greenland; and in 2004 he crossed the Gobi Desert in central Asia.