Discovery Channel Magazine. Solo feats – Reinhold Messner

Discovery Channel Magazine, September 2013

On 17 October 1986, Reinhold Messner walked back towards Base Camp beneath the Nepali-Chinese peak of Lhotse in the Himalayas. It was a big moment: he had climbed all 14 of the world’s 8,000-metre peaks, something nobody had ever done before, a task that had taken him 16 years.

Messner is often considered the greatest of all mountaineers. It’s not that he was the first to climb any of those peaks, but he climbed many of them solo and all of them without supplementary oxygen, usually by new routes. He was a purist, and something of a pioneer of what today is called Alpine Style, taking on a mountain with an absolute minimum of equipment and support; on none of his climbs, for example, did he allow himself to use an expansion bolt or wedge anchor, a device that wedges itself in a gap in order to provide a handhold. “Expansion bolts make it theoretically possible to eliminate uncertainty, the very element that gives climbing its excitement,” he writes. “It is precisely this ‘perhaps it’s not possible?’ that is so important. I would have felt cheated if, from the outset, I had cancelled that out with some technical device.”

“In 1978,” he recalls, “I knew I could climb to 8,500 metres using oxygen, but I did not want to. Instead, I wanted to know how far, using my own strength and notwithstanding any hang-ups or uncertainties I might have, I was capable of pushing into this ‘perhaps it’s not possible?’ territory. As a man, and not as a man-machine.”

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