Reinhold Messner
The peculiar greatness of Reinhold Messner is grounded in a pure form of selfishness. His pas de deux with the world's most inhospitable wildernesses have always been about measuring his own might, skill and especially will. "I am Sisyphus," he has written, "and the stone which I push up the mountain is my own psyche."
He has carried that heavy burden to the literal ends of the earth. Messner, 62, is not only the greatest high-altitude mountaineer the world has ever known; he is probably the best it will ever know. His 1980 solo ascent of Mount Everest by "fair means" — without sherpas, crevasse ladders or supplemental oxygen — remains the most primal test conceivable of man against the earth.
That ascent, and Messner's subsequent conquest of the world's 13 other peaks of 8,000 m or more, set the gold standard for mountaineering. "He had nobody's footsteps to follow," says Ed Viesturs, an American climber who completed the fair-means ascent of all 14 of those peaks in spring 2005. "After Messner, the mystery of possibility was gone; there remained only the mystery of whether you could do it."
Messner's obsession was formed early in the Dolomites and other Alpine ranges — he was born in a narrow German-speaking valley of Italy's South Tyrol. His first venture to the Himalayas in 1970 ended in tragedy when his younger brother Günther died after summiting Nanga Parbat. Several members of that expedition accused Messner of abandoning his brother in an egotistical push to open a new route of descent, but the discovery of Günther's body last year confirmed Messner's contention that he had been killed by an avalanche.
Messner later traversed Greenland and the Gobi Desert, and tackled both poles by fair means. He served a term in the European Parliament for the Italian Green Party, and now heads a range of museums about the lure of mountains and raises a family back in South Tyrol, where it all began. He's been decried as arrogant, defensive and abrasive. But in answering to no one but himself, Messner obeys a higher calling. His achievements will inspire lone wolves and stubborn dreamers for generations to come.
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