Risking It All

(6 of 10)

Reinhold Messner, 38, the solo climber of Everest, has paid a price for his fame as the world's strongest expedition climber. He talks with the rocklike confidence of all the mountain world's hard men, saying, for instance, that Everest by the traditional Hillary-Tenzing route is "a good holiday, but not really challenging." Messner has never used oxygen in his life, he says with a trace of pride. But he offers freely the opinion that his memory has been dulled by long periods of oxygen deprivation. There have been other prices. His brother Gunther died in an avalanche while climbing with him on Nanga Parbat, in the Himalayas. Messner has lost several toes and parts of three fingers to frostbite. And he admits that it was not worth it. "If somebody had told me, on the next expedition you will lose your toes, I wouldn't have gone. But you don't know what will happen before it happens. It's like asking, 'Is your life worth your death?' "

What seems clear is that no adventurer, in his own mind, is a daredevil. Even the most extreme risk taker talks like an astronaut of safety gear, of weather carefully calculated, of redundant strengths to cushion failure. What really protects them, however, seems to be their abnormal awareness of how very much alive they are. "You know about accidents," says a rock-climber. "But it's always the guy next to you, never you." How could it be you? But this inspired state does not often last a lifetime.

Climbers have seen the pattern again and again: three years of stupefying ascents, of moving confidently upward along cracks so subtle and fine that normal fingers cannot even feel them, and then the prodigy loses his magic, backs off, gets serious about a love affair, goes to graduate school, finds a reason to avoid those nearly supernatural 5.13 pitches (rock climbs are graded in difficulty from 5.1 upward, and until the present generation came along, 5.10 was considered the unreachable ultimate).

John Bachar, 26, is a Yosemite climber who has pushed strength and skill to a level that astonishes even other good rock apes. Equipped with nothing but boots and gymnast's chalk, and unbelayed by safety ropes, Bachar flows up pitches graded 5.8 or better. Gym workouts have given him steely arm and finger strength, but superb technique and unshakable concentration are his most powerful adhesives. He may work out a sequence of ten or so moves to take him up an overhang hundreds of feet in the air, then discover that the route cannot be forced any farther. Without delay, before his muscles begin to tire and shake, he must then perform the ten-move ballet perfectly in reverse order. "You can't forget the fact that you're right next to the edge all the time," he says. "If you make any kind of mistake, you're going to die."

Such an acute focusing of effort cannot be repeated endlessly. A German mountaineer who in his 20s spent three frightful weeks on the north face of the Eiger in Switzerland during midwinter laughs about the recollection and says that he does not do such things now that he is in his 30s. He pulls out his wallet like a traveling businessman and shows a picture of his wife and two sons. "This is what I think about now."