Quathlamba
“Listen to the streams as they gurgle from their cradles
and you will hear the story of the mountains. You will hear fascinating tales
if only you listen! Lie next to a stream and listen to the song of the
mountains. The smiling faces of the flowers, dancing in the wind. Venture into
the remote valleys or stand on a peak at sunrise or sunset, after snow has fallen,
and you will hear a song that you will never forget - the Song of the High
Mountain".
DRAKENSBERG WILDERNESS PHOTOS ©
WILLEM PELSER
“FAR BETTER IT IS TO
DARE MIGHTY THINGS EVEN THOUGH CHEQUERED BY FAILURE, THAN TO DWELL IN THAT
PERPETUAL TWILIGHT THAT KNOWS NOT VICTORY OR DEFEAT.”
T ROOSEVELDT
THE EXPLORERS
REINHOLDT MESSNER
When
one surveys the history of 20th century mountaineering, one man
bestrides the scene with equal dominance: Messner. His surname alone evokes
pioneering epics of survival at the highest altitude, images of a smiling man
whose face, almost entirely hidden by hair, is more 1970,s rock star than
mountaineering legend. First to climb Everest without oxygen in 1978 with Peter
Habeler, he went on to become the first man to climb all 14 of the world’s
8,000-metre peaks. And, as is inevitable with such extraordinary success, there
have always been critics who have made all sorts of sniping comments, from
accusing him of having brain damage after prolonged exposure to extreme
altitude, to leaving other mountaineers to die on mountains in his overriding
bid to reach the top, come what may. Yet the criticisms fail to remove him from
his legitimate throne at the very pinnacle of mountaineering greatness. There
is no one quite like him. And now, because he has achieved what he has, there
never can be.
Messner was
born among the mountains in 1944 in Vilnoss in the South Tyrol. Climbing,
therefore, was always an entirely natural pursuit. “For me it was quite
logical. I was brought up in the Dolomites – the most beautiful rock areas of
the world – and we had no swimming pool, no football pitch, so there wasn’t the
opportunity to do much else and so we went off and climbed these rocks. The
children in the valley did not do this as they had other activities to follow,
the cows and doing things in the fields with other small children. We being one
daughter and eight sons of a teacher, we went climbing and a few of us became
extreme climbers and when I was five I did my first 3,000-metre climb with the
parents and mostly later ascents with my brother and when I was 20 I did my
first ascent on the Dolomites and all over the Alps.”
By his
early twenties Messner was well down the path that would mark him out as a true
original in his field. In an era of ‘siege’ mountaineering in which climbers on
the tallest peaks ferried equipment up and down to fixed camps to prepare their
way to the top on fixed ropes, Messner forged his own very different route. His
approach was far simpler and purer, in a sense less antagonistic to the
mountain. It involved translating the alpine style to the Himalayas and other
great ranges, in short lightweight expeditions and lightning ascents. It was a
rejection of oxygen apparatus, fixed high camps, and high-altitude porters. It
was self-sufficiency.
His first
eight-thousander, Nanga Parbat, came in 1970, but brought tragedy with it in
the death of his climbing partner and younger brother Gunther, killed in an
avalanche. The others followed steadily over the next two decades, their names
familiar to anyone with an interest in this higher world. Manaslu, Hidden Peak,
the landmark Everest climb, where he described himself summiting as “nothing more
than a single gasp lung”, followed by the supremely difficult K2, and the
Shisha Pangma. A ‘hat-trick’ of eight-thousanders in 1982 gave birth to his
dream of climbing all fourteen, though he rejects the idea he was ever
‘collecting’ them. There followed Cho Oyu, Annapurna, Dhaulagiri and Makalu. In
1986, 16 years after his first ascent of Nanga Parbat, he descended safely from
Lhotse and the record was his, whether he liked it or not.
“Luckily, climbing
is not capable of being expressed either in terms of records or by numbers,” he
wrote in All 14 Eight-Thousanders.
“It certainly cannot be measured in seconds, metres of height or grades.”
“I
was lucky; the Gods were kind to me…… We all need luck, for the mountains are
infinitely bigger than us. Mere men can never ‘vanquish’ them. ‘Lhagyelo’, the
Tibetans say whenever they venture up a mountain or a high pass, and I say it
too: ‘The Gods have won’.”
Much of
that is true, of course, but mountaineering can be sufficiently recorded and
measured to enable us to acknowledge Messner as its greatest ever practitioner.
He does not consider himself an explorer. His challenge has always been
personal, a question of survival rather than science. “I would like to use the
word adventure for my activities, but not exploration,” he states. “Adventuring
for me is nothing but the path for surviving. I have exposed myself to high
places, cold places, windy places, to dangerous places generally and I try to
survive. The whole energy I put in is only to survive in these difficult places
and the more dangerous and difficult they are the more difficult it is to
survive. So the best adventurer is a women or a man who is accepting all risks
and is surviving. The person who is dying in the first or second expedition is
not a good adventurer.”
The personal
challenges have continued beyond the mountains. In 1990, he made the first
crossing of Antarctica on foot, via the South Pole, covering 1,750 miles in 92
days. In 1995, he stated publicly that he had stopped high-altitude climbing,
turning his attentions to the Arctic, which he attempted to cross from Siberia
to Canada. He has written more than 40 books about his adventures, including
his quest for the yeti, which he said he discovered in the form of a Tibetan
bear. He went into politics in 1999, serving one term as a member of the
European Parliament for the Italian Green Party.
“I
am an explorer of my own fear, of my own hopes, of my own dreams, my own
possibilities, and in reality my activity is nothing but a passion for limits.”
He has
helped define them on the summits of the world.
The End.
Safe Hiking.
References and Acknowledgements
From the book – Faces
of Exploration – Joanna Vestey
Photos: ©Willem Pelser
Compiled by: Willem Pelser
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