DRAKENSBERG
KwaZulu-Natal
South Africa
Mountain of the Dragons
South Africa’s mightiest
mountain range with its spear-like peaks – reminiscent of the saw-toothed spine
of a gigantic dragon.
Where Adventure
beckons..........
DRAKENSBERG WILDERNESS PHOTOS ©
WILLEM PELSER
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.
We as hikers, explorers,
and adventurers have the absolute duty to respect and protect our Wildernesses.
Nobody else will do it for us. Take ownership!
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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