Only the gentle roar of the gas stove disturbed the silence. The tent, with its chill moss of hoar frost festooning the walls, was sepulchral in the dim, grey light of the dawn. Yet it had a reassuring, womb-like quality, for those thin walls protected him from the lonely immensity of the sky and mountains outside. And then another noise intruded; an insistent, rushing, hissing rumble that came from all around him. It sounded like a gigantic flood about to engulf his shelter. Panic stricken, he tore at the iced-up fastenings of the entrance to see what was happening. The whole mountain seemed to be on the move, torrents of ice pouring down on either side, while below him the entire slope, which he had climbed the previous day, had now broken away and was plunging in a great, tumbling, boiling wave to the glacier far below, reaching out and down towards the little camp at its foot where he had left his two companions.
And then the sound died away. A cloud of snow particles, looking no more substantial than Huffy cumulus on a summer’s day, settled gently, and it was as if the avalanche had never happened, the icy debris merging into the existing snow and ice. Once again, the only sound was the purr of the gas stove. Somehow it emphasised his smallness, inconsequence, the ephemeral nature of his own existence.
Reinhold Messner was at a height of around 6,400 metres on the Diamir Face of Nanga Parbat. Having set out the previous morning from a bivouac at the foot of the face, he was attempting the first solo ascent of a major Himalayan peak, all the way from its foot to the summit. It meant complete self-sufficiency, carrying all his food and equipment with him, facing the physical and mental stresses of high-altitude climbing on his own, also facing the risk of accident, of falling down a hidden crevasse, with no one to help him.
Although he could see the site of his Base Camp, some 2,000 metres below and eight kilometres away, he was as much alone as a solitary sailor in the Southern Ocean or as isolated as an astronaut in orbit on the other side of the moon. That sense of isolation was now even more extreme; his line of descent having been swept away by the avalanche, he would have to find another way back down the mountain.
Others had, of course, reached Himalayan summits on their own. Hermann Buhl had made the first ascent of Nanga Parbat in a solitary push – an incredible achievement, but he had been part of a large expedition which had worked together to reach the top camp. It was just the final, if most challenging, step that he had to make on his own – a very different concept from that of starting at the foot by oneself. Some had tried. In 1934 Maurice Wilson had slipped into Tibet and attempted to climb Everest from the north, leaving his porters behind at Camp 3. Comparatively inexperienced, he had wanted to climb the mountain for the mystic experience, but perished fairly low down. Earl Denman, a Canadian climber, got no further than the North Col before accepting the futility of his attempt in 1947, while four years later the Dane, Klaus Becker Larson, did not get as high. Both these climbers had employed Sherpas. Messner himself had attempted Nanga Parbat solo on two previous occasions, but on the first barely started the climb before the immensity of the challenge overcame him, and on the second did not even reach the foot of the mountain.
But unlike Wilson, Denman and Larson, most of Messner’s life had been devoted to the mountains, to stretching himself to the extreme, forever striving to discover new ground, new experience. Attempting an 8,000-metre peak solo was a logical step in his own personal evolution.
Born in 1944 in the village of Vilnoss, which nestles among the Dolomite peaks of South Tyrol, he was the second of eight children, seven boys and a girl. His father, the village schoolmaster, was from the same peasant stock as the children he taught. There was not much money, but it was a secure and happy, if disciplined, upbringing within the tight circle of his large family. Joseph Messner loved the mountains and each summer they moved up to a hut among the high pastures where they could wander and climb. Reinhold Messner was taken on his first climb, up Sass Rigais, the highest peak of the Geisler Alps, at the age of five.
As he grew older he began climbing with his younger brother, Günther, exploring the Geisler peaks around his home and steadily expanding his own climbing ability. By the time he went to the University of Padua he was already an extremely capable and forceful climber and quickly developed his prowess, spurning the use of artificial aids, particularly the indiscriminate use of expansion bolts. He made a series of very fast ascents of the most difficult routes and also some outstanding solo ascents, among them the North Face of the Droites, long considered the most difficult mixed ice and rock route of the Western Alps, and the Philipp/Flamm route on the North Face of the Civetta, one of the hardest free rock routes in the Dolomites. By 1969 Messner was established as one of the boldest and most innovative climbers in Europe, with a stature very similar to that of Hermann Buhl in the early 1950s.
It was Karl Herrligkoffer who was going to offer the opportunity of going to the Himalaya. This Munich doctor had an obsession with Nanga Parbat ever since his idolised half-brother Willy Merkl had died on the mountain during a disastrous 1934 expedition. Herrligkoffer was to organise and lead no less than eight expeditions to Nanga Parbat. In 1961 he attempted the mountain from the west, by its Diamir Face. This is the side from which Mummery, the British pioneer who was swept away in an avalanche, made the first attempt in 1895. Herrligkoffer failed in 1961 but returned the following year, when Toni Kinshofer, Siegi Löw and Anderl Mannhardt reached the top by a difficult route skirting round the huge ice cliffs in the centre of the face.
Herrligkoffer turned next to the forbidding south aspect, the Rupal Face, at 4,500 metres one of the highest mountain walls in the world. He had made three attempts on this face between 1963 and 1968, each time getting a little higher. The year 1970, however, seemed destined to be the year of the big walls in the Himalaya. It was the year our British party climbed the South Face of Annapurna and the Japanese were attempting the South-West Face of Everest. Messner had reservations about joining a large expedition, very few of whose members he knew personally, but the opportunity was too good to miss.
He approached the climb with characteristic seriousness, very different from the attitude of British climbers of this period. In Britain there was undoubtedly an ethic against formal training outside the process of climbing itself; it was a tradition of climbing by day and boozing in the pub at night. Messner, on the other hand, approached his climbing with the dedication of a competitive athlete. He trained on the walls of an old sawmill near his home, traversing along the wall, back and forth until his arms and fingers gave out. This is very similar to the climbing training undertaken by leading British rock climbers today, but in Britain this approach was only developed in the mid-1970s. Messner’s training went a lot further. It encompassed a regime of cold showers in the morning, a careful diet in which he ate only fruit for one day of the week to accustom his body to deprivation, and a routine of four hours’ distance running each day as well as exercises designed to build up his stamina.
Before going to the South Face of Annapurna, I can remember being invited by a sports medicine research unit to submit my own group of climbers to the same series of tests for fitness as those which had recently been given to the England football team. I found an excuse for declining the invitation, knowing that we should almost certainly compare unfavourably and, if we failed to climb the South Face, could then be pilloried as unfit. As it happened Don Whillans, who had a substantial beer gut before the expedition, got himself fit during the climb and reached the top. Messner could have taken such a test with impunity and, I suspect, would have compared in lung capacity and fitness with any Olympic athlete. His pulse rate was down to forty-two beats per minute and he could gain a thousand metres of height on his training runs in under an hour. The Rupal Face was to prove a crucible in which to test his fitness and drive.
Herrligkoffer himself was an organiser rather than a climber and he led from Base Camp, a recipe for dissension on many of his expeditions. This time the dissension focused on Messner, who wanted to make a solo bid for the summit. The story around this is still clouded in confusion and ended in court actions.
Just three climbers were at the top camp; Reinhold Messner, his younger brother, Günther, and a German climber and film cameraman, Gerhard Baur. They had no radio, so the previous day on the radio at the camp below Messner had made an agreement with Herrligkoffer that if the weather report were good, the three at the top camp would fix ropes in place for a summit bid to be made by Felix Kuen, Peter Scholz, Günther and himself. But in view of the lateness of the season and the approaching monsoon, if the weather report were bad, Messner should make a fast solo bid for the summit. The signal was to be a rocket fired from Base Camp – a red one for a bad weather report and a blue one for good.
It was 26 June and that evening at Base Camp the weather forecast was good for the next few days. It should have been a blue rocket. This was to become the subject of a violent controversy, for a red rocket was fired. Apparently it had a blue marking on its cover and Herrligkoffer, assuming that all the remaining rockets were also red, did not attempt to fire any others for fear of confusing the issue still further.
To Messner it seemed quite clear. He could see the great cloudbank in the distance; the rocket signal indicated that it was rolling up towards Nanga Parbat, but his eyes and experience told him that he just had time to reach the summit and get back. It was a challenge that inevitably part of him welcomed, daunting, huge but something that he had confronted before, on the steep walls of the Alps. He set out at three in the morning, climbed swiftly and steadily upwards, into the Merkl Gully. After a mistake in route finding he was forced to drop back and take another line and then, just after dawn, he saw a dark shape coming up from below. It was Günther, who had been unable to resist the temptation to follow his brother and share in the summit. He had made extraordinary progress, catching Reinhold up in only four hours of climbing over a distance that was to take Kuen and Scholz a full ten the following day.
The two brothers climbed on together. It had been a bitterly cold night when they started, but now the enervating glare of the sun was their main problem. Making steady, continuous progress, they reached a shoulder on the ridge, and suddenly Reinhold realised that success was within their grasp. He could see across the Silver Saddle, the long weary way that Hermann Buhl had crossed on the 1953 first ascent. The summit pyramid was just a short way beyond; nothing could stop them. And then in the late afternoon they were at the top, relishing the momentary euphoria of slopes dropping away on every side, of endless peaks around them in the warm yellow light of the late afternoon sun, but then came the nagging awareness of their position. They had to find a way down.
On the way up fear becomes anaesthetised by the summit goal, the focal point of all one’s effort and desire, but once attained, reality floods back and for the Messners, the reality was daunting. They had no rope, no bivouac gear except a thin silver foil space blanket, no stove for melting snow and practically no food. Reinhold had been confident he could return by the way he had come, but Günther was an unforeseen circumstance. Younger, less experienced than his brother, he had stretched himself to his limit on the way up and knew with a horrible certainty that he could not climb back down those desperately steep walls of the Merkl Gully. The Diamir Face swept away to the west, lit by the setting sun, seemingly easy-angled, inviting, less daunting than the steepness of the wall from which they had only just escaped. But it was completely unknown ground. Kinshofer, Löw and Mannhardt’s route had been well to the right of the apparently easy summit slopes the brothers could see below them. But what of the route lower down? Messner had examined photographs and knew all too well how complex were the icefalls through which they would have to find their way. And so he compromised; there was only an hour or so before it was dark and a bivouac was inevitable. They could at least lose some height by climbing down to the col below the summit pyramid. From there it might still be possible to go down the Rupal Face and it was just feasible that someone might come to help them. It took them a long time to reach the col. Günther was desperately tired, slumping into the snow every few metres to get some rest.
Huddled into a tiny rock niche on the col, wrapped in the space blanket, they shivered through the night, exposed to the icy wind blasting through the gap. In the chill dawn Reinhold scrambled over to the ridge of the col; he could see where they had left the Merkl Crack to reach the shoulder about a hundred metres below. There was no way they could climb down without a rope. If only someone would come up from below. He shouted for help, but his voice was snatched away by the wind. For two hours he called, to no avail. And then, far below, he saw two figures slowly working their way up towards them. A great wave of relief – they were saved.
The two figures were a hundred metres below when Reinhold recognised Felix Kuen and Peter Scholz. He shouted down to them and Felix looked up, but their words were torn away by the winds. Messner took it for granted that they would climb up the steep and broken rocks leading to the col but saw that Kuen had turned away and was following their track leading to the shoulder. He shouted that it was much quicker for them to climb up to the col, that all he and Günther needed was the use of the rope to get down to where Kuen was now climbing, that Kuen and Scholz could then go on to the summit. But Kuen did not appear to understand or hear properly, merely shouting, ‘Everything OK?’
Messner thought he was simply asking if they were all right, so said yes. After all, they only needed a rope. So he was stunned when Kuen turned away and continued up the shoulder. When Kuen looked back Messner pointed to the west, the Diamir side, to which he now seemed irrevocably committed. In Felix Kuen’s account, there is no mention of the wind or any difficulty in communication:
‘The Merkl Gully continued vertically above. We left the gully by the right and crossed towards the South Shoulder. The traverse led over a snow slope of about fifty degrees in easy terrain, where I was able to carry on a conversation with Reinhold Messner. He stood on the ridge where the top of the Merkl Crack met the South Shoulder, some seventy to a hundred metres distant. It was ten o’clock and he spoke of the possible routes to the summit, as well as the time they would require. Reinhold reported that he and his brother were on the summit at 17.00 hours the previous day and that they were now about to descend in a westerly direction [Diamir side!]. To my question whether everything was OK, he replied “yes”. A great weight lifted from my heart for I had feared he was calling for help. As yet I had no presentiment that the tragedy had already begun the day before when Günther had followed in the wake of his climbing brother. From that moment the two were without a rope, without bivouac sack, without sufficient survival equipment. Reinhold was prepared only for a solo climb with an NRC blanket and some food in his pocket. And now he charged me to tell the others he was going down the reverse side of the mountain and would soon be back at Base. I strongly advised him against this, whereupon he broke off with a “Cheerio” and disappeared over the ridge.’
The two versions have the bare skeleton in common but the interpretation of the detail is very different. It certainly seems unlikely that Reinhold Messner would have chosen to go down the Diamir Face, as Kuen implies. Although an extraordinarily bold and innovative climber, he has always displayed very sound judgement and practical common sense. Heading down an unknown face on the other side of the mountain, with no gear, food or support, accompanied by his exhausted brother, seems completely out of character.
He was in a desperate state, he stumbled and fell a few times, tearing his hand on his crampons, and eventually leant on his ice axe and cried. It was not until the exhausted Günther rallied his brother that Messner took charge of the situation.
Reinhold knew that Günther would never survive another night at this altitude and was not capable of climbing back up to join Kuen and Scholz. He was desperate to get down those easy-looking slopes on the western side and so, at about eleven o’clock in the morning, they set out down the sunlit snow of the Diamir Face.
Reinhold went first, trying to pick out the best route, never easy from above, for it is impossible to see the ice cliffs until you are right on top of them. And then the afternoon clouds crept up the slope, engulfed them in their tide, flattening out all perspective as they groped their way down. Suddenly the mist parted, revealing a dark hole plunging into the depths of the Diamir Valley far below. They came to a barrier of ice, steep, sheer, impossible. Skirting it, Reinhold found a chute of smooth, polished ice at an angle of around fifty degrees. It was just possible. Facing in, kicking in with the front points of their crampons, penetrating only a few millimetres, they teetered down the hard, smooth surface.
Reinhold felt the presence of a third person with uncanny clarity, just outside his field of vision, keeping pace with him as he carefully kicked downwards. They climbed on into the dark. A few rocks appeared. They were now on the Mummery Rib. They stopped at last around midnight. Exhausted, chilled, desperately thirsty, for they had had nothing to drink for two days, they crouched on a tiny ledge.
They set out before dawn, by the light of the moon. It was ghostly, mysterious with the thin gleam of the snow and the opaque black of the shadows lit by the occasional spark of crampons striking rock. Forcing themselves through the last levels of their exhaustion, they finally realised in the dawn that they had reached the glacier at the bottom of the Diamir Face. They had come through the worst; exhausted as they were, still far from safety, they knew the momentary elation of what they had achieved – of having made the first traverse of Nanga Parbat, the first ascent of the Rupal Face, the first direct descent of the Diamir Face – and of being alive.
In a dream, they wandered on down the glacier. Reinhold out in front picking out the route, Günther coming on behind. The glacier was bare of snow, the crevasses exposed, no longer a threat, and then as the sun rose little rivulets of water began to trickle on every side. Reinhold lay down, drank and drank, then sat basking in the sun as he waited for his brother. He heard voices, saw a horse silhouetted against the sky, cattle grazing, people leaning against a wall. He focused his eyes and the horse turned into a crevasse, the cattle into great blocks of snow, the people into stones.
But there was no sign of Günther. He waited for another hour – still no sign. Increasingly worried, he forced his body back up the glacier, retracing his route, forgetting his exhaustion as he made his frantic search. There were no footprints, for it had been frozen hard as they walked down, but there was the great piled debris of an ice avalanche that had swept down only a short time after he had last seen his brother. Slowly, the realisation sank in that Günther had almost certainly been caught by it and was somewhere underneath thousands of tons of ice. Unable to accept it fully, he continued searching throughout the day, shouting himself hoarse. He slept out on the glacier, searched the next day as well, and only towards evening at last began to admit what had happened. In a daze, almost unconscious, he staggered down the glacier to its end, to spend his fourth night in the open without food or shelter.
The following morning was cold, clear, still and silent, the Diamir Face inscrutably in shadow, the teeth of the Mazeno Ridge just catching the rays of the early morning sun. It was as if there were no one left alive in the entire world. Messner shouted his brother’s name yet again into the silence. There was not even an echo. He left his gaiters on top of a rock in case a helicopter was sent in to search for him, and started down the long, empty valley. His progress was desperately slow. Accompanied by spectres, he staggered from boulder to boulder, spending three more nights in the open before stumbling upon the high grazing camp of local villagers. He was emaciated, burnt by the sun, with torn, frostbitten feet.
For Messner it had been an armageddon that I suspect very few people would have survived, let alone have gone on from to even greater challenges. There were not only his injuries – the amputation of one big toe and the loss of parts of all the others except the two little ones, but also the emotional wounds. As if that were not enough, a series of lawsuits were brought by Herrligkoffer against Messner for breach of contract and libel. Messner described the impact of his experience in his book, The Big Walls: ‘The Nanga Parbat Odyssey has given me the strength to face any future hazards squarely and accept or reject them, and every single hazardous enterprise I now undertake – whether it is successful or no – is an invisible ingredient of my life, of my fate.’
In every way, 1970 was a year of crisis for Messner. He was befriended by Baron von Kienlin, a wealthy German aristocrat who had played a minor role on the Rupal Face expedition and had taken Messner’s side in the protracted legal wrangling which followed. He also invited the climber to convalesce at his castle in Württemberg. It was during this period that Messner and von Kienlin’s beautiful young wife, Uschi, fell in love. Uschi left her husband and three children to be with Messner. They were married in 1971 and together returned to the Diamir Valley to search for the body of Günther. They did not succeed.
In 1972 Messner climbed Manaslu (8,156 metres), his second 8,000-metre peak, as a member of an Austrian expedition led by Wolfgang Nairz, but once again disaster struck his climbing companion. Franz Jäger, who was making the summit bid with Messner, turned back, while Messner pressed on to the top alone. On his way back down from the summit, Messner was caught in a violent snowstorm, and when he reached the top camp was appalled to learn Jäger had not arrived. Two other climbers at Camp 4 immediately set out in search of him and one of these, Andi Schlick, also lost his life. Inevitably there was some controversy, though there was no way Messner could have foreseen the events that followed his decision to go for the summit alone.
Around this time Messner began to dream of the possibility of climbing an 8,000-metre peak solo, and the Diamir Face seemed to act as a magnet. He returned in 1973 to make his first solo attempt, described in his book, Solo Nanga Parbat, camping below the rocky spur of the Mummery Rib, quite close to where he had bivouacked in despair after his brother’s death. But his heart was not in it. Before leaving his little Base Camp, he had confessed in his diary:
‘Long after midnight and I cannot sleep. The few mouthfuls of food I managed to force down last evening weigh heavily on my stomach. I think of Uschi and sob violently. This oppressive feeling that robs me of hunger and thirst won’t go away. It is not my Grand Plan that prevents me from eating and sleeping, it is this separation from my wife. I am not mentally ready to see such a big undertaking through to the end.’
Even so, he had set out and, that morning of 3 June, he packed his sack, put on his boots and started climbing the lower slopes of the Face in the ghostly light of the dawn. He did not take the decision to turn back consciously. He simply found himself heading back down the slope. The jump into the unknown was too big and, equally important perhaps, his own ties on the ground were too strong.
No sooner did he get back to Funes than he began to dream and plan for other climbs; it is a syndrome which I, and almost every other addicted climber, have been through, the longing to be home when on the mountain, and the restless plans within a few days of getting back.
In 1975 Messner went on two expeditions which provided extreme examples of two different climbing philosophies. In the spring he joined a siege-style Italian expedition to the huge South Face of Lhotse, one of the most complex and dangerous faces in the Himalaya. The party was led by Riccardo Cassin, one of the great climbers of the pre-war era. Messner liked and respected Cassin and, on the whole, got on well with his fellow team members. Though he had done much of the climbing out in front, he found this type of expedition uncongenial, commenting in his book, The Challenge:
‘On the one side it offers greater safety, backup, the possibility of substitution in case of illness, comradeship. On the other hand you must offset the restricted mobility, the long discussions and the team spirit, which under some circumstances can strangle all progress. With careful preparation and the necessary experience, a two-man expedition would not only be quicker and cheaper, but also safer. On any quite large mountain everyone must be self-reliant. It is much easier to find a single well-matched partner than ten or fifteen.’
Cassin’s team did not succeed and already Messner was planning a very different kind of expedition, a two-man attempt on Hidden Peak (Gasherbrum I, 8,068 metres) in the Karakoram. No mountain of over 8,000 metres had yielded either to a two-man expedition or, for that matter, to a purely alpine-style attempt. Hermann Buhl’s expedition to Broad Peak had been extremely compact and had not used high-altitude porters, but they had ferried loads up the mountain, establishing their camps in the traditional way.
The evolution of mountaineering is influenced strongly by a conflict between basic instincts. On the one hand there is the spirit of adventure, the desire to pitch skill and judgement against the unknown, with the spice of risk to sharpen the experience, but on the other hand is the instinct for survival and also a need to increase the chances of success. The siege approach gives a greater chance of success, with its big teams and lines of fixed ropes, and at the same time reduces the psychological commitment, though in some ways the risks are just as great, if in different guises. The climber on a siege-style expedition can become over-complacent, confident in his camps and ropes. But he is going back and forth over potentially dangerous ground many times, and is therefore increasing the chances of being caught by avalanche stone fall or hidden crevasses. A weaker climber can, perhaps, get higher on the mountain than he ever would have done had he started from the bottom without the fragile scaffolding of a siege-style expedition.
And so, the move towards an alpine approach, while psychologically much more daunting, had some sound, practical merit, as pointed out by Messner. He had talked this over with Peter Habeler, a talented Austrian guide with whom he had climbed in the Andes and made a very fast ascent of the Eiger. He learned that he had permission for Hidden Peak during the Lhotse expedition. The timing was tight, for it was unlikely that they would have finished on Lhotse – successfully or otherwise – before mid May, the start of the climbing season in the Karakoram. Nevertheless, he resolved to go and, as soon as he got back to the Tyrol, plunged into preparations for the expedition. This introduced another conflict between his relationship with Uschi and his driving urge to climb. She could see an endless series of expeditions, with the period between devoted to preparations for the next one, to lecture tours, to a constant preoccupation in which their life together would be forever subordinate. Messner could see signs of trouble, but the need to go to Hidden Peak was all consuming; he could not give it up and Uschi would never have asked him to, knowing all too well that this in itself would forever have put a shadow over their relationship.
So a few hectic weeks after getting back to Europe, Messner was back in the Himalaya, this time in Skardu. He and Peter Habeler had a mere twelve porters to carry in the expedition gear, and reached their Base Camp below Hidden Peak near the end of July. They spent a fortnight reconnoitring the approach to their chosen route and then, on 8 August, set out in a dramatic dash for their objective. They bivouacked at the foot of the North-West Face and then, on the following day, climbed the 1,200-metre ice and rock wall. It was as steep and committing as the North Face of the Matterhorn, with all the problems of altitude thrown in. To reduce weight and commit themselves to fast movement, they had decided to leave the rope behind which meant, in effect, that each was climbing solo; a mistake would mean almost certain death. Even so, the psychological reassurance that each could give the other was tremendously important. This is what Messner had lacked in that first solo attempt on Nanga Parbat.
They climbed through the day, steep ice, rocks piled loosely upon each other, with the uncomfortable knowledge in the backs of their minds that they also had to get back down. Calves ached with the constant strain of being on the front points of their crampons; their lungs ached with the fatigue of their exertion as they thrust slowly upwards from a height of 5,900 metres to 7,100. And then, at last, they were above the face in a great snow basin on the upper part of Hidden Peak. The summit ridge, another thousand metres high, stretched invitingly, less steeply above. They camped in their tiny two-man tent and next day set out for the summit. Never had a mountain of this height been climbed with such élan, and complete commitment.
But Messner was to pay a high price for his single-minded devotion to the mountains. In 1977 Uschi left him. On returning to Nanga Parbat later the same year, once again hoping to make the solo ascent, he did not even reach the foot of the mountain – so great was his sense of desolate loneliness.
But there were other challenges. No one had ever reached the summit of Everest without oxygen, though people had got very close. In 1924, Colonel Norton had reached a height of about 8,570 metres on the north side of Everest and then, in 1933, Wyn Harris, Wager and Smythe reached the same height. The difficulty of the ground, as much as the lack of oxygen, finally forced them to retreat. The Chinese on their ascent from the north in 1975, made only partial use of oxygen, carrying a couple of bottles and passing one round whenever they rested, so that everyone could have a whiff. But nobody reached the top without using it at all.
There were many unanswered questions. Was the human frame capable of working at 8,000 metres without the help of an extra oxygen supply? It was certainly very close to, if not above, that critical height when there just is not sufficient oxygen in the atmosphere to sustain life. And what about the threat of brain damage? For Messner, however, the challenge was immensely appealing; it fitted into his philosophy of reducing all technical aids that intrude between the climber and the actual experience to the very minimum. It was also a unique dramatic statement. He described his attempt as being an attempt on Everest by fair means, implying that everyone else who had climbed the mountain had, in some way, been cheating.
But it is not easy to get permission to climb Everest. The mountain was booked for years ahead. An Austrian expedition, led by Messner’s friend Wolfgang Nairz, was going there in the spring of 1978, and he agreed to Messner and Habeler joining the expedition, almost as a self-contained mini-expedition within his own. In return, Messner was able to raise funds which would not have been available otherwise.
They worked well together as a team on the climb, with Messner and Habeler helping to make the route up through the Icefall, the Western Cwm and up on to the Lhotse Face. They abandoned their first summit bid without oxygen, Habeler because of a stomach upset and Messner defeated by a storm. At this point Habeler had momentary second thoughts and tried to join an oxygen-using team for his second bid, but the rest of the party’s arrangements had already been made and there was, anyway, a level of resentment among the others, since part of the deal had been that the oxygenless pair should have first go for the summit. Habeler’s resolution returned and on 8 May he and Messner reached the top of Everest without oxygen.
It was an extraordinary achievement and yet Messner felt a sense of anticlimax; he was already thinking about going back to Nanga Parbat: ‘When we were back in Base Camp again and I didn’t feel any joy in our success, but rather an inner emptiness, I filled this emptiness with the conception of this eight-thousander solo ideal.’
He had already applied again for permission for Nanga Parbat and he learned he had got it while on Everest. He returned to the Tyrol to spend a hectic month writing his account of his Everest climb, giving interviews and arranging the new trip. One advantage of making a solo attempt is that it requires delightfully little organisation. At the end of June the expedition set out. It consisted of Messner and Ursula Grether, a medical student in her final year who had trekked on her own to the Everest Base Camp where she had meet Messner. She was to be companion and doctor on the expedition.
In Rawalpindi they acquired a liaison officer, Major Mohammed Tahir, bought some local food and set out for the mountain. The challenge awaiting Messner was probably greater, and certainly very much more committing, than the one he had faced on Everest. He had made two attempts already and had failed because he had not been ready psychologically for so great a commitment. This time, perhaps, he had managed the right mix. His ascent of Everest must have given him still greater confidence in his own ability to keep going. With Ursula’s companionship as far as Base Camp, he would not know the debilitating loneliness that he had experienced on both his previous attempts, and he had come to terms with the break-up of his marriage, writing: ‘I still suffer from depression every now and then, but it does me good to think about her. I certainly don’t want to forget her.’
The approach to the mountain was delightfully relaxed; it was more like a trekking holiday than an expedition, with the little team of three becoming absorbed into the atmosphere of the society around them. Quickly they formed a close and easy friendship with their liaison officer; each took turns at cooking and the other minor chores as they walked through the foothills. At the foot of the Diamir Glacier, where Messner had now been on three separate occasions, they set up their tiny camp and looked up at the face. The fact that he had climbed down it in 1970 did not lessen the challenge, the quality of the unknown. It is the concept of being totally alone on that huge mountain, the obvious risk of falling into a hidden crevasse or bergschrund, the less obvious one of facing the appalling upward struggle of high-altitude climbing without encouragement, without the sustaining presence of another.
They had been at Base Camp for ten days before Messner felt ready for his attempt. He had the residual acclimatisation and fitness left over from his ascent of Everest as well as the ten-day approach march, going up and down between 2,000 and 4,000 metres. Yet, even as he packed his rucksack that afternoon, there was a nagging doubt at the back of his mind. That night it was worse; thoughts and images galloped through his mind in that hazy, frightening realm that lies between wakefulness and uneasy sleep:
‘In my torment I sit up. Suddenly the vision of a body falling down the mountainside flashes before me. It comes straight at me. I duck out of its way. Fear engulfs my whole body. As it falls, this whirling body almost touches me, and I recognise its face as my own. My stomach turns over. I think I am going to be sick. It no longer makes any difference if I fall or cling on, live or die I must have uttered a cry for Ursula wakes.’
He did not set out the following morning. Instead, he and Ursula climbed a small peak above their camp and through this he gained the self-confidence he needed, together with a feeling of being in harmony with the face that was his objective and the peaks and the sky surrounding him. A few days later he was ready to start. As on Hidden Peak, he was basing his plan on speed; the longer he was on the mountain, the more likely it was for the weather to break, the longer he would be exposed to objective dangers of avalanche or stone fall. He therefore carried with him the bare minimum a lightweight tent, sleeping bag, ice axe, crampons, gas stove and a few days’ food. The lot came to fifteen kilos. This meant that he had to climb the 3,500-metre face in just three or four days, whereas a conventional siege-style expedition might have taken as many weeks, or even longer.
Setting out from Base Camp on 6 August, he walked up the easy dry glacier to the foot of the Mummery Rib; Ursula accompanied him and, that night, they camped beneath a large rock which Messner hoped would guard them from the effects of any avalanche from the face. The following morning he set out in the grey dawn up the glacier guarding the lower part of the face, picking his way through the crevasses and round the steep sérac walls. As on his fateful descent with Günther eight years before, he felt another presence and could actually hear its voice guiding him, telling him to go left or right to find the best route. He was making good progress, heading for the hanging glacier that turned the huge ice wall that barred the centre of the face. To be safe, he had to get above it that day.
The face was still in shadow, the snow crisp and firm under foot and he was above the great ice wall. He had climbed 1600 metres in only six hours. Although still early in the day, he decided to stop where he was and trampled out a small platform immediately below a sérac wall which he hoped would protect it from avalanches. He put up his tent and flopped inside. At altitude the contrasts are almost as great as those on the moon. In the shade it is bitterly cold, but in the sun, particularly inside a tent, it is like being in an oven, so warm that the snow packed into the tent bag, hanging from the roof, steadily melted through the day providing him with precious liquid and thus conserving his fuel. He heated the water and made soup, swallowed some cold corned beef and was promptly sick. The heat, the fast height gain, exhaustion had all played their part, but in being sick he had lost precious fluid, something that he could not afford. He sipped the melt water through the day, had another brew of soup that night, and then snuggled down into his sleeping bag for his first night alone on the Diamir Face. So far everything was under control, progress as planned.
And then came the morning of the huge avalanche. Much later he learned that this had been caused by an earthquake whose epicentre was in the knee-bend of the river Indus in its serpentine course through the mountains. All he knew was that the route he had followed the previous day had been swept away, that if he had started one day later, he would have been at the bottom of the face, in the direct path of the torrent of ice and snow. The size of the catastrophe emphasised his own lonely vulnerability. But it never occurred to him to start trying to find an alternative way back; his whole being was focused on the summit.
He packed his gear, neatly folded the tent and set out once again in the bitter cold of the early morning, heading for the next barrier – a broken wall of rock and ice stretching down from the crest of the ridge. He was going more slowly than on the previous day, each step taking a separate effort of will. There was no question of racing the sun, and once this crept over the shoulder the bitter cold changed to blazing heat and the snow soon turned into a treacherous morass. And still he kept going, getting ever closer to the great trapezoid of rock that marked the summit block. He stopped just beneath it. He was now at a height of around 7,500 metres, another thousand metres gained, another long afternoon to savour his isolation. Intermittently he was again aware of another presence, this time a girl; tantalising, he could almost glimpse her at the extreme edge of vision. They talked. She reassured him that the weather would hold, that he would reach the summit the following day. And through the afternoon the clouds, strange mountains of cumulus, shifted and changed in shape and tone as the sun dropped down over the western horizon. That night in the lee of the long day, Messner felt at peace with himself, but the following morning was very different:
‘This sudden confrontation with such utter loneliness immediately envelops me in a deep depression. In the months after my break-up with Uschi it was often like this when I woke up. The sudden pressure which threatens to dash me to pieces, a well of despair bubbling up from deep sources and taking possession of my whole being. It is so strong I have to cry.’
But action has its own quality of reassurance. He peered out of the tent to see what the reality of the day would bring:
‘The play of the dark clouds below me both worry and fascinate me. Now and then, between the surging clouds, a mountaintop emerges. It is like being witness to the Creation. Like seeing everything from the outside. It doesn’t occur to me to be surprised at the threatening bad weather. It is a strange sensation. “Tike” [All right] I say; just that, a word that slips into my mind unbidden. I could blow soap bubbles and suspend the tent on them. For a tiny moment something warm passes through my dog-tired body.’
Now within striking distance of the top, he could hope to get there and back in the day; indeed, he had to, for he could no longer carry a fifteen-kilo load on his back; could not afford to spend any more nights at that altitude and continue to toil upwards. He left his tent, sleeping bag and food and, just carrying his ice axe and camera, started out for the top.
He was now well above the altitude where snow thaws and then freezes. Even in the early morning cold it was a deep slough in which he wallowed up to his thighs. After three hours’ struggle, he had made hardly any progress – the day and his own strength were racing away. There seemed only one chance, to take the steep rocks leading direct to the summit, even though this meant infinitely greater insecurity. He teetered around narrow ledges, no wider than a window sill; no chance of hard rock climbing at this altitude, in clumsy double boots with crampons.
The act of balancing on crampon points was bad enough. Snow-filled gullies alternated with rocky steps; his rests became more frequent as his limbs grew more and more leaden. There is no physical exhilaration in climbing at altitude; it is willpower alone that can keep you going, make each leg move forward with such painful slowness that the goal never seems to come any closer. He could hear his lungs roar, his heartbeat hammering at a furious rate and still he kept plodding on.
It was four o’clock when, at last, he reached the top. Suddenly, the snow dropped away on every side; the view was the same as he had seen eight years before and yet so different, for that ascent had been in the freshness of his experience. It was his first Himalayan peak and his brother had been with him to share that momentary euphoria. Messner writes:
‘I wander around in a circle, repeatedly looking at the view, as if I can hardly believe I am really here. There is no great outrush of emotion such as I experienced on Everest; I am quite calm, calmer than I have ever been on any eight-thousander. I often thought about that later and wondered why these swelling emotions which on Everest wracked me with sobs and tears, should have been absent on Nanga Parbat. I have come to the conclusion that being alone, as I was on top of Nanga, I could not have borne such a strong surge of feeling. I would have been unable to leave. Our bodies know more than we understand with our minds.’
He spent an hour on the summit, and took a series of photographs with his camera mounted on a screw head specially fitted to his ice axe. Using the timer and an ultra-wide-angle lens, he could include himself in the picture. A great mass of cloud covered the Karakoram; ominous tendrils chased across the sky, reaching out towards Nanga Parbat, yet Messner felt very little anxiety about his chances of getting back down by a different route from his ascent in the face of the threatened storm. No doubt his reactions were deadened by fatigue and lack of oxygen but, more important, so at one with the mountain did he feel that the very strength of this feeling gave him a calm confidence.
But it was time to descend. He picked a different route down and was able to make relatively fast, easy progress back to the lonely tent at the foot of the summit pyramid. That night he could sense the gathering storm. There was not yet any wind, but he could almost feel the cloud pressing in on the tent and then, next morning, with a banshee wail came the wind and snow. There was no question of moving now, for he could never have found his way down in the driving snow. But the storm might last a couple of days, a week, or even longer. If he conserved his fuel and food he could last for five days, and so he settled down in his sleeping bag to try to wait it out. But it wasn’t just a question of supplies, for at that altitude the body is slowly deteriorating. Already badly dehydrated, he was also exhausted and knew that he could only get worse, that even rest would do him little good. He was becoming clumsy in his movements, upset the stove a couple of times and burnt his sleeping bag. There was plenty of time in which to ponder his predicament, to try to work out the best line of descent.
All that day he was pinned down in the tent, but the next morning the cloud around him cleared, although the sky was still overcast with a high scum of grey. He realised that he had to get down that day and so abandoned tent, sleeping bag and food, knowing that if he failed to escape from the face before dark he would have little chance of survival. He set out, heading down the long snow slopes towards the ice runnel running down the centre of the face between the Mummery Rib and the great ice wall – his only hope of descent, for the rocks on the rib were plastered with a thin layer of ice. But it was also the natural avalanche line. Messner had no choice – he just had to hope for the best. He slipped on the way down, knew that once he fell he would be out of control and so raced down the slope in a series of giant strides, crampons biting into the ice as he tried to regain his balance and get back control. Lungs heaving, trembling with shock, he managed to do it. And so it went on through the day, the whole time at the edge between extinction and survival, of accepting exhaustion and forcing himself on, each step on the hard ice needing all his concentration as he teetered down, seeming to go little faster than he had on the way up.
And then he was down; almost without realising it, the angle had eased. He was on the dry glacier at the foot of the face and just had to put one foot in front of the other. Ursula came out to meet him. The climb was over.
‘Somehow I have overstepped my limitations; my strength, the loneliness. A year ago feeling I was alone was my weakness. I am not saying that now I have got over it, no, I was only totally alone for a few days. But it was beautiful. I don’t know everything about loneliness yet – that too is reassuring.’
The following year Messner climbed K2, this time as part of an expedition and then, in 1980, he climbed Everest solo, once again without oxygen, from the Chinese side. The pattern, in many ways, was very similar to that of Nanga Parbat. A girlfriend, this time Nena Ritchie, from Canada, accompanied him to Base Camp and, like Ursula in 1978, went with him to his advanced camp. Once again he took the mountain by storm, climbing it in just three days by the North Ridge, the route attempted by the British before the war and first climbed by the Chinese in 1960. It was an amazing feat. To put it into perspective, there had been twenty-five successful expeditions to Everest between 1953 and 1980, none of them with fewer than thirty climbers and Sherpas, none of them without oxygen and not one of these expeditions had taken less than a month to climb the mountain. Since Messner’s solo ascent there has been an explosion of activity, due both to the Nepalis and Chinese allowing any number of expeditions on to Everest at the same time, and the growth of commercial expeditions. Messner showed what can be done.
He went on to climb all fourteen of the 8,000-metre peaks, finishing with Lhotse in 1986. In doing this he gave birth to a sub-sport in mountaineering – that of 8,000-metre peak bagging – before giving up serious mountaineering and turning to what he describes as ‘ice walking’ in Antarctica and in the Arctic. But in the mountains there are still infinite opportunities. Climbers, using alpine-style tactics have tackled ever steeper and technically more difficult climbs on the highest peaks, not only in the summer season, but in winter as well. One of the most impressive in this genre was the first ascent of the West Face of Gasherbrum IV (7,925 metres) by Voytek Kurtyka and Robert Schauer in 1985. Today no face or line can be dismissed as impossible but it was Messner who opened up the possibilities of climbing the highest peaks solo and in alpine style.