The Man Who Took On Reinhold Messner’s Mountaineering Record
Shortly after 11 A.M. on April 24, 1985, Reinhold Messner battled his way up the last few steps to the summit ridge of Annapurna. High winds and heavy fog had rolled in as he and his climbing partner, fellow Italian Hans Kammerlander, reached the upper slopes of the 26,545-foot Himalayan peak. “Again and again I felt the chunks of snow on my face, whipped up by the gale,” Messner later wrote, in a book about the climb. Both men were exhausted. They had been climbing for three days. But they were on the cusp of making history with yet another incredible first: an alpine-style ascent of the mountain’s previously unclimbed 4,000-meter northwest face—over 13,000 feet of near vertical rock and ice—without supplementary oxygen.
At the age of 40, Messner was already a legend. In 1978, he’d made the first ascent of Everest without oxygen. Two years later, he’d repeated the feat solo, catapulting himself to a whole new level of mainstream fame. The summit of Annapurna would take him one step closer to an achievement that would cement his legacy—one he’d been chasing for years. This was his 11th summit above 26,247 feet, or 8,000 meters; the 11th mountain on which he’d entered the “Death Zone,” where oxygen pressure drops so low, no human can survive for long.
There are 14 such peaks on the planet—known as the 8,000ers. Within a month, accompanied again by Kammerlander, Messner had climbed Dhaulagiri, his 12th. The following year, he reached the top of Makalu and finally, on October 16, 1986, Lhotse, becoming the first person on the planet to summit all 14.
Or at least that’s what he thought.
Since 2019, a series of revelations published on the website 8000ers.com has called into question various historic summit claims in the Himalayas. By cross-referencing 21st-century topographical data with the mass of summit photos now readily available online, a dedicated group of volunteer researchers, led by the site’s founder, Eberhard Jurgalski, has revealed that many climbers actually stopped short of the true peaks. Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, and Annapurna—the world’s 7th, 8th, and 10th highest mountains respectively—were particularly problematic, the research revealed. Thousands of mountaineers had missed the true summit of Manaslu, dozens had turned around before the top of Dhaulagiri, and only about half of those who claimed to have climbed Annapurna had actually stood on the highest point of its long summit ridge. Among those who’d stopped short of Annapurna’s actual peak, they discovered, was Reinhold Messner.
Initially, Messner’s public response to this news was measured. His own account of the climb had proved a key piece of evidence, after all. In his 2000 book Annapurna, he’d written that he and Kammerlander could see their base camp from the top. But this, according to the researchers, was impossible given the climbers’ locations, leaving them to conclude that the Italian pair had stopped at a high point called the Ridge Junction, 215 feet and 16 vertical feet short of the true summit. In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Messner acknowledged the possibility that he may have made a mistake. “If they say maybe on Annapurna I got five meters below the summit, somewhere on this long ridge, I feel totally OK,” he said.
The post The Man Who Took On Reinhold Messner’s Mountaineering Record appeared first on Outside Online.
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