BEING KURT


He’s the only living person to have made first ascents of two 8,000m peaks. In 1986 he crawled off K2 after surviving the storm that killed Julie Tullis and Al Rouse, and in 2013 he won the Piolet d’Or Lifetime Achievement Award. Ben Williams meets the Austrian alpine legend that is Kurt Diemberger.


There’s an extraordinary scene in a 2014 film about mountaineering legend Kurt Diemberger, Verso Dove, when he was, by his own account, on his last legs: “I went to the bathroom one morning and got these pains… Afterwards I couldn’t stand up anymore”. In the scene, the 83-year-old Diemberger, who made the first ascent of both Broad Peak (8,047m) and Dhaulagiri (8,167m), is in the hospital, attached to a machine and bearing the discomfort well – so well, in fact, that the filmmakers asked him to dramatize the procedure a little. By the third take, Diemberger was “doing my scene so convincingly” and trembling so much that his wife, who came in at that moment, was sure he was mortally ill.


SUMMIT#85 | SPRING 2017 | 31


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