BIG INTERVIEW
1981 Shishapangma (8,027m) Aa ski-mountaineering ascent with Friedl Mutschlechner.
have greater media and corporate cache. Rock climbing is also gender neutral compared to the crude machismo of balls-to-the- wall alpinism. Messner concedes that this may be true. “Yes, Lynn Hill was as good as the best boys,” he offers with a smile. ‘But this is not mountaineering, this is a sport.” Messner might seem an odd source when considering the gender question – or even metrosexual himself – but there is definitely something vulnerable about him which puts his masculinity at risk. There is a lot of crying in his books; despite the superhuman physical feats he doesn’t seem to be taking the whole male thing that seriously. He is certainly unafraid to turn out his emotional side. In Solo Nanga Parbat, he talks candidly about his then wife leaving him. “At Munich airport she is there to meet me. For the final separation.
1982
Kangchenjunga (8,586m), Gasherbrum II (8,034m), Broad Peak(8,051m)
In ’82, Messner succeeded in becoming the first to climb three 8,000m peaks in one year. Kangchenjunga was first, via a new route on the North Face with Friedl Mutschlechner. Afterwards, Messner flew back to Europe for frostbite treatment before returning for a tick of Gasherbrum II and Broad Peak, both with Sher Khan and Nazir Sabir.
ROCK CLIMBING IS GENDER NEUTRAL COMPARED TO THE CRUDE MACHISMO OF BALLS-TO- THE-WALL ALPINISM.
It’s what I have known all along, but not wanted to believe. Now, with the brute force of an avalanche, everything collapses around me and in the same instant I am filled with a sad weariness. No more anger. No more self-reproach. The loneliness alone endures. I look across at her and it is as if those mysterious turquoise eyes shatter me into tiny pieces.”
1983 Cho Oyu (8,188m)
After turning back on an early-season attempt, Messner reaches the summit in May with Hans Kammerlander and Michael Dacher on a partially new route.
50 | CLIMB. WALK. JOIN.
A confessional tendency might be another reason for his celebrity appeal. In the film Werner Herzog made of Messner and Hans Kammerlander’s expedition to the Gasherbrums, The Dark Glow of the Mountains (on YouTube), it is interesting to watch a man who reveals himself to be acutely self-conscious, seeing the camera as an opportunity to present himself wholeheartedly. Messner is pictured, ludicrously, receiving a wildly vigorous head massage from one of his Pakistani porters, hair flying all over the place and talking to the camera all the while. He is filmed bathing naked in a glacial pool. He sobs wildly when recounting how he broke the news of his brother’s disappearance to their mother. The footage is so compelling you almost forget that the two Tyroleans have just completed a pioneering traverse of two 8,000m peaks. Here is a man willing to debase himself, to dramatise himself, comfortable with the very harshest of exposure. Or at least, he was eventually. As Herzog has said of the filming process:
R Messner on the Rombok Glacier on the north side of Everest in 1980.
8,000M QUEST
PHOTO: MESSNER COLLECTION.
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