Climbing Quote of the Week: Reinhold Messner

Reinhold Messner, born and raised in the Villnöss Valley among the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy, is quite simply the greatest mountaineer of the 20th century and perhaps of all time. Messner’s feats are legendary: solo first ascents on the great faces of the Dolomites; the forbidding Eiger North Face in 10 hours with Peter Habeler in 1974; the first to climb Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen in 1978; the first solo ascent of Mount Everest in 1980; the first man to climb all the 8,000-meter peaks; the second to climb the Seven Summits, the highest points on the seven continents; and the list goes on.

This quote regarding the 1965 first ascent of the 600-meter-high North Face of the Grosse Fermeda comes from Messner’s 1989 autobiography Free Spirit: A Climber’s Life. He learned to love climbing and to climb from his father and later, as a young man, his father would lend him his Lambretta motor-scooter so Reinhold and his brother Günther could venture to farther ranges, greater adventures, and first ascents. Reinhold writes: “He was generous when it came to giving us our freedom in the mountains.”

“Today I am amazed that my father did not forbid us to make such first ascents. At that time I had a confused picture of freedom: today the name is the only thing people know about freedom. They want to be free of laws, free of everyday cares, free of hate, free of ambition. Who knows what freedom is? No one. I often think that we mountaineers get nearest to it, this paradise on earth. Or, to put it another way: the truly free climber is one who obeys no rules. He is no high flyer, keeping up with the Joneses; no slave of others or of the summit fall line, like the directtissima men. I am sorry for them all, but especially for those who do not realize at all that rules force their way between them and the mountains.”

Buy Reinhold Messner’s book:
Free Spirit: A Climber’s Life

Photo above: Nanga Parbat’s Rupal Face was the scene of Messner’s greatest triumphs and tragedies.
Photograph © SMG Stockshots