Messner and Viesturs, a memorable lesson: “Mountaineering is culture”

A memorable mountaineering lesson. Reinhold Messner and Ed Viesturs meet for the first time at the Sports Festival. The meeting was organized in recent weeks and was motivated by the controversy over the decision to remove the South Tyrolean mountaineer from the Guinness Book of Records for not having actually climbed all 14 8000ers. The initiative, which the author Berhard Jurgalski had motivated by the fact that Messner had not climbed to the highest point of Annapurna and which had pushed him to assign this “record” to Ed Viesturs, has turned the world of mountaineering, to the point of pushing Jurgalski himself to recant. “Not every evil has a silver lining” says Sandro Filippini introducing the evening, because Viesturs, who immediately said he didn’t want that record because it didn’t make any sense, agreed to cross the ocean to meet Messner in front of the Festival audience of Sport and to give fans a memorable evening.

There are no rules

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The first clarification is made by Sandro Filippini. “We won’t talk about records. Mountaineering is a great sporting activity, but it has no rules. And without rules there is no sport, as we understand it. There may be the first ascents, which some mistakenly call records; the record but it is made to be beaten, while the first ascent of a mountain remains forever”. Enter Ed Viesturs, who tells his story. “I come from Illinois, a US state that is as flat as a pancake. I started reading about mountaineering, I was particularly inspired by Maurice Herzog’s climb on Annapurna (the Frenchman climbed it in 1950, becoming the first man to climb to the top of an 8000er, ed.). I started reading about the history of mountaineering and the character I started to gravitate towards was Reinhold Messner. The thing that amazed me the most was in 1978, when Peter Habeler and Reinhold Messner climbed Everest without oxygen. Nobody thought it was possible, they did it.”

CULTURE

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Then Reinhold Messner enters the scene, welcomed with warm applause from the audience of the Teatro Sociale of Trento. His is a real lesson in mountaineering: “With Ed today we told each other our vision of mountaineering. There is empathy, a value that is being lost a little. For 150 years mountaineering has been between human nature and mountain and the mountain has its own law. We went to the wildest areas of the world to survive. We went there where death is a possibility, to try not to die. However, this is an art, it is not a sport. Sport it’s climbing today, a beautiful and now Olympic sport where numbers count. On the walls, however, they don’t count because the walls are a wild, unique world, and the only thing you can look for there is to gain experience to the limits of your possibilities. “Mountaineering is culture. It also has a sporting dimension, but what matters is the tension that is created between human nature and nature.”

The four phases

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Messner takes on the role of historian and begins to explain the evolutionary phases of that extraordinary human adventure that is mountaineering. “He was born in the Alps and in the Alps he evolved. Each generation has made possible what the previous one believed impossible. Ed Viesturs made 21 expeditions above 8000, I only 18, but the number doesn’t count, the emotions count. To us Guinness doesn’t interest me. This argument didn’t interest me because they couldn’t take away what I didn’t have. I can only go on telling what mountaineering is, indeed with the Messner Mountain Heritage we will travel the world with debates, films, conferences for talk about the mountains and traditional mountaineering, which has an incredible history. Those who are mountaineers at heart study these books before planning their ventures. I myself have created my ventures by studying and reading. Mountaineering has gone through 4 periods, all started in the Alps: the first was the mountaineering of conquest, in which people tried to be the first to reach the top of the mountains. When this period ended, another generation sought more difficult routes: it is the mountaineering of difficulty. The third period, mine, was that of style: the summit was all in all secondary, the real goal was to climb a difficult wall or route with a certain style, to get to the top and return. Now there is track mountaineering, with hundreds of Sherpas preparing the track and hundreds of people who pay and are taken to the top, with all the oxygen they want and maybe even by helicopter. This is called tourism, and for tourism you need infrastructure. It has nothing to do with traditional mountaineering. Where is self-responsibility? Where is the effort? I don’t criticize him, he gives work to the Sherpa families, but the real mountaineer goes where there is wilderness, not where there is infrastructure, and equips himself to save his life”. Viesturs can only join in: “I agree one hundred percent agreement with Reinhold. Mountaineering is based on travel, on preparation, on the idea, on the team. And the mountain is being in difficulty, the struggle is the reason why you go to the mountains: to test yourself and to see how you come out of it, how you relate to the mountain. If it’s done the way it’s done now, if you do races on the walls, well, you lose the dimension of the journey, what drives you to go to the mountains.”

Lesson

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From this moment a real lesson begins. With the help of photographs, Messner shows all 14 8000ers, in order of date of first ascent, and tells their story, the difficulties of the first climbers and of those who faced them trying to overcome a difficult wall or do it with style own. Step by step he arrives at the alleged scandal stone, Annapurna. “It’s enormous, it has three peaks above 8000 metres. Hans Kammerlander and I climbed it from a different route than Herzog and Ed Viesturs. Climbing a wall for 4000 meters we arrived at the summit ridge. I can’t understand how they calculated that we remained five meters below the summit, it’s incredible. We followed the ridge, in the storm and in the fog. Doubts only arise in the heads of those who don’t know mountaineering and the dimensions of these mountains.”

Nanga Parbat

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Messner reviews the various mountains and touches on the tragedy of Nanga Parbat in which he lost his brother Guenther: “We climbed the South Face, 4500 meters high. When we found ourselves at the summit my brother, with altitude sickness, could no longer go down this way. We tried to save ourselves by going down the other side, no one could help us. I went beyond the limit of my abilities. It was not only the most tragic thing, it was my greatest adventure, I lived between life and death for many days. We wanted to climb the largest wall in the world, 4500 meters high. There I learned to progress without help, without base camps, without oxygen, without Sherpas. I wanted to do the best I could do with my abilities. My brother died at the base of the descent route. For me this experience is worth all the mountains of my life. I have experienced everything that can be experienced, suffered, endured in the mountains”. Then another note on the meaning of going to the mountains: “The conquest of the useless” is the most beautiful definition of traditional mountaineering. It’s by Lionel Terray, a mountaineer who I adore because he was also a great writer. There is no utility, there is only possibility. We make sense, and for twenty years, every year I managed to give meaning to what I designed and created. We are closer to art than sport. It’s a cultural fact, I will defend it forever. Competition has nothing to do with it, on the contrary it ruins our business”. At the end Messner gets up and greets everyone. The evening continues with the memories of Viesturs, which draw applause. After an hour and a half, those present leave the room with the feeling of having witnessed a memorable mountaineering lesson.