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Troubling questions above 8000 meters
By Tom Smith

You don't normally see mountaineering stories on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. (subscription required.) But Wednesday morning, I was taken aback to see a drawing of Reinhold Messner's hairy face staring at me from the cover of the Journal, along with this headline: "High Drama: 30-year-old mystery roils climbing world."

Reinhold Messner, most climbers, including wannabe's such as myself, would agree, is the greatest mountaineer who ever lived. First to climb Everest without oxygen, first to climb all the peaks over 8000 meters, all in alpine style and without oxygen, numberless epic first ascents, as well as articulate (sort of) spokesman for the freedom of the hills. O yes, and the first to cross Antarctica without machines or dogs. Authour of many books.

The crux of the controversy is this. In 1970, Rheinhold and his brother Guthner were climbing Nanga Parbat, one the world's highest and most difficult peaks (far, far more difficult than the normal route up Everest, for example). They became the first to ascend the Rupal face, the biggest and highest mountain face on the planet. Any man who really appreciates what is involved in a feat of this sort, well, will for a while find that his jockey shorts are too big. Reinhold and Guthner made climbing history by reaching the top. The question is, what happened next?

For certain we know that Guthner did not return alive, nor was his body found. Reinhold says when they reached the top, Guthner was seriously ill with altitude sickness, and said he was unable to descend down the face, the way they had come. Instead, Reinhold says, Guthner begged him to descend instead down the western Diamir Flank of the mountain. During this descent, Reinhold says, Guthner was swept away in an avalanche and lost.

The story is problematic. For one thing, Reinhold and Guthner has ascended without tent or sleeping bags, intending to return to their camp. It is not clear how Reinhold thought he could save his brother by descending down a route where there was no shelter or help waiting. On the other hand, the ascent route may have been very sketchy. Perhaps descending the Diamir flank really was more practical. Or perhaps they were both so brain addled by hypoxia that they did not know what they were doing, and Reinhold cannot now distinguish what he remembers from what he imagined or hoped.

The plot thickens. By descending down the Diamir Flank, having come up the Rapul face, Messner had completed a traverse of Nanga, having already scaled its previously unclimbed, enormous wall. In moutaineering terms this elevated the feat from the historic to the legendary, equal to Herman Buhl's first legendary, and controversial ascent of the mountain, chronicled in one of the classics of mountain literature. (Among other things, Buhl reached the summit far too late to get back down before dark and so stood all night on a ledge a few inches wide until he had enough light to move again.) It was the first traverse of an 8000 meter peak, as well as the first ascent of the Rupal wall. Several of the climbers who were on the expedition with Messner claim (though they were not with him on the summit) that they suspect Messner abandoned his dying brother on the summit in order to secure the glory of this amazing traverse of Nanga Parbat. One of the accusers, however, is a much reduced German baron who was on the expedition, and whose wife Reinhold took away after she nursed him back to health as he recovered from serious frostbite (he lost six digits) back in Germany. The baron obviously has an ice ax to grind. Messner succeeded in getting an injunction against the sale of the baron's book in which he made these accusations, and there have been other suits and counter-suits as well.

I hope Messner's reputation survives intact. No one accomplishes what he has without being driven to the point of near madness. But I don't believe he left his brother, who was his climbing partner of many years, on the summit of Nanga to die. But perhaps he and Guthner agreed the sick climber would make his own way down the face, so Reinhold could complete the traverse--though this would also be an almost indefensible decision. More than likely, this will remain one of the unsolved mysteries of high altitude mountaineering.


posted by thomas at 12/11/2003 04:21:00 PM