A Summit Meeting of Mountaineers

As he gasped his way to the 28,028-foot summit of the world without the use of bottled oxygen--something that many thought would never be done--Reinhold Messner found Mt. Everest seeming to get bigger.

“It is growing in your inner mind . . . and with a growing mountain in front of you, you become smaller and smaller and you need a lot of inner willpower to go up,” the 49-year-old Messner told a rapt crowd here Tuesday night.

Messner, from the German-speaking north of Italy and arguably the most accomplished mountaineer of today, was one of half a dozen climbing luminaries at an unusual gathering to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the first ascent of Mt. Everest, on the border of Nepal and Tibet.

By virtually any measure, it was the most impressive collection of super-mountaineers ever in the United States. About 600 people paid $200 each to attend the dinner, a fund-raiser to help the American Himalayan Foundation protect the fragile environment of areas such as the Solo Khumbu region around Mt. Everest, now immensely popular with trekkers.

Those present included Edmund Hillary of New Zealand, the first, with Sherpa guide Tenzing Norgay, to climb Mt. Everest in 1953; Maurice Herzog of France, the first, with Louis Lachenal, to climb any of the 10 highest peaks in the world, Annapurna, in 1951; and Junko Tabei of Japan, the first woman to climb Everest.

Also featured at the dinner were James W. Whittaker of Washington state, the first American on the summit of Everest, in 1963, and Chris Bonnington, who pioneered small lightweight expeditions to the Himalayas in the 1970s and 1980s, and who climbed Everest at the age of 50 in 1985.

“Tonight we have a gathering of great mountaineers like none other,” said Richard C. Blum, a San Francisco investment banker, veteran Himalayan traveler and husband of U.S. Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.).

If there was a star among these legends of the mountains, it was the charismatic Messner, who was the first person to ascend Everest without artificial oxygen, in 1978; first to climb Everest both solo and without oxygen, in 1980, and the first to climb all 14 peaks in the world of 8,000 meters (26,247 feet) or more in height.

In recent years, Messner has led a campaign to protect the high mountain environment, a land existing entirely of rock, snow and ice.

“I still think the biggest offer the mountains can give us is that we can go for a few hours, a few days, a maximum of a few weeks, in a world where human beings should not be,” he said.

“And today I think we have to put part of our energy into saving the mountains for the next generation because it is not important to conquer them, to be on the summit,” Messner said. “It is important to have these mountains. It is important that there is silence, that there is harmony, that there is something in this world which is left untouched.”

Groups such as Blum’s American Himalayan Foundation and Hillary’s Himalayan Trust have developed programs to educate children of the Sherpas, build schools and health facilities and work for environmental protection.

The most vigorous applause of the night came when Messner referred to “the big, unsolved problem of Tibet--to help Tibetans get part of their freedoms back” from the People’s Republic of China.

Blum’s interest in the region evolved from treks he has taken there since the 1960s. He led an American climbing expedition to the east face of Mt. Everest in the mid-1980s.

Of the Everest veterans on hand Tuesday night at the St. Francis Hotel on Union Square, Whittaker was the best-known American, but he is not nearly as famed as the others in their homelands.

Hillary was knighted by Queen Elizabeth and now appears on the New Zealand $5 bill. Herzog became a cabinet minister in the government of the late French President Charles DeGaulle, served for years in the French Parliament and now is a successful businessman.

Both Messner and Bonnington have been easily recognized celebrities throughout Europe for years and spend much of their time writing books and lecturing when they are not on expeditions.