German Climber Reinhold Messner Scaled the World’s Highest Peaks, but Now He’s Headed to the Flat Expanses of the North Pole : One Extreme to the Other

The first person to climb Mt. Everest without supplemental oxygen, the first to climb it solo, the first to climb all 14 of the world’s peaks over 8,000 meters--often alone, always without oxygen--has gone horizontal.

At 50, Italy’s Reinhold Messner, often cited as the world’s greatest living mountaineer, has decided long walks are more appropriate for him.

“Now I prepare to go to the North Pole,” said Messner. “The Himalaya is not as challenging. Twenty years ago, I would have said ‘Never, it’s boring going on the sled ice.’ Now I enjoy much more these trips. Knowing the area, and all the difficulties, and how big the Arctic Ocean is--a mountain is nothing.”

Nothing?

Messner’s 1,550-mile trek across Antarctica with Arved Fuchs of Germany in 91 days in 1990, without the aid of dog sleds or machinery, first hinted at his change of life. A 1,300-mile crossing of Greenland in 35 days two years ago, the longest unsupported traverse, confirmed it.

His planned unaided traverse of the North Pole from Siberia to Canada in spring could prove the icing on the cake. If successful, he believes that he and his brother, Hubert, will be the first to reach and return from the pole without machinery or support.

“From Everest I can go down to base camp in one day,” Messner said. “From the middle of Antarctica, you need months to get out. You are much more exposed. Exposure is the most important factor, not only difficulties. It’s one thing to be on a small rock wall, or a middle rock wall like El Capitan, but if you are there with air under your . . . and you are exposed under your feet . . .

“Antarctica is not a vertical wall, it is a horizontal wall. But it is the biggest wall, and the possibility for exposure is highest.”

Messner was talking by phone from Milan while en route to his castle in Bolzano, Italy, where he was preparing for an appearance tonight in Robert Frost Auditorium at Culver City High School, and training daily by running uphill pulling a sled.

Messner grew up in the Sud Tirol, in northeastern Italy. Until he was 25, he was a rock climber concentrating on the most difficult routes in Italy’s Dolomites and the western Alps.

On his first 8,000-meter (26,248-foot) expedition--Pakistan’s Nanga Parbat in 1970--his brother, Gunther, was killed. The two had completed the first ascent of the mountain face when Gunther disappeared in an avalanche. Messner lost most of his toes to frostbite. On his second 8,000-meter peak, Manaslu in Nepal, two friends died.

With Austrian Peter Habeler, he made his ascent of Everest, without oxygen, in 1978. But his earlier experiences fostered a preference for solo ascents. When he scaled Nanga Parbat a second time--also in 1978--he was alone. It was the first such ascent of an 8,000-meter peak. He reached the summit of K2 the next year with German MichlDacher, and made a solo climb of Everest a year after that.

Messner has chronicled his adventures in such books as “To the Top of the World” (1992) and “Antarctica--Both Heaven and Hell” (1991).

Just as he has shown little regard for mountaineering convention, his books are another departure. Most climbing and adventure literature is written with drama, excitement and danger--entertainment--in mind. Messner’s writings often are reflective and sometimes painfully psychological.

“I am trying to express what is happening in my inner feelings,” he said. “In my climbing, I am going practically with my feet and body in a place like the top of Everest--but this is only the outside world. In the same moment, I climb my inner mountain.

“More and more I understand how limited I am. As human beings, we have problems. We have fear. . . . I am not seeking to achieve a summit, I am searching to achieve more knowledge about my fears and hopes and about being a human being. It is not so important to describe how many camps I make.”

Messner has become well acquainted with fear.

“I was more afraid in the beginning,” he said. “Today I have the ability to put myself in a balance between skill and fear before starting. Fear is the other half of skill. I am still afraid, but now I can have a good balance.”

On solo ascents, he occasionally converses with himself--in a number of passages in his books he carefully delineates the two trains of thought. And just because he’s traveling solo doesn’t mean he’s alone.

After his brother was killed on Nanga Parbat, Messner still felt his presence to the point that he could smell him. On Nanga Parbat the second time, he walked behind his father and talked with his brother. During a storm on Kanchenjunga, the third-highest mountain in the world, he thought a group of Japanese were securing the tent with stones. In Antarctica, he walked beside himself.

Suffice it to say he suffers severe hallucinations, though he would almost certainly take issue with the word suffer.

“It was often like this,” Messner said. “(On Nanga Parbat after Gunther disappeared), and totally at the end of possibilities, I would see from time to time a horse with a rider and I was sure now that I could get help. But there was always only a stone or a tree. One moment I would realize I was trapped by a hallucination, in the next I would again decide it was a reality.

“But this is not a disease,” he said. “Schizophrenia can be a great help.

“I believe that thousands and thousands of years ago, humans living in a dangerous world with dangerous animals could go into schizophrenic states in difficult situations. If you do something alone, and difficult, you can speak with a second one, and discuss your problems. A saint in the Himalayas or alone in the desert has this ability to become schizophrenic.”

Yet Messner’s single-mindedness is his hallmark. For now, that means the top of the world is not a matter of meters, but of latitude. And it means both vanity and humility are mute considerations when asked whether he considers himself the greatest living mountaineer.

“No. I was a mountain climber,” he says. “I still do 20 or 30 climbs a year, but I am so involved with my new adventure that I have problems even to say I am a mountain climber. After the North Pole, maybe there will be new (climbing) plans.

“I was lucky to live in a beautiful time. In the ‘70s, we could reinvent climbing. It was a naive period. I did not go to big walls thinking, ‘Now I will change climbing, now I invent something new.’ I went like a small boy climbing. Only afterward we understood that we changed climbing. And we did it without the hero feelings like in the ‘50s, with flags on the summit.”

Instead, Messner was achieving summits in a minimalist style that proved revolutionary. While others “conquered” Himalayan mountains using tons of equipment over long periods of time, Messner’s style was fast and light. And he approached a mountain not as a thing to be conquered, but as a resource of wildness to be respected.

In fact, he doesn’t even think of mountaineering in terms of a physical act.

“Generally my activity is more near art than sport,” he said. “People think the opposite, but the sport side--strength and will power--is much less important. I imagine my adventures first, then I do them. Doing them, I (only) put down my feet and hands and body.

“A line on a certain wall is like doing a picture. On Nanga Parbat, you see no line on the face, but I live months with this line in my head. I make the line with my suffering in weeks of work, like the painter Picasso puts his ideas on a canvas. I leave nothing, but my nothing is something. If I return 25 years later, I see the line immediately.”

Paradox, it seems, is at the bottom of a life lived in a vertical reality. It surfaced again when Messner was asked about the source of the drive to always ascend. (Until long walks become more appropriate, that is.)

“It’s quite logical,” he said. “A mountain is so beautiful. Look, it is like an arrow pointing to the heaven. We cannot sit up there forever, but we can go up and go down. The beauty in life is that you can even try more than once.

“Sisyphus climbs up, then the stone falls down, and he has to roll it up again--life is nothing else. But perhaps we can imagine Sisyphus as a happy man, because he can do this, not that he is forced to do it, or that he suffers.

“Life is the same,” he reiterated. “We begin every day new. We do approximately the same thing. But not exactly the same thing.”

Reinhold Messner speaks tonight at 8 p.m. in Robert Frost Auditorium, Culver City High School, 4401 Elenda St., Culver City. Details: (310) 473-4574 or (714) 556-7625.