45 years ago: Reinhold Messner’s solo ascent of Mount Everest

“In 1980 on Everest, I was more wiped out than ever before and not even after that,” Reinhold Messner told me five years ago when we talked about 20 August 1980—the day he stood alone on the summit of the highest mountain on earth.

“I had fantastic weather, was very well acclimatized and made very good progress in the lower part of the mountain. That made me feel cheerful and confident. A few hundred meters below the summit, however, the weather closed up. Fog crawled up from the south side, spilling down over the ridges and the summit to the north. I was suddenly afraid that I would lose orientation. Tiny snowflakes were drizzling.”

In the middle of the monsoon, the South Tyrolean climbed the Tibetan north side of Mount Everest: without bottled oxygen, on a partially new route. Messner crossed the north flank below the Northeast Ridge, then ascended through the Norton Couloir and finally reached the highest point at 8,849 meters. Three days after leaving base camp.

“Thin air slowed, slowed, slowed me down”

“If I hadn’t found my trail, which only broke a little into the firn, when going down, I would have been lost up there,” Messner recalled.

“So I tried to climb a little faster. But that didn’t work because the oxygen partial pressure was so low up there. So on the one hand there was the concern that it would become dangerous and on the other hand the thin air that slowed, slowed, slowed me down. I was so exhausted at the summit that I just let myself fall into the snow and dozed off. Fortunately, after an hour of puffing – that’s all it was – I had the strength to get up again and to descend.”

When the then 35-year-old returned to base camp, his girlfriend hardly recognized him. “It seems as if a drunk is descending from the Col and not the same man who left four days ago,” Nena Holguin wrote in her diary. “He looks at me with tears in his eyes. His face is yellow, his lips are cracked and frayed.” Reinhold Messner was exhausted, both physically and mentally. This mountaineering feat of genius had demanded everything of him.

The final chord in his development, not the climax

Messner described his solo ascent of Everest to me as “a kind of final chord in my development”: after climbing the Rupal Face on Nanga Parbat in 1970 (with his brother Günther, who died during the descent), the first alpine-style ascent of an eight-thousander in 1975 on Gasherbrum I (with Peter Habeler), Everest without bottled oxygen in 1978 (again with Habeler), the solo climb on Nanga Parbat in 1978, and the ascent of K2 in 1979.

“After that, I set out to climb all eight-thousanders,” said Messner. In 1986, he completed his collection, the first person ever to do so. He always refrained from using bottled oxygen.

The solo ascent of Everest was not the climax of his sporting career, said Messner: “The solo ascent of Nanga Parbat was more important because it was the first step in this dimension, tackling an eight-thousander all by myself. It’s mainly about the impossibility of sharing your worries and fears. If I have a partner with me, the whole thing becomes easier to bear emotionally and psychologically. But it’s still a slog. The oxygen-depleted air, the panting, the cold air filling your lungs – it’s pure suffering. You have to have experienced it yourself to be able to recount it.”