This article originally appeared in the UK edition of Vanity Fair, and on VanityFair.Com, in September of 2006.

Reinhold Messner at Castle Juval, his home in South Tyrol, Italy, 2001. Photograph by Jonas Karlsson.

Reinhold Messner secured his status as the most phenomenal mountaineer of all time in 1978, when he and his Tyrolean countryman Peter Habeler became the first climbers ever to reach the top of Mount Everest without supplementary oxygen. Two years later, Messner soloed Everest—at 29,035 feet the world's highest peak—again without an oxygen mask. By 1986 he would complete climbs of the 14 highest mountains in the world—all the "eight-thousanders," 8,000 meters (26,240 feet) or more. Since then, only a handful of climbers have matched these superhuman feats of endurance and survival.

But in 1970, Messner was 26 years old and still unknown outside the small community of European extreme rock climbers. Two years earlier, he'd gotten their attention on a group expedition to the vertiginous granite Aiguilles of the Mont Blanc range, in the Alps. Some of the best climbers in the world stopped their ascents and watched through binoculars, aghast, as Messner hacked his way up Les Droites, then regarded as the most difficult ice wall on earth, in only four hours. The fastest ascent until then had taken three days; three previous expeditions had met with disaster and death.

Messner was able to move so quickly because he climbed alone, alpine-style—meaning he took only a rucksack. Not having to bang in pitons (thin metal wedges to secure protective ropes), or rappel back down each pitch to pick them up, saved him a lot of time and energy. But it meant that he had to have absolute confidence in himself. There could be no hesitation, no uncertainty in his movements.

Another factor in Messner's success was his artistry at route finding. Picking a way up thousands of feet of sheer rock is like designing a large, complicated building, and Messner's lines were elegant and innovative. He was in superb condition, from running for hours at a time up alpine meadows and practicing moves on a ruined building in St. Peter, the little village in the Dolomite mountains of Northern Italy where he lived. "Reinhold never made a move until he had studied the weather conditions," says Doug Scott, one of the top Himalayan climbers of Messner's era, "and when everything was right, he went for it and pulled it off because of his phenomenal fitness."

But most important, Messner had the mysterious drive, the ambition, the single-minded focus that separates the world's Lance Armstrongs, Michael Jordans, and Tiger Woodses from the merely talented. He had decided in his mid-teens that he was going to become the greatest mountain climber ever, and from then on was a man obsessed, pushing himself to the limit, then pushing the limit out some more, "learning the world through my fear," as he puts it in one of his many books.

By 1969 the Alps had become too small for Messner, so he went to the Peruvian Andes and pioneered two ascents there. Now he longed for an opportunity to tackle the big boys: the 14 eight-thousanders in Central Asia—in the Himalayan, Karakoram, Hindu Kush, and Pamir ranges.

The chance came late that year, when a climber dropped out of a German expedition that was going to Nanga Parbat, the world's ninth-highest mountain (26,658 feet), and Messner was invited to take his place. Nanga is in the Himalayas, in Pakistan, near the Kashmir border. It was the holy grail of German mountaineering. Thirty-one people had died on it by 1953, when Hermann Buhl finally reached the top, and 30 more have died since. A solo-climbing pioneer, Buhl, with the Italian Walter Bonatti, was Messner's main role model. But the southern, Rupal Face was still unclimbed. Fifteen thousand feet of mostly exposed rock from top to bottom, it is the highest vertical wall on earth. Even Buhl considered it to be suicide. Starting in 1963, the best German climbers had pitted themselves against it. Four expeditions had failed. This was the fifth.

"This I was interested in," Messner told me recently.

At the last moment, another climber dropped out, and Messner was able to get his brother Günther on the expedition. Reinhold and Günther had done easily a thousand climbs together, starting as little boys in their valley in South Tyrol, a German-speaking enclave at the border of Austria and Italy that has been under Italian rule since the First World War. Günther was very strong, but his rock climbing was not at the Spider-Man level of Reinhold's. He was a few inches shorter and hadn't been able to put in the same hours of practice and training because of his job as a bank clerk. Reinhold, who was teaching high-school math and making a desultory effort to get a degree in building engineering at the University of Padua, had his summers free. When Günther asked for a two-month leave of absence to go on the expedition, the bank wouldn't give it to him, so he gave his notice. He was going to find a job that would let him do more climbing when he got back.
 
 

In May 1970, the expedition's 22 climbers and their teams of high-altitude porters began working their way up the Rupal Face, setting up tent camps along the way. Reinhold quickly demonstrated that he was the strongest climber, and on June 27, after days of being snowbound by a blizzard, the death of one of the porters, and other setbacks, the expedition had one last chance to make the summit: it all came down to Messner making a solo dash up the last 3,000 feet from Camp Five. He set out before dawn and by the end of the morning had climbed the Merkl Couloir, a nearly vertical slit of snow and ice above Camp Five, and started on a long traverse off to the right, skirting the lower, south summit. Suddenly, he noticed another climber below him, coming up fast. It was Günther, who was supposed to be stringing fixed ropes in the couloir to ease Reinhold's descent. But Günther had decided he wasn't going to miss out on this.

The brothers reached the summit late in the afternoon and shook hands, as they always did. Elated by their triumph, and befuddled by the thin air, they lost track of the time and stayed too long on top. This happens in the "death zone," above around 23,000 feet. Without an oxygen tank, you start to experience "rapture of the heights." Günther had come up from Camp Five too fast and was completely spent. He told his brother that he didn't think he could make it back down the Rupal Face. He didn't trust his footing. One slip and it was 15,000 feet to the valley floor, and they didn't have a rope, so there was no way Reinhold could hold him. Reinhold finally looked at his watch and realized that there was only an hour of daylight left. They were in big trouble.