Legendary mountaineer Reinhold Messner visits Seattle this weekend

For some, impossible is the point where dreams begin. Reinhold Messner is one such person. This Saturday, the legendary mountaineer will share some of his death-defying stories as the keynote speaker at the annual Mountaineers Gala in Seattle.

Widely considered history’s greatest high-altitude mountaineer, the Italian alpinist’s list of accomplishments is iconic. The first person to summit Mount Everest without supplemental oxygen. The first person to summit Everest solo. The first person to summit all 14 of the tallest peaks on the planet, each without supplemental oxygen. He also walked across the entire continent of Antarctica and set new summit lines on mountains from Africa to South America that people struggle to duplicate to this day.

“I became a specialist in high-attitude climbing by studying all the literature and knowing famous mountaineers from [Sir Edmund] Hillary and back,” Messner said. “And so, I became slowly the mountain. I look into a mountain and I see hundreds of stories which happened up there. And all these stories are part not only of the climbing history, they’re also part of myself.”

Born among the Dolomites of South Tyrol, Italy, in 1944, Messner grew up in the mountains. “I did my first 3,000-meter peak, which is 10,000 feet, at 5, together with my parents,” he said. “And from then, I became a mountaineer.”

Scaling crags across the Alps with his younger brother, Günther, the Messner teenagers earned a reputation as some of the best pure rock climbers in Europe. But then Messner “found a new dimension,” he said, “a new possibility. This was climbing the high peaks. That became my goal, my dream.”

In 1970, the Messner brothers were invited to participate in a large expedition to the Himalayas to scale the Rupal Face of Nanga Parbat in Kashmir, the ninth-highest mountain in the world. While the brothers made the summit, Günther Messner suffered severe altitude sickness and died during their descent. His remains were lost for decades, then discovered by climbers in 2005.

Reinhold Messner barely made it back to base camp and lost six of his toes to frostbite. It was a major turning point in his life.

“We go in the most dangerous places possible for surviving,” he said. “Surviving is the art of mountaineering. And it’s only an art because death is a possibility. The whole thing becomes absurd. You are standing in front of it and say, ‘This is absurd, what you do.’

“We human beings, we have the possibility to give sense to our life, to our dreams,” Messner said. “Follow your dreams, follow your fantasy.”

Without all his toes, technical rock climbing was out of the question. So Messner aimed higher. In 1978, he and climbing partner Peter Habeler scaled Mount Everest without oxygen, which experts were convinced couldn’t be done.

“It’s the mental power which is bringing you up, not the physical power,” Messner said. “You have to imagine that if you have a fire and there is no oxygen, the fire will stop. The blood needs oxygen. The sugar in the blood needs oxygen. Otherwise, it cannot go.”

Messner’s Everest ascent was akin to breaking the sound barrier in the world of mountaineering. It opened the door to possibilities that people hadn’t ever considered before. He emphasized the point with groundbreaking oxygen-free summits of terror-inducing peaks like Annapurna, Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, and Manaslu.

“My generation was the lucky generation,” Messner said. “The generations before us, they could do one or two, maximum three really great outgoings in their life. It was much more costly, much more difficult. I did more or less 100 trips in my life. Today, there are still many new lines possible. It needs fantasy and it needs special knowledge where to go to find the challenges, but the challenges are still there.”

Mountaineers CEO Tom Vogl said the group has “been excited about welcoming Reinhold back for many years,” adding that Messner “has a very special connection with The Mountaineers in particular, because we’ve been the U.S. publisher of many of his books,” including the one he’s currently writing.

For Messner, mountaineering isn’t just a physical pursuit or a mental challenge. There’s also a spiritual and artistic dimension.

“On the mountains, we cannot change anything because they’re so big and we are nothing,” he said. “But we can have certain experiences like people had maybe 50,000 years ago when they were out in the wilderness to survive.”

But it’s more than just the art of survival in dangerous situations — rather, “the lines we take up the walls, they are pieces of art,” Messner said. Like a painter at a canvas, “you invent them with your own brain, with your experience. You look from below a high wall and you find out exactly the line which is possible [to climb] in your view. You do the line like an artist is designing the line.”

Messner has left brushstrokes across the globe, many of which remain vibrant today.

“I had the opportunity about five years ago to climb Kilimanjaro, and I saw a sign there that was describing a first ascent that [Messner] put up on a wall called the Breach Direct,” said Vogl. “I think it’s maybe only been climbed a couple of other times since.”

In 1971, Messner wrote in a famous essay that the impossible “doesn’t exist anymore. The dragon is dead, poisoned, and the hero Siegfried is unemployed.” He laughed when I mentioned it to him.

“I was … very young,” he said. “But I understood if you put all the technical equipment which we have to take in overcoming alpine problems, climbing problems, the whole impossible is gone. And without impossible, there’s no dream for the next generations.”