Naked Mountain by Reinhold Messner

Author:Reinhold Messner [Reinhold Messner]
Language: eng
Format: epub

Günther Messner at Camp 3.

That evening, the clouds finally lifted. Neither the mountain nor the weather could fool us now and we were desperate to push on and get higher.

Herrligkoffer: ‘A period of fine weather is moving in. We intend to use the next few days for the first, and perhaps last, serious summit bid.’

Muttered words, groans and rustling – after a relatively quiet night, Camp 3 was slowly waking up. Outside, it was still dark. The candles we had lashed to the middle pole of the tent with leather straps were lit, but we couldn’t be bothered getting up; not yet. In any case, we had agreed that Felix and Peter would take the lead on the next section of the route and break trail.

Günther got the stove going and started melting snow. It took a long time. Then he warmed up a tin of fruit. The stove hummed. All the entrances and the walls of the tent were encrusted with hoar frost. Felix stood by the tents and strapped on his crampons. He would be setting off soon, I thought.

Inside our tent, the warm tinned fruit was being passed around. Then we got dressed, rolled our sleeping bags up and strapped them to our rucksacks that were already packed full to bursting and lying in the entrance to the tent.

Finally, Günther, Gerhard and I crawled out of the tent, only to find Felix was still there, looking disparagingly at us. What was all that about? We all strapped our crampons on, each of us in his own little world. There was not much talking. The lights of the head torches bobbed and flickered in the moonlight. It was bitterly cold.

It was only then that Felix started climbing. Taking the lead, he traversed left, clipped his ascender to the fixed rope and started hauling himself up. Breaking trail was very strenuous; you could see it in his movements.

I set off up the ropes, following in Felix’s tracks. After about a hundred metres I took over the hard work from him. Further down, Günther, Peter and Gerhard were now climbing, too. Günther also overtook Felix. The face was easyangled here and the ropes were buried beneath a blanket of new snow. It was a hellish job to pull them free.

We all traversed left across a snow rib to gain some rocks and continued up to a couloir, one after the other, like a family of geese, tiny circles of light at the edge of a dark precipice. The ropes that Peter and Felix had fixed on this section weeks ago were undamaged; even the anchor points were in good order. Now, however, the face was getting steeper and all the snow had slid off the smooth surface of hard ice.

We were soon standing on blue-green ice peppered with little air bubbles. I kicked my crampons hard into the ice; only the tips of the two front points bit in as I led off diagonally leftwards up the smooth sheet of ice.

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