Word: everests
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Only 14 summits, all of them in the crescent of mountains that runs from northern Pakistan southeast along the Himalayan chain to Sikkim, exceed this mysterious boundary between life and death. To climbers they are known as the eight-thousanders. And many of them, including Mount Everest, were conquered by mountaineers who fudged a little: they used bottled air. No one had ever conquered all 14 -- much less without oxygen -- until last week, when Reinhold Messner, 42, a brash, blond-bearded native of Italy's South Tirol, stood triumphantly atop Lhotse, the world's fourth highest mountain. Having conquered...
...glacier-shrouded western bastion of the chain. Then he climbed Manaslu (26,781 ft.) in central Nepal and Pakistan's Gasherbrum I (26,470 ft.) with Peter Habeler, a longtime climbing partner. In 1978 Messner and Habeler, now 44, climbed oxygenless to the summit of Mount Everest (29,028 ft.), and the mountaineering world gasped. In 1979 Messner went back to the Pakistan-China border and conquered K2 (28,251 ft.), the world's second highest mountain, and, to top that, lumbered up Everest again in 1980, this time all by himself...
Messner has been called tactless and egocentric by his critics. After his solo ascent of Everest, for example, he told admiring fellow South Tyroleans, "I do this for myself because I am my own fatherland, and my handkerchief is my flag." On talk-show stints, he tends to shout down other guests. Indeed, a mountaineer who has known him for years thinks fame has been hard on a man who finds peace in solitude: "Everyone wants to get in touch with him. Everybody wants to shake his hand." He is divorced from West German Journalist Uschi Demeter, and lately, says...
...that were part of the historic eight-thousander sieges, which frequently involved ten or more climbers supported by dozens of Sherpas. The minimalist technique has attracted thousands of imitators. Says Swiss Mountain Guide Erhard Loretan, 27, who, with his countryman Jean Troillet, 38, raced to the top of Everest last August and back down again to base camp in an astonishing 43 hours: "The reason we can now climb so quickly and easily is that Messner served as an example...
...barrier proved to have what Oelz calls a "rather active respiratory center," meaning that as the air gets thinner, their rate of breathing involuntarily increases. "He's obviously got a superb high-altitude physique," says Chris Bonington, who in 1975 led a successful British expedition to Mount Everest, "but what has given him the edge over everyone is creative innovation. There is a wall called 'impossible' that the great mass of people in any field face. Then one person who's got a kind of extra imaginative drive jumps that wall. That's Reinhold Messner...