Reinhold Messner
Lost his brother and seven toes on Nanga Parbat, then rewrote what was thought possible at altitude
Reinhold Messner grew up in a valley in the Dolomites, one of nine children of a village schoolteacher, and climbed his first peak at five. By his twenties he and his younger brother Günther were making difficult routes in the Alps in fast, lightweight style, with little of the fixed rope and heavy equipment that expeditions then relied on.
In 1970 both brothers joined an expedition to Nanga Parbat in Pakistan. They reached the summit, but Günther was exhausted and altitude-sick, and they descended by a different, unknown face. Günther disappeared, almost certainly in an avalanche. Reinhold staggered down alone, hallucinating, and lost seven toes to frostbite. Other expedition members later accused him of abandoning his brother; the dispute ran for decades until Günther's remains were found in 2005 where Reinhold had said they would be.
He kept climbing, with a new question in mind: how far could a human body go without help. In 1978, with Peter Habeler, he climbed Everest without supplementary oxygen, which doctors had said would cause brain damage or death. Two years later he climbed it again, alone and without oxygen, during the monsoon. By 1986 he had climbed all fourteen peaks over 8,000 metres, the first person to do so.
He later crossed Antarctica on foot, served in the European Parliament, and built a group of mountain museums in South Tyrol.