For me, climbing has always been about adventure and that involves difficulties, danger and exposure, so I deliberately set out to climb with as little equipment as possible.
Interpretation
Climbing is an adventurous journey that embraces challenges and risks, which is enhanced by minimal reliance on equipment.
This quote by Reinhold Messner reflects his philosophy that climbing should be an adventure rich with challenges, danger, and the essence of exposure to nature. By choosing to climb with minimal equipment, he emphasizes the importance of facing the unknown and embodying the true spirit of adventure, highlighting the significance of personal experience over reliance on gear.
In practice
This quote would be perfect for a motivational speech at an outdoor adventure conference.
I became famous for the fact that I would break many, many limits. People said, 'He does all these crazy things.' But oddly it was a crazy thing only because scientists and climbers said, 'Everest and the 8,000-meter peaks without oxygen - impossible. Messner is becoming sick in his head.'
A 30-year-old rock climber is an old man. At 40, one is in the middle of his high-altitude power. At 50, a crosser of deserts is at his best age. But at 60, each of us is out of the game.
I think my cultural work is more important than the adventures I did. The adventures are not important for human beings. It's the conquering of the useless.
In mountaineering, there is not only the activity, but the philosophy behind it. Some say a moral, but I am against that because all morality is dangerous.
I was the first man to climb the world's 14 tallest peaks without supplementary oxygen, but I never asked how high I would go, just how I would do it.
In my state of spiritual abstraction, I no longer belong to myself and to my eyesight. I am nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung, floating over the mists and summits.
For us the mountains had been a natural field of activity where, playing on the frontiers of life and death, we had found the freedom for which we were blindly groping and which was as necessary to us as bread.
Adventures are not all pony-rides in May-sunshine.
You have to remember this was the '60s, when climbing was dangerous and sex was safe.
Everest has always been a magnet for kooks, publicity seekers, hopeless romantics and others with a shaky hold on reality.
I have lifted my plane . . . for perhaps a thousand flights and I have never felt her wheels glide from the Earth into the air without knowing the uncertainty and the exhilaration of first-born adventure.
Land! An island! We devoured it greedily with our eyes and woke the others, who tumbled out drowsily and stared in all directions as if they thought our bow was about to run on to a beach. Screaming seabirds formed a bridge across the sky in the direction of the distant island, which stood out sharper against the horizon as the red background widened and turned gold with the approach of the sun and the full daylight.
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