Portrait: Der Bergsteiger

Maybe Peter Habeler became one of the world’s best Alpine climbers because he didn’t like hauling things.

INNSBRUCK. We’re traveling light and arrive early. A man is standing outside the sporting goods store where we are supposed to meet. He has arrived even earlier. He travels even lighter. The man is Peter Habeler, 69. He is well-dressed, light on his feet and without baggage. He has a list of big, big achievements in the mountains. He is also – and we’ll get back to this – among the world’s best at sliding on his backside.

A CHILDHOOD. Peter Habeler was born in 1942 in the town of Mayrhofen in the Zillertal valley of Austria. “I have a picture from when I was six years old,” he says. “I’m carrying a backpack up to one of the mountain cabins. They knew me at the cabins. People knew little Peter, so I didn’t have to pay. I got soup, maybe a bite to eat. I started guiding up to the cabins when I was seven or eight years old.”“What you saw from the window of your boyhood room were those mountains right there?” “Exactly. I was curious and wanted to climb them,” he says,“What comes to mind about those days?”“It was a crazy time. My father died when I was eight, and the mountain guides took me over, more or less. I was curious and got the chance to learn : How to cross a glacier, how to be safe. And it just continued.”“What did your mother say?”“She let me go.”Before Habeler turned 12, he had been up all the 3 000 meter peaks in Zillertal. Alone.

A MEETING. Habeler says he has been lucky in his encounters with people throughout his life. One of the most significant such meetings was when he was 20.“I was doing a winter climb in Italy with a childhood friend. We met another team that included Reinhold Messner.” Messner was 18.“I saw that this guy was somebody I wanted to team up with,” says Habeler.“You saw it that early?”“Yeah. It was just a feeling, if you know what I mean.”The climbs Habeler undertook with Messner made Alpine climbing history and created a new school. In this article, we will concentrate on three of them.Ready? Let’s go.

1. EIGER. In 1974, Habeler and Messner set out to be the first to climb the north face of the Eiger – perhaps Europe’s most notorious route – in one day.“It’s 1 800 meters. Not very difficult technically. We hadn’t come as far as we have today. Now it’s been done in three hours, or two and a half, which is fantastic. We only hoped to do it in one day without having to spend the night, because we didn’t have any equipment with us for overnighting. I have never liked heavy, slow approaches. You know : I liked to dance. I was light, with my 60 kilograms. We always wanted to carry as little as possible,” says Habeler.An Austrian team Habeler knew started two days earlier. Habeler and Messner caught up with them at ten in the morning at the Bivouac of Death. “They sat there eating breakfast. Cheese and sausages,” he says. “We had no food other than nuts and raisins in our pockets. We brought one rope, not two. Instead of 10 pitons, we had four. That helps. And had we not gotten stuck on a dumb variation of the route, we could have done it in seven hours instead of 10,” says Habeler.“Do today’s Alpinists have a legacy from you and Messner?”“For our part, it wasn’t about being the fastest. There was a lot of safety involved. A lot of people die on the Eiger because bad weather can come in fast. We wanted to avoid that. We did not want to overnight. You need a good companion, a partner. With Messner, we could go nonstop, we could go without protection. I always felt safe with Messner.”

A LIFE. His mother got him to train as a glass painter, but the moun-tains became Habeler’s job. One of his sons, Christian, now runs the ski school Habeler founded in Mayrhofen in 1973. The other son, Alex, runs the sporting goods store where we met the father in Innsbruck. Alex says going Alpine touring with his father is a mixed blessing : He is always faster than everyone else. (“You know, such short, fast steps.”) Peter still guides, lectures and does TV. In the fall, Habeler plans to climb the Eiger again for an Austrian TV production.“People ask ‘Aren’t you tired of it?’ No. No! I still burn for the mountains. Reinhold doesn’t climb anymore, he is busy with other things, but I still get a kick out of climbing,” says Habeler.“What are your goals now?”“My goals are still the classics. I don’t have one mountain I like the best. I like them all. I have never collected summits, which means nothing to me. But sooner or later, you just feel like trying some-thing new.”“How do you stay in shape?”“Many of the people I see who are my age – 69 … 70 next year – have big stomachs. They have back-aches, and their knees hurt, and they say : ‘I have a new hip; I have a new shoulder.’ I am glad – knock on wood – I don’t and can keep going a while longer.

2. HIDDEN PEAK. After the Eiger, Habeler and Messner wanted to try the same style on bigger mountains. The year after the Eiger, they picked Hidden Peak in the Karakoram Range of Pakistan.“Messner was the mastermind of that trip. It was easier for him to get the funding and he knew he had a good partner in me,” says Habeler. They wanted to take their Eiger tactics to a big mountain.“Hidden Peak was an elegant expedition, with just seven or eight porters. There was no trail for the approach, so I ran ahead of Messner and the porters and built cairns. It all went very fast,” he says.Fast, indeed. In an era when 8,000 meter peaks were climbed in month-long sieges, Messner and Habeler did Hidden Peak in a three-day assault. The two-man team enjoyed their internal competi-tion, “On Hidden Peak, I was faster than Reinhold. Not that it meant anything, but just the same : I beat him and he was very impressed by that. But sometimes one man is fast, and sometimes it’s the other. That’s the way it is. But I felt strong at high elevation,” says Habeler. The success spawned a new goal.“We were so fast on that peak – it was just over 8 000 meters … eight thousand and eighty … that we knew we could have gone higher without oxygen.”

A CLIMBING PARTNER. The name Messner has already popped up a dozen times in this article. He was the first person to ever ascend all of the world’s 8,000 meter peaks. Along the way came triumphs and tragedies. In 1972, Hans Jäger died in an attempt with Messner on Manasula. Two years earlier, Messner’s brother Günther died on the descent from Nanga Parbat. Both were paired with Messner.“You said you always felt safe with Messner. What did people around you say about you two climbing together?”“So – there was the tragedy with the brother. But I am convinced it was not Reinhold’s fault. The worst part is that I was supposed to be the one who went with Messner. I cancelled a week before departure. We had a final meeting in Munich to organize equip-ment. I had to pay 3 000 German marks but I didn’t have the money. ‘I can’t,’ I said to Messner. ‘OK,’ he said, and his brother Günther stepped in at the last moment. He hadn’t had as much preparation, and then the tragedy happened.” During Habeler’s expeditions with Messner, an idea took shape.“We knew that we and others had gone high without oxygen. In my mind, it was just the last 500-600 meters that was the challenge. And I thought, ‘I can always go back down when we reach that point,’” says Habeler.

3. EVEREST. The idea was to climb the world’s highest mountain without supplementary oxygen. “Many thought we were crazy. But we thought l ogically. Imagine how heavy oxygen bottles were at that time : You needed two oxygen bottles, and one weighed five or six kilograms. So you have at least 10 kilos right there. And I have always liked going light. I have always been bad at carrying loads,” Habeler says. There were a series of factors that led to the triumph. Before departure, the head of the ski school paid Habeler to train for the trek instead of teach. He skied two thousand vertical meters every other day. The trip was also part of a larger Austrian expedition.“We were all friends,” he says. “It wasn’t like you met a stranger at the airport and decided – a-ha – you can be on our team. We were there for two and a half months, unbelievably long, so we were very well acclimatized.” But in the beginning, Habeler’s faith started to falter.“I’ll tell you why. After we had established a route through the icefall, we established ABC. On our first night, there was a terrible storm. I remember Reinhold and me holding up the tent poles with our hands. I thought : ‘This is just ABC. What if the tent fails? What if this happened farther up? We’d be in deep trouble. We wouldn’t survive.” Before the trip, Peter and Messner had a serious talk.“What happens if, let’s say, one of us breaks a leg? What can you do? There is no help. You can sit there with the other and die as well, or you go down alone. It sounds very alien, but when you are that high up you need all of your physical and mental strength to get yourself down the mountain,” says Peter.The book Habeler wrote about Everest was called “The Lonely Victory.” Interpret that as you wish. On May 8, 1978, they went for the summit.“All we thought was : ‘Let’s go. Slowly, slowly. Onward. Onward.’ We went light. I had maybe three kilos in my pack. Technically, it was easy, but the worst was falling through the snow all the time, suddenly up to the knee. These days, people say they fall through to their waists. I don’t know. All I know is that we went to our knees pretty often. And then you had to pull that leg out and take another step. I didn’t know if we could do it.”They did, and thus achieved what no one thought They did, and thus achieved what no one thought possible : They reached the top of the world without bottled oxygen.

A RETURN.“I didn’t want to spend long at the top,” Habeler recalls. “I was impatient. Messner wanted to stay and talk to his tape recorder. I went ahead.”He went down Hillary Step alone.“It’s really exposed there. I am convinced that what we learned on our home mountain ridges helped us. It is not climbing, but more like walking on snow. On Hillary, I back-tracked our own trail from the ascent. After that, there was a slight incline and I remember I crawled on all fours,” Habeler says. It took Habeler an hour from the summit to the south base at about 8 000 meters.“An hour is not long. It was very fast. I was so fast because there was a lot of snow and I could see our tracks in the snow. I sat on my behind and slid down. The snow piled up in my lap and slowed me down after 10-12 meters, and then I got up, found our tracks and repeated the process,” says Habeler.To this day he is fast on the descent.“I like it a lot, running down a mountain. And if the snow is soft, it is not dangerous. You just let your legs work like the shock absorbers on a car.”It goes with the story that Messner went snow blind on the descent. In the tent one night, he begged Habeler not to leave him.“I don’t know why he said that. I would never have left him.”“How were you received upon your return home.”“It changed life. People recognized you. It was easier to do lectures. It was easier to raise money. It was easier to finish the house. But I wouldn’t say it went to my head.”“What happened after Everest?”“Messner said : ‘We’ve done Everest. Let’s do the rest.’ I said, ‘No. I want to stay home’”

MAYRHOFEN. Habeler still lives in Mayrhofen. After Everest, there were three more eight-thousanders plus a few attempts. But Habeler laughes this off, saying he is not in the same league as those who have done them all.“Home – or heimat as we say – heimat is my Shangri-La. I can always sneak in a trip, to Nepal or other places, and then I can come home again,” says Habeler. Outside the sporting goods store, his car is waiting. He’s headed somewhere. And the car? A Ford Focus RS. Small, light and fast.“When I climb my local mountains now, I remember how it was to climb here as a child. Thankfully, I´m still doing the same things as I did as a little boy.”

Text: Henning Reinton
Photos: Chris Holter