I have just recently come across this essay that Reinhold Messner wrote way back in 1965. At the time it was visionary piece and in my opinion it still holds good today, some 44 years later. In ‘the future’, will the challenge for climbers be to do todays bolted routes in a ‘clean’ way, removing existing bolts and doing the routes free?
Will we eventually be able to return to the purer mountaineering values of the past? I hope so.
From “The Murder of the Impossible” By Reinhold Messner (1965)
What have I personally got against œdirettissimas? Nothing at all; in fact, I think that the œfalling drop of water route is one of the most logical things that exist. And of course it always has existed—so long as the mountain permits it. But sometimes the line of weakness wanders to the left or the right of this line; and then we see climbers—those on the first ascent, I mean—going straight on up as if it weren ™t so, striking in bolts of course. Why do they go that way? œFor the sake of freedom, they say; but they don ™t realize that they are the slaves of the plumb line.
They have a horror of deviations. œIn the face of difficulties, logic commands one not to avoid them, but to overcome them, œ declares Paul Claudel. And that ™s what the direttissima protagonists say, too, knowing from the start that the equipment they have will get them over any obstacle. They are therefore talking about problems which no longer exist. Could the mountain stop them with unexpected difficulties? They smile: those times are long past! The impossible in mountaineering has been eliminated, murdered by the direttissima.
Yet direttissimas would not in themselves be so bad were it not for the fact that the spirit that guides them has infiltrated the entire field of climbing. Take a climber on a rock face, iron rungs beneath his feet and all around him only yellow, overhanging rock. Already tired, he bores another hole above the last peg. He won ™t give up. Stubbornly, bolt by bolt, he goes on. His way, and none other, must be forced on the face.
Expansion bolts are taken for granted nowadays; they are kept to hand just in case some difficulty cannot be overcome by ordinary methods. Today ™s climber doesn ™t want to cut himself off from the possibility of retreat. Rock faces are no longer overcome by climbing skill, but are humbled, pitch by pitch, by methodical manual labour; what isn ™t done today will be done tomorrow. Free-climbing routes are dangerous, so they are protected by pegs. Ambitions are no longer built on skill, but on equipment and the length of time available. The decisive factor isn ™t courage, but technique; an ascent may take days and days, and the pegs and bolts be counted in hundreds. Retreat has become dishonourable, because everyone knows now that a combination of bolts and single-mindedness will get you up anything, even the most repulsive-looking direttissima.
Times change, and with them concepts and values. Faith in equipment has replaced faith in oneself; a team is admired for the number of bivouacs it makes, while the courage of those who still climb œfree is derided as a manifestation of lack of conscientiousness.
Who has polluted the pure spring of mountaineering?
The innovators perhaps wanted only to get closer to the limits of possibility. Today, however, every single limit has vanished, been erased. In principle, it didn ™t seem to be a serious matter, but ten years have sufficed to eliminate the word œimpossible form mountaineering vocabulary.
Progress? Today, ten years from the start of it all, there are a lot of people who don ™t care where they put bolts, whether on new routes or on classic ones. People are drilling more and more and climbing les and less.
œImpossible: it doesn ™t exist any more. The dragon is dead, poisoned, and the hero Siegfried is unemployed. Now anyone can work on a rock face, using tools to bend it to his own idea of possibility.
Some people foresaw this a while ago, but they went on drilling, both on direttissimas and on other climbs, until they lost the taste for climbing: why dare, why gamble, when you can proceed in perfect safety? And so they became the prophets of the direttissima: œDon ™t ™ waste time on classic routes—learn to drill, learn to use your equipment. Be cunning: if you want to be successful use every means you can to get round the mountain. The era of the direttissima has barely begun; every peak awaits its plumb line route. There ™s no rush, for a mountain can ™t run away—and nor can it defend itself.
œDone the direttissima yet? And the super direttissima? These are the criteria by which mountaineering prowess is measured nowadays. And so the young men go off, crawl up the ladder of bolts, and then ask the next ones: œDone the direttissima yet?
Anyone who doesn ™t play ball is laughed at for daring to take a stand against current opinion. The plumb line generation has already consolidated itself and has thoughtlessly killed the ideal of the impossible. Anyone who doesn ™t oppose this makes himself an accomplice of the murderers. When future mountaineers open their eyes and realize what has happened, it will be too late: the impossible (and, with it, risk) will be buried, rotted away, and forgotten forever.
All is not yet lost, however, although œthey are returning to the attack; and even if it ™s not always the same people, it ™ll be other people similar to them. Long before they attack, they ™ll make a great noise, and once again any warning will be useless. They ™ll be ambitious and they ™ll have long holidays—and some new œlast great problem will be resolved. They ™ll leave more photographs at the hut, as historical documents, showing a dead straight line of dots running from base to summit—and on the face itself, several hundred bolts. Newspapers, radio and television will once again inform us that œman has achieved the impossible.
If people have already been driven to the idea of establishing a set of rules of conduct, it means that the position is serious; but we young people don ™t want a mountaineering code. On the contrary, œup there we want to find long, hard days, days when we don ™t know in the morning what the evening will bring. But for how much longer will we be able to have this?
I ™m worried about that dead dragon: we should do something before the impossible is finally interred. We have hurled ourselves, in a fury of pegs and bots, on increasingly savage rock faces: the next generation will have to know how to free itself from all these unnecessary trappings. We have learned from the plumb line routes; our successors will once again have to reach the summits by other routes.
It ™s time we repaid our debts and search again for the limits of possibility—for we must have such limits if we are going to use the virtue or courage to approach them. And we must never break them down again, even if it ™s impossible for us to reach them.. Where else will we be able to find refuge in our flight from the oppression of everyday humdrum routine? In the Himalaya? In the Andes? Yes, certainly, if we can get there; but for most of us there ™ll only be these old Alps.
So let ™s save the dragon; and in the future let ™s follow the road that past climbers marked out. I ™m convinced it ™s still the right one.
Put on your boots and get going. If you ™ve got a companion, take rope with you and a couple of pitons for your belays, but nothing else. I ™m already on my way, ready for anything—even for retreat, if I meet the impossible. I ™m not going to be killing dragons, but if anyone wants to come with me, we ™ll go to the top together on the routes we can climb without branding ourselves as murderers.
English translation from Mountain No. 15, 1971 out of High Ambition: A Biography of Reinhold Messner, by R. Faux
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