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Did Reinhold Messner really not touch the true 8091m summit of Annapurna I on his now highly controversial 1985 ascent? We speak to Britain’s most successful high-altitude mountaineer, Alan Hinkes, in an attempt to get to the bottom of whether one the world’s greatest mountaineers should really have been stripped of his world records over a technicality, or if it’s all just ‘nitpicking’.
Outraged cries and fierce debates are sounding across the mountaineering community as Reinhold Messner, one of the world’s most revered climbers, has been stripped of two world records on account of an armchair cartographer deeming his ascents ‘invalid’.
If you’re new to the world of high-altitude mountaineering, Reinhold Messner, now aged 79, is a living legend. He was the first person to summit all 14 of the ‘8000ers’, the name we affectionately give to the 14 mountains on the planet that stand over 8000m tall. He was also the first to do it with no supplemental oxygen. All told, this astonishing feat took Messner 16 years to complete, which he did in 1986. This world record, well over a decade in the making, was proudly attached to Messner’s name until September, when the team at Guinness World Records demoted it to a ‘legacy record’ after reviewing the findings of Eberhard Jurgalski.
Jurgalski runs 8000ers.com, a site dedicated to chronicling and studying the world’s mammoth peaks. He has apparently spent the last decade investigating historical ascents of the 8000ers, and used a combination of local photography, satellite imagery, and topographical data to determine that the ‘true summit’ of Annapurna is a little bit higher than Messner allegedly reached. According to Jurgalski, it shouldn’t be possible to see Annapurna’s Base Camp from the true summit of the mountain. Jurgalski uses the fact that Messner describes seeing the camp from the top of the peak as proof that the Italian never reached the true summit. This would mean that Messner technically wasn’t the first to summit all 14 peaks. And it seems Guinness World Records has verified Jurgalski’s calculations, and therefore stripped this alpine pioneer of his title. A prestigious record revoked due to him coming 5m short in elevation.
“Five metres? Five metres is neither here nor there,” comments Alan Hinkes, the first (and still only) British mountaineer to have climbed the 14 peaks.
