"GASHERBRUM, THE LUMINOUS MOUNTAIN" "In June 1984, the mountaineer Reinhold Messner organized an expedition in the mountains of the Karakorum." "Hans Kammerlander, on the right of the picture, was with him." "Their objective:" "Two summits in the chain of the Gasherbrums all two at few more of 8000 meters of altitude." "Here is the Gasherbrum 1." "Gasherbrum means "THE LUMINOUS MOUNTAIN."" "Their idea was to climb the two mountains, one after the other, without stoping, without stationary camp and without oxygen, without anything other than a bagpack." "Messner already climbed them separately." "Here is the Gasherbrum 2." "I don't have a true profession." "I didn't learn anything particular." "I made a lot of things who take the liberty to live." "It is everything I need." "I finance my expeditions thanks to mountaineering equipment." "I don't need anything else." "I am very happy not to have a profession." "I think that otherwise one renounces to all creative activity." "I grew in a farm in mountain in the South Tyrol." "I helped my father in our small farm." "My mother died when I was again very young." "My father was not of good health." "Then I worked as a bricklayer during 5 years" "I also had to take care of housework." "What was the housework?" "The usual works in one farm, I took care of everything." "I continue again when me follow home" "Now, I work as guide of mountain the summer and as professor skiing the winter." "And I have a lot of time in the spring and to the fall to make the climbing and to participate in expeditions." "Our idea was not of to achieve a movie on the mountaineering" "What we wanted to discover it was what happens... in the head of the mountaineers when they rush in of the enterprises as extreme." "What fascination drives them on these summits as hooked." "These mountains and these summits they don't exist at the bottom, in the soul of each among us?" "Here we are in Skardu in the north of Pakistan the last accessible city by car or by plane." "We buy some supplies with Rozi Ali, carrier and cook a friend of Reinhold Messner since of numerous expeditions." "The selection of the carriers a place the following morning." "Much participated in the previous ascensions of Messner." "Most are the Baltises, of the mountains of the north of Pakistan." "Just after Skardu, the road stops." "The provisions are brought by Jeep until Dasso." "Of there until the camp of basis there are 150 kilometers on foot." "The last 60 kilometers take place on a glacier." "The camp is going to be installed to an altitude of about 5000 m." "After 5 days us let's find a place to stop us." "It is a source of water hot sulfurous, the last real bath before a long time." "That doesn't look worse that our other expeditions." "Of course we don't know again if we will have strength the staying and even the nerves of which we will have need." "It having never been tempted, we lack reference." "I climbed the 8000 before, but two 8000 never have been climbed in only one time" "We add some sorts of guinea pigs." "We leave... without knowing if us won't be exhausted." "Will be maybe become us mad, not holding more standing." "In this case we would be obligated to come down again." "Maybe also that the fact to have climbed the first summit, the desire to win our bet, all it will give us... enough strength and of power to climb the second summit." "If we have a lot of luck and if we are in shape, if the conditions of enneigement are ideal, if we are in shape physically and emotionally, we can succeed." "For the players of soccer, the friendship forgets itself on the land." "You train a team as the other." "He/it is necessary to be friends?" "Could speak to yourselves of this aspect?" "How long do you know yourselves?" "Since 5 or 6 years, especially since I work as guide of mountain in his/her/its school of mountaineering." "We leave in expedition together since 3 years." "Are you near friends?" "I would not say it, we know ourselves very well ...and I chose Hans for this expedition among all mountaineers that I know personally." "Hans is one of the only ones of which I think that he/it is capable of it." "I participated to about 30 expeditions and I choose my partners still in the same way." "Without being necessarily friends, I always have confidence to 100% in their cleverness of climbers, ...their intuitive knowledge of the atmospheric conditions, and of the strengths of the nature as the avalanches, the storms." "I know that they have as much of staying that me." "Otherwise sooner or later we would have failed." "One of us would be responsible of the death of the other." "Each of us assumes one personal responsibility." "There is not an alternative." "I cannot solve myself to ask someone to join me without being sure that he/it has it in head." "We join the glacier to one altitude of about 4000 m." "The carriers already collected the last pieces of wood for fire." "All have fear of what is going to arrive." "After 10 days of walk through the throats and the glacier, the massages as this one makes the good." "Ibrahim is a carrier very worker and if most other already left us, he/it wanted to remain with me a few longer." "He/it massaged each of us during the walk of approach and now than us let's go begin the ascension, he/it takes it very seriously." "Now he/it pulls my fingers one by one." "If I understood well, him holds his/her/its father's technique." "We are relatively in security here to the camp of basis" "Yes, we are in security." "It is a real pleasure." "But higher, the dangers are numerous." "Just to the over of the basis camp there are the hundreds of crevasses." "A few has one farther stiff enough partition and then, naturally, there are the storms close to the summit." "At the time of my lone ascension in the Nanga Parbat, in 1978," "I had an incredible luck." "Now he/it pulls to me the ears." "I climbed all day, relatively quickly and I bivouaced on a sérac... to an altitude of about 6500 m in a well sheltered place." "The following morning at 5 o'clock, I folded the camp, there was a light tremor." "I immediately noticed it." "The instant according to an incredible avalanche fell." "Just below, an enormous block of sérac of the size of one pâté of houses... detached itself and flew until in the valley." "My camp of basis that I saw again yesterday as one red point, ...was covered with snow." "Then of the friends to the camp of basis told to me that snow had fallen during one half-hour." "I had luck to be awake." "If it had arrived the eve" "I would have flown off with the avalanche." "A "classic expedition" who would like to climb these mountains would have resort to carriers to transport 1 or 2 tons of material and provisions." "One would have numerous people with camps of altitude." "The climbers would make of the displacements of a tent to the other, of a camp to the other, like a pyramid." "The strongest being able to then to win the summit." "We practice, on the contrary, an alpine style..." "We have a small tent and only these clothes." "If he/it is too hot, us let's glue them in our bags" "A fine rope, two picks, a special pick who can stretch out, and a pick made of titanium very light." "And this strange rope?" "It is not a real rope." "We use it in duplicate when we insure." "But we won't use it not many." "Each of us is responsible of himself." "For the essential us let's climb without cording." "One can see the camera what you carry away there high?" "We carry away a camera with us, a small Bell  Howell in order to shoot the summit and as testimony of the expedition." "How many toes did you lose, Hans?" "I have all again mine thanks to God." "Me n' lost some again none because of the frost." "I have four of them, I lost the other." "Will be you in contact radio with the camp?" "No, not of contact radio, it would be too heavy anyway no one here could not come to rescue us." "It is our risk and if one doesn't arrive there, it is like that." "He/it remains only two carriers in the camp." "Rozi Ali, the cook prepares of the chapati, of the flat breads." "I brought up my 1 °expédition himalayenne in 1970 in the Nanga Parbat." "Of the four participants, I am the only one to be again in life." "A German, Peter Scholz and Felix Krün, an Austrian, perishes several years after." "My brother died during this expedition in the Nanga Parbat." "Later, in 1972, I was in the Manaslu, to Nepal... a member of the expedition died of just cold weather under the summit and another became madman and perishes also him." "During all these years, I met some mountaineers," "I learned two or three years later than they had died ...in big expeditions." "I think that the fact to want to climb some mountains is a sign of cerebral degeneration." "So much that people must to work hard to live, to cultivate small fields as people of mountain, they don't think about climbing on mountains." "They are afraid of the mountains, of the avalanches, of the storms, and especially of the torrents who destroy all." "My neighbors, in Villnöss, continue to tell me that I am mad, that it doesn't have a sense to climb the mountains, that I could use my energy to something else and they don't have completely wrong." "And you, that you think some?" "You think that you are not quite sound of mind?" "I think that all artists, the creative people are mad, even the art and the creativeness are shapes of degeneration." "The fascination animated me during so long." "The fascination for the altitude." "In the beginning, it was only of the curiosity." "To what that resembles when the zone is some death higher?" "That one feels before a partition of 5000 meters?" "But I cannot answer to the question to know why I make it not more that to the one of to know why I live and I never landed the question when I climbed." "The question doesn't exist because my whole being is the answer." "When I am lengthened in my tent I sometimes think" "Reason is that that do I make it?" "Reason is that that me do remain not here, below?" "My ambition is yet already relatively satisfied." "But in spite of all, two or three times per year I need me to measure to myself." "If I climb a mountain of 3000 m of altitude in the Alps ...I don't have the opportunity of it." "I don't know how go turn this expedition ...toward the two Gasherbrums," "what will be my relation interior with her." "The very solitude if we are two pass the one that one can to feel in an empty piece" "or in anonymity of a big city." "You achieve to what point you are small, vulnerable." "Sometimes I think that I don't have need anymore of it but after several months, the desire comes back" "as a hooked who cannot stop." "Maybe that the climbing is as obsessional and morbid." "Is what it means and it is a sensitive question, that this type of climbing understands also a research of the death?" "I believe that one interprets as a research of the death a lot of activities who go at the end of the limits." "I never wanted to kill me while climbing." "If he/it ever happened to me to have similar thoughts, it is in situations completely different but ever while climbing a mountain." "I am persuaded that someone who is on a partition cannot think of it while he/it climbs it." "Two Spanish of an expedition toward the Gasherbrum 2 appear." "After weeks of struggle, of snow storms they should have quit rightly below the summit." "They were exhausted and us cautions deep snow and of the avalanches who raged higher." "You think that because of your big proximity with your brother, this one could be dead to your place?" "You would have an attitude different before his/her/its death?" "I have a different attitude before the death in general because I am mountaineer and maybe because of his/her/its death even though I have the impression again that he/it is in life." "When I see the mountains that we climbed together." "I made with him the climbings the most difficult on the Heiligkreuzkofel in the Dolomites, we lived some situations extreme or each of us was responsible in the event the other tomb and this relation was so intense" "that we would not be able to to have separated again." "When I see these partitions today," "I are not able to more climb them without my toes" "I have the impression that him is always in life." "I don't have the feeling that he/it died to my place" "I have the impression that it is myself that died during this expedition." "During the whole coming down, I told myself:" ""All is finished, we are not able to not to go farther "." "Before abrupt partitions, we didn't have a rope." "What was necessary to make?" "II had there of the dozens of moments in the coming down where I was sure that all was finished." "And back in the valley after his/her/its disappearance after having looked for it all night long and him to have waited in vain until the following day" "I didn't worry anymore to know if I was going to die." "During the rest of the journey, I didn't think anymore" "I didn't feel same not the pain." "I was naked feet." "My swollen feet didn't go back more in my shoes." "Then I fainted and when I awakened later" "I was stunned to see that I was living." "And, to the return, when I went back home," "I had the feeling that my life had toppled with this tragedy." "How have you announced the news to your mother?" "My mother understood it better that anyone and yet it was very hard." "We are going to leave now and if the time improves as the weather report announced it with one monsoon of the southeast we should be back in about one week so all happens well." "If we don't appear at the end of 10 days you will be able to make come the carriers and to leave." "You have money for the carriers Rozi Ali knows everything of them." "Money for the journey is to Rawalpindi to the Miss Davis Hotel." "You will find money for the case of a mission by helicopter." "All is organized and arranged so that from the moment where you will take the responsibility of the expedition you can receive the government's money." "If we don't come back from here two weeks, it will mean that we finished under one avalanche or dead of weariness." "Don't leave to our research, no one will ever find us." "Hans, that we should make of your personal business in the tent?" "The photos and..." "There is not much to say some, the best thing would be of all to throw in a crevasse." "The morning according to them was to 6 kilometers of us to one thousand meters to the over of the camp." "They arrived to the summit of the Gasherbrum 2 ...two days and half later." "Then the time changed." "The following summit disappeared in the storm of snow." "They arrive to the summit of the Gasherbrum 1." "After 7 days and half of waiting anxious they emerged the glacier." "Rozi Ali had passed the four last nights to pray." "Reinhold, how it he/it happened?" "The last two days were..." "We succeeded!" "You could remove your glasses if he/it pleases you?" "That is himself he/it passes these last two days?" "We reached the summit yesterday, in spite of the storm." "We found it to the middle of the storm." "It was the hardest part." "We underwent winds of 80 to 100 Km / h all day and we hurt to recover the tent." "The only reason for which we came down again yesterday it is because we wanted to descend by a precise bone." "Yesterday, midway, it was rotted... and today also because he/it was too hot." "We had indeed the worse conditions meteorological conceivable." "If we had not had as much luck in the beginning, we would never have succeeded." "Hans, how was that for you?" "I think that if you make that kind of thing enough often, the best thing to make, it is to write your will." "We really had a lot of luck these last two days, it was the madness..." "I think that no one répètera it in this decade." "A hole of water in the glacier of hundred meter thick." "The temperature is close to the frost." "The risk is that the water that springs disappears in ice." "The one that would slip would be irreparably lost." "Reinhold, whereas you sit down naked and vulnerable before us." "I would like to land a simple question:" "What was the goal of all it?" "I don't know." "I don't wonder ever why I make it." "It is thus for the other madness that I committed." "I would not like to know the answer." "I have the feeling that I can to write on these enormous partitions ...of 3000 or 4000 meter high, as a professor writes on a blackboard with a chalk." "But I don't only make that to write these lines ...of the imaginary lines, I live these lines." "I also have the impression that after, these lines remain there even though I am the only one to can to feel them, to see them that I live them and nobody else be able to ever see them" "but they are there and them will remain forever there." "You can imagine of more to climb?" "To make quite something else?" "Sometimes, I want to stop the climbing in mountain and I imagine that I walk..." "during score of years" "Maybe forever, with of the yaks, some carriers of a valley himalayenne to another." "To shortcoming the deserts, the forests, without going nowhere without watching behind, without watching toward the before while continuing to walk until the tip of the world." "It is strange, I have precisely the same dream." "I would like to have a dog, a husky with two bags of leather and just to walk until I went everywhere." "Yes, it is passionate and I imagine that, more and more in the next years sooner or later in my life, I won't watch behind." "And I won't go nowhere in particular, without destination." "I will walk until the tip of the world." "I don't know if he/it is round or flat for me the world never finishes to a certain moment, him... stop." "It is it, probably, when my life will stop, the world will make in the same way." "We would be able to each to follow the traces of the other." "I am some delighted with advance." "The climbing of the mountains is not anymore if important for me." "Especially the climbing." "The important it is to walk, to walk, to walk..."