It’s not often that you can meet a legend.  I was lucky enough to meet Reinhold Messner this past summer at a trade show in Salt Lake City.  Time magazine recognized Messner in their issue, 60 Years of Heros, by saying:

Messner, 62, is not only the greatest high-altitude mountaineer the world has ever known; he is probably the best it will ever know. His 1980 solo ascent of Mount Everest by “fair means” — without sherpas, crevasse ladders or supplemental oxygen — remains the most primal test conceivable of man against the earth.

That ascent, and Messner’s subsequent conquest of the world’s 13 other peaks of 8,000 m or more, set the gold standard for mountaineering. “He had nobody’s footsteps to follow,” says Ed Viesturs, an American climber who completed the fair-means ascent of all 14 of those peaks in spring 2005. “After Messner, the mystery of possibility was gone; there remained only the mystery of whether you could do it.”

The best climber of all time gives his take on who leads the way today, death, the afterlife and the secrets of his amazing success.  Check out the video from  Rock and Ice Here!

Think we could convince him to present at Ice Fest?