Free spirit

Reinhold Messner had the ideal childhood for a climber. Born in the South Tyrol under the shadow of the Geislerspitz of parents who took him on his first climb on the Sass Rigais at the age of five, he grew up loving and learning every metre of his native Dolomites, and honing on them the basic mountaineering skills which were to lead him to set himself the harder and harder challenges which in turn rolled back the frontiers of the possible for a whole generation of climbers.