The Man Who Took On Reinhold Messner's Mountaineering Record

(Illustration: Tristan Kennedy (Jurgalski, Map); Getty (Messner); Art by Hannah Dewitt)

Everest Season

The Man Who Took On Reinhold Messner’s Mountaineering Record

Published: May 29, 2024 Updated: May 29, 2024

When Eberhard Jurgalski determined that Reinhold Messner narrowly missed a key summit, he told the world. He’s still dealing with the fallout.

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Shortly after 11 A.M. on April 24, 1985, Reinhold Messner battled his way up the last few steps to the summit ridge of Annapurna. High winds and heavy fog had rolled in as he and his climbing partner, fellow Italian Hans Kammerlander, reached the upper slopes of the 26,545-foot Himalayan peak. “Again and again I felt the chunks of snow on my face, whipped up by the gale,” Messner later wrote, in a book about the climb. Both men were exhausted. They had been climbing for three days. But they were on the cusp of making history with yet another incredible first: an alpine-style ascent of the mountain’s previously unclimbed 4,000-meter northwest face—over 13,000 feet of near vertical rock and ice—without supplementary oxygen.

At the age of 40, Messner was already a legend. In 1978, he’d made the first ascent of Everest without oxygen. Two years later, he’d repeated the feat solo, catapulting himself to a whole new level of mainstream fame. The summit of Annapurna would take him one step closer to an achievement that would cement his legacy—one he’d been chasing for years. This was his 11th summit above 26,247 feet, or 8,000 meters; the 11th mountain on which he’d entered the “Death Zone,” where oxygen pressure drops so low, no human can survive for long.

There are 14 such peaks on the planet—known as the 8,000ers. Within a month, accompanied again by Kammerlander, Messner had climbed Dhaulagiri, his 12th. The following year, he reached the top of Makalu and finally, on October 16, 1986, Lhotse, becoming the first person on the planet to summit all 14.

Or at least that’s what he thought.

Since 2019, a series of revelations published on the website 8000ers.com has called into question various historic summit claims in the Himalayas. By cross-referencing 21st-century topographical data with the mass of summit photos now readily available online, a dedicated group of volunteer researchers, led by the site’s founder, Eberhard Jurgalski, has revealed that many climbers actually stopped short of the true peaks. Dhaulagiri, Manaslu, and Annapurna—the world’s 7th, 8th, and 10th highest mountains respectively—were particularly problematic, the research revealed. Thousands of mountaineers had missed the true summit of Manaslu, dozens had turned around before the top of Dhaulagiri, and only about half of those who claimed to have climbed Annapurna had actually stood on the highest point of its long summit ridge. Among those who’d stopped short of Annapurna’s actual peak, they discovered, was Reinhold Messner.

Initially, Messner’s public response to this news was measured. His own account of the climb had proved a key piece of evidence, after all. In his 2000 book Annapurna, he’d written that he and Kammerlander could see their base camp from the top. But this, according to the researchers, was impossible given the climbers’ locations, leaving them to conclude that the Italian pair had stopped at a high point called the Ridge Junction, 215 feet and 16 vertical feet short of the true summit. In a 2021 interview with The New York Times, Messner acknowledged the possibility that he may have made a mistake. “If they say maybe on Annapurna I got five meters below the summit, somewhere on this long ridge, I feel totally OK,” he said.

A Google Earth of the summit of Annapurna — The arrows on this Google Earth image illustrate the direct lines of sight from the summit of Annapurna (labeled C3W) and the point that the researchers believed Messner and Kammerlander reached (labeled RJ, for “Ridge Junction”). The researchers said that it would be impossible to see the location of Messner and Kammerlander’s 1985 basecamp from the true summit, leading them to deduce that the pair in fact turned around at the Ridge Junction—215 feet and 16 vertical feet short of the highest point. (Photo: 8000ers.com)

A topographical map of Annapurna showing where Messner's basecamp was relative to the summie — Based on photos and a sketch map published in Messner’s own account of climbing Annapurna, researchers from 8000ers.com plotted the location of his 1985 basecamp on a topographical map. (Photo: 8000ers.com)

Jurgalski, an unassuming 71-year-old German retiree, hardly seemed to pose a threat to the great climber’s reputation. He’d never done any mountaineering himself, and his website, which started as a passion project funded through occasional donations, had little public profile. Among those who read it, 8000ers.com was respected as a resource, and there were historians and climbers who actively welcomed the revelations. Several Sherpa guides thanked him for setting the record straight, and during the 2022 season, more than twice the normal number of permits were issued for Manaslu as mountaineers flocked to Nepal to “correct” previous climbs. But outside the confines of the Himalayan climbing community, it seemed his findings wouldn’t make much of a splash.

Then, on September 18, 2023, Guinness World Records issued a statement declaring that it would no longer list Messner as the first person to reach the summits of all of the 8,000-meter peaks. It now believed, based on Jurgalski’s research, that the first true summit ascents of all the 8,000ers were made by American Edmund “Ed” Viesturs. At the stroke of a desk jockey’s cursor, four decades of established mountaineering history had seemingly been erased.

Bombarded by media requests, Messner abandoned his measured stance and went on the offensive. He gave a series of interviews to major news outlets in which he belittled Jurgalski and dismissed his research as “nonsense.” “No one who knows anything about mountaineering would doubt our feat,” he told Italian news agency ANSA, “and Jurgalski knows nothing about it.” To the German news agency DPA, he said Jurgalski “has no idea, he’s not an expert,” suggesting that he’d “just got his mountains confused” or somehow failed to account for the buildup of snow on summits.

In any case, Messner added, the record had never mattered to him. “I don’t care if my name is in the Guinness Book,” he told DPA, a claim he repeated on Facebook, where he wrote, “not the summit but the path is the goal.” On Instagram, where he has more than 250,000 followers, Messner fired off three posts in two days, accusing unspecified people of using him “to make themselves feel important,” and suggesting it was “all about money right?” Meanwhile, on social media and climbing sites across the Web, his acolytes eagerly took up the cause, with a slew of angry comments.

From the start, Jurgalski had tried to make it clear that he wasn’t accusing Messner of lying. He and his team believed that the vast majority of the historic errors they’d discovered—including Messner’s—had been made in good faith. But that didn’t matter. In the minds of many, the die was cast. Jurgalski was just a numbers guy, “a nitpicking theorist,” as Kammerlander put it, in an interview with Der Spiegel. The Chroniclers—as the 8000ers.com teammates called themselves—were just armchair eggheads, critics said. They misunderstood, on a fundamental, philosophical level, what it meant to climb mountains. With their focus on lists and firsts, they were destroying the spirit of true alpinism, and eroding the honor principle by which summits were recognized. After all, Jurgalski had never even been to the Himalayas. Who was he to adjudicate on such matters?

Jurgalski’s fixation with facts and figures long predates 8000ers.com. This old notebook is filled with friends’ dates of birth. Jurgalski takes particular delight in discovering what he calls “moments of synchronicity,” and dates that are related to other significant numbers in his life. (Photo: Tristan Kennedy)

A line had started to form outside the Teatro Sociale in Trento long before the doors opened. This neoclassical theater in the capital of the Dolomites was originally built in 1818 to welcome well-heeled opera lovers in gowns and tailcoats. But on the evening of October 14, 2023, the audience filing through its lobby was more likely to be wearing trail-running shoes or Polartec fleece.

The evening had the potential to be explosive. Reinhold Messner would be onstage alongside Ed Viesturs—the man who, according to Guinness, had replaced him as the first ascender of the 8,000ers less than a month earlier. Such was the level of interest that space had been cleared in the theater’s schedule at the last minute. But anyone who arrived expecting a dramatic showdown would have left disappointed.

For his part, Viesturs, an affable 64-year-old, had found the whole furor about being named number one “kind of embarrassing.” He had accepted the offer to speak largely out of solidarity with Messner, adding that he believed the Italian should still be listed as the first person to climb the 8,000ers, regardless of a few meters here or there. In the end, however, he didn’t have a chance to get into the specifics. “Messner had said, yes to meeting Ed, no to talking about Jurgalski,” remembered Alessandro Filippini, a veteran mountaineering journalist who helped organize the event. On stage, they talked around the issue, without mentioning the German researcher by name. Despite the crowded theater, it seemed no one noticed the elephant in the room.

I met Messner the following day at the Gardena Grödnerhof, a five-star spa hotel near his home in the Dolomites. Driving through fall-speckled forests, I caught an occasional glimpse of the jagged peaks above me, silhouetted against the blue October sky like the world’s most beautiful set of broken teeth. The historic hotel was celebrating its 100th anniversary and Messner, who pioneered rock-climbing routes in the area as a young man, had been booked to talk as part of the festivities.

In person, the 79-year-old had the gruff manner of an offshore trawler captain. With his checked shirt and beaded Tibetan necklace, he stood out from the hotel’s elegantly dressed guests, but he moved easily in their company. When he spoke, he held the private gathering rapt, responding to questions with polished answers in English, Italian, and his native German. No one asked about the 8,000ers, records, or Jurgalski.

When we sat down to talk in the hotel lobby, however, Messner had plenty to say on the subject. “The whole group doing these things are not climbers,” he said of the 8000ers.com team. “They have no idea. I did a 4,000-meter-high wall on Annapurna, first ascent, and they say I missed five meters!” he scoffed. Anyway, he repeated, the record didn’t matter. Being first was never the primary aim. “Traditional alpinism, my alpinism, doesn’t recognize records. I don’t want to be in the Guinness Book. I hope I am never in the Guinness Book again because us traditional alpinists aren’t in a competition.”

Through a spokesperson, Messner later declined to answer fact-checking questions for this article or comment further on the issue. But during our 20-minute interview, he suggested Jurgalski’s principal motivation was a long-simmering desire for revenge. “He says that 30 years ago he met me,” Messner said—an encounter he claimed not to remember but said he’d read about online. Apparently he’d rejected the German’s request for help with some research. “And this,” Messner said dismissively, “is the basis of the whole affair.”

Despite his affected indifference, however, it was clear the issue of Annapurna remained an irritant. The afternoon before their talk, Messner gave Viesturs a private tour of Sigmundskron Castle, the imposing medieval fortress overlooking Bolzano that houses one of his Messner Mountain Museums. Viesturs enjoyed meeting his hero, and their lunch. “But I think he was irritated. Frustrated,” he remembered. “The first thing he said when we met was, ‘Let’s go talk about Annapurna.’ We went to a room with models and he pointed out the summit ridge. You could tell he was fixated with that discussion. It was like this fly in the ointment of his history book.”

As far as Viesturs is concerned, Messner shouldn’t be worried about his place in history, or being listed as the first to climb the 8,000ers. The way he sees it, “The list is the list.” But at the same time, he “doesn’t see how Jurgalski is the bad guy” either. As he put it, “There has to be somebody making sure people are accountable to be on this list. Because there are certain people that do fib, right?”

The book which started it all. “My grandfather gave it to me when I was seven or eight years old,” Jurgalski said. The book was published in 1954 and he updated the list of 8000ers with the first ascents as a child: Kanchenjunga, 1955; Lhotse, 1956; and Dhaulagiri, 1960. (Photo: Tristan Kennedy)

An old Russian-language map, produced during the Soviet era, is one of several which adorn the walls of Jurgalski’s apartment. This shows the China Bhutan border, site of the highest unclimbed mountain in the world. (Photo: Tristan Kennedy)

For almost as long as human beings have been climbing mountains, there have been people willing to lie about reaching the top. On September 27, 1906, the American explorer Frederick Cook sent a telegram to a friend claiming to have reached the summit of Denali, at 20,320. A detailed account of the ascent followed in Harper’s Monthly magazine, accompanied by a photo that supposedly showed his climbing partner Edward Barrill standing on the peak. Two years later, both the claim and Cook’s reputation lay in tatters, after Barrill signed a sworn affidavit confirming that the summit story was invented. But it wasn’t until 1997 that the photo was definitively proved to be a fake.

Like Messner, many other modern alpinists claim that climbing is all about personal experience—about the satisfaction of pushing themselves to new feats of endurance, or tackling particularly technical pitches. Yet the success of expeditions, and the reputations of those who undertake them, are still routinely judged by whether they reach the top. And history suggests that Cook’s fraud is far from unique. From the Italian Cesare Maestri, who went to his grave swearing he’d summited Patagonia’s Cerro Torre in 1959, to the Slovenian Tomo Česen, whose 1990 solo of the south face of Lhotse in Nepal was widely questioned afterward, the world of elite mountaineering is no stranger to scandal. Despite this, there has never been an official body to certify summits.

For more than 50 years, the chief arbiter in the Himalayas was the American Elizabeth Hawley, a journalist and amateur archivist who set up and ran the Himalayan Database from the front room of her Kathmandu apartment. From 1963 until shortly before her death in 2018, Hawley or one of her assistants interviewed members of almost every single expedition climbing in Nepal, filling in meticulously detailed forms about their ascents. A straight-talking woman with sharp, birdlike features, Hawley developed a fearsome reputation as an interrogator, despite her diminutive stature. “She would nitpick, and she would ask you very detailed questions about the summit,” said Ed Viesturs, who met Hawley multiple times. “You could tell she knew if you were lying or not.”

For all her lifelong interest in logging ascents, Hawley never ventured into the high Himalayas herself, believing that chroniclers should keep their work separate. “She nearly killed me when I told her that I was going to go to Everest,” said Billi Bierling, a German mountaineer who worked as her longtime assistant. “She threw her keyboard at me.” Bierling, who took over at the Himalayan Database after Hawley’s death, wasn’t the only friend to experience her spiky side. In an otherwise hagiographic foreword to a 2005 biography of Hawley, Sir Edmund Hillary, the first ascender of Everest and a friend of four decades, wrote: “She is a formidable lady and does not suffer fools easily.”

But although she could be “extremely demanding,” Bierling said she learned a lot from Hawley—and the flip side of her difficult nature was an incredible eye for detail that made her uniquely qualified as a keeper of records. Apparently Hawley had a form of grapheme synesthesia, which meant she saw “all vowels as colors,” Bierling said. “She spotted my spelling mistakes within a second. She’d say, ‘The last time I saw that name, there was a blue in it.’” In spite of her rigor, however, Hawley’s system wasn’t considered infallible—as in 2013, when a celebrated Swiss alpinist returned to Kathmandu, having apparently achieved a sensational first.

A photo showing the Swiss mountaineer Erhard Loretan celebrating on what he believed was the summit of Dhaulagiri. By examining the mountains visible in the background (Annapurna to Loretan’s right, Nilgiri to his left) and cross-referencing the rock formation beneath his right foot with other photos from the summit ridge, the 8000ers.com team concluded that he had celebrated too soon—this is the Metal Pole area, not the true summit. (Photo: Jean Troillet / 8000ers.com)

Ueli Steck’s claim to have soloed a new route on Annapurna’s south face attracted suspicion from the start. His camera had been ripped from his hands by spindrift, he said, and he hadn’t used his GPS watch for fear of running down the battery, which he might need in an emergency. Despite the obvious holes in his story, his proven track record—he was the famous “Swiss Machine,” setter of solo speed records on the great north faces of the Alps—inoculated him from serious skepticism. The following year, his Annapurna ascent earned him a Piolet d’Or, mountaineering’s highest accolade.

But in the years since, experts, including Jurgalski, have become convinced Steck was lying. (Bierling and Hawley, however, never personally doubted his claim.) A forensic investigation by Rodolphe Popier, a French freelance journalist who volunteers for both the Himalayan Database and 8000ers.com, produced compelling evidence for the case against him. But when Steck died during a 2017 attempt on Nuptse, in Nepal, any desire to reinvestigate his claims stalled.

For Popier, however, the case was about more than just the Piolet d’Or. It showed that the entire honor system, by which mountaineering achievements are still routinely judged, was badly in need of reform. “The problem is that you have to rely on the good faith and honesty of the mountaineers themselves. I think 99 percent of them are good faith,” he said. But when the person making a questionable claim was a media darling, he believes the climbing establishment remains far too willing to give the benefit of the doubt.

Popier has tried to suggest changes. Having previously worked with the Piolets d’Or organizers, he was invited to present his findings on Steck at the 2017 awards, as part of an “International forum on the question of proof in mountaineering.” Ultimately, however, they decided not to act on his recommendations, and he was left disappointed at their unwillingness to question the status quo. Christian Trommsdorff, the president of the French alpine club that organizes the Piolets d’Or, told me he and his colleagues worry that introducing reporting criteria, or rules, would compromise the ideals underpinning the awards. They are intended to celebrate ascents done in a particular style and a particular spirit, he said. “Part of that spirit is trust.”

Yet as Popier pointed out, the temptation to cheat “will always exist, because humans are made with egos”—mountaineers perhaps more so than most. For the Frenchman, the real risk is that the actions of a few high-profile offenders like Steck will cast a long, Lance Armstrong–like shadow over the entire discipline. “We need to prevent younger generations from getting into the same trap,” he said—and if the mountaineering establishment wouldn’t set standards on proof, he asked, then who else would hold people accountable?

A handwritten record of fatalities on Mount Everest—part of the archive of material Jurgalski received from the late chronicler Xavier Eguskitza, who worked with both him and Liz Hawley. (Photo: Tristan Kennedy)

Eberhard Jurgalski lives alone, in a modest rented apartment on the outskirts of the small southern German town of Lörrach. I met him at home on a gray, drizzly day in late November 2023, two weeks after his 71st birthday. With his silver ponytail, full beard, and pajama-style pants, Jurgalski dresses like the archetypal aging hippie. But I couldn’t help noticing that his CD collection—arranged alphabetically next to a string of Tibetan prayer flags—included some surprising choices. “Hommm,” he said as he sat down, his voice sonorous and thoughtful, like an Ent’s from The Lord of the Rings. “Let’s not rush.” Before we talked mountains, he said, he wanted to talk music—and to play me his latest favorites: the all-girl Japanese punk and metal groups Hanabie, Otoboke Beaver, and Band-Maid.

Over the next hour, as we watched music videos ripped from YouTube onto homemade DVDs, I learned that Jurgalski knows almost everything there is to know about the modern Japanese metal scene. His fandom was endearingly unselfconscious—he would air-drum along, or wiggle his fingers during the guitar solos. He also appeared to have a perfect recall of the names, birthdays, and even the heights in centimeters of various band members, and he took particular delight in pointing out numbers that mirrored dates of personal or historical significance. He encounters such “moments of synchronicity” often in his life, he told me, and frequently feels compelled to write them down.

Jurgalski has always enjoyed cataloging facts and figures. Most mountaineering enthusiasts are drawn in by the stories: the epic tales of struggle and survival at extreme altitude. Jurgalski’s interest was first sparked by tables showing the vital statistics of various peaks in a children’s book called �Ҿ��ڱ��ü�� (“Summiteer”). “My grandfather gave it to me when I was seven or eight years old,” he said, laughing as he noticed some pencil scribbles. “It was published in 1954, and as you can see, even as a small boy, I already edited the list with the first ascents: Kanchenjunga, 1955; Lhotse, 1956; and Dhaulagiri, 1960.”

At school, he was a bright if somewhat rebellious student. He once completed an hourlong geometry exam in just 12 minutes, he said, but still failed because he let his classmates copy the answers. At 15, he and his friends tattooed each other with a spidery “R” still visible on his left hand. It stood for their wannabe gang name, “the Ruchers,” he said—a misspelling of “Rockers.” “We didn’t really know English,” he laughed.

After graduating, Jurgalski got a doctor’s note to avoid Germany’s mandatory military service and fell in with the hippie movement. In 1972, aged 20, he moved from his hometown of Salzgitter, Germany, to Basel, Switzerland. “Back then it was a big melting pot of teenagers and young men and women from all over the world,” he said. He spent a summer in Amsterdam, sleeping rough in the city’s Vondelpark for a time. Eventually, he settled in Lörrach, just across the German border from Basel, where he worked variously for a youth center, booking bands, and for a shoe-distribution company.

All the while, he was categorizing facts and creating tables—of his favorite bands, famous people’s dates of birth, and any other information he found interesting. In 1981, this hobby led him back to the mountains—or rather to tables of mountain statistics—and he came across a book that listed Anders Bolinder as its source. A Swedish climber, cartographer, and chronicler, Bolinder had made several first ascents in the Andes before moving to Switzerland, where he amassed a large private archive of maps, expedition reports, and other mountain ephemera. Jurgalski found his phone number from the Swiss Foundation for Alpine Research and called him up. Before long, he had begun working as Bolinder’s assistant.

Jurgalski’s particular genius was for geography—creating detailed tables of topographical data that allowed Bolinder to work out what constituted an individual peak, and where mountain ranges began and ended. The pair were working together on a book about the Karakoram Range in Pakistan when Jurgalski met Messner. He remembers the date, as he remembers most dates: April 16, 1987. But what really stuck out, he said, was the mountaineer’s lack of manners.

This annotated image shot from a drone in 2021 clearly shows the summit topography of Manaslu. According to 8000ers.com’s research, many climbers turned around at the points labeled “C3,” or “C2” rather than the true summit, labeled “4”. Ironically, those who stopped short included the photographer behind these photos, Jackson Groves. (Photo: )

Messner was giving a talk in Lörrach Town Hall, and afterward Jurgalski joined the line of people waiting for autographs. He knew Bolinder had corresponded with the mountaineer, and Jurgalski himself had met Messner briefly on the street in 1983. But they had never talked properly. This time, he arrived hoping to speak to Messner about the Karakoram project—if not as equals, then as one interested expert to another. Instead, in Jurgalski’s telling, he was met with a dismissive rant. “He said Anders Bolinder is a charlatan, and nobody cares about my work,” Jurgalski remembered. Later, he learned that Messner and Bolinder had fallen out, but at the time, Jurgalski was simply shocked by Messner’s rudeness.

When Bolinder died four months later, Jurgalski was devastated by the loss of his mentor, but he kept working on his topographical tables. He maintains they are among the work he’s most proud of to this day. In 1988, he rented his first computer, and he spent much of the next decade digitizing the data he and Bolinder had worked on together. He did a stint as the “adventure statistics” consultant for the mountaineering news site Explorers Web in the early 2000s and then, in 2008, he set up 8000ers.com: a place where he and a small community of like-minded amateur stats gurus could publish topographical information, tables of firsts, and other information they’d painstakingly compiled.

In 2012, he and the others who contributed to his site began to notice issues with the summit photos now being posted to social media after every commercial Himalayan climb. Different expeditions were uploading pictures that clearly showed—to Jurgalski’s expert eyes—different areas. Particularly on what Jurgalski calls the “MAD mountains,” Manaslu, Annapurna, and Dhaulagiri—three peaks where the topography isn’t always obvious to the naked eye—there appeared to be confusion about the locations of the actual summits.

Using satellite data gathered from publicly available U.S. and Russian sources—and for Annapurna, the even more precise information available from Germany’s space agency, the DLR—Jurgalski created spreadsheets of coordinates showing exactly where the highest points on each peak were, which he and his fellow chroniclers could then check against any supposed summit photos.

When they started cross-referencing these findings with photos from historic climbs, however, the researchers realized they had a problem on their hands. “It was a complete bloodbath,” Rodolphe Popier remembered. Of the 34 climbers generally accredited as having climbed all the 8,000ers before 2018, they worked out that just two—Ed Viesturs and his frequent climbing partner, Veikka Gustafsson of Finland, had actually made it to all of the true summits.

The 8000ers.com team were all avid students of mountaineering history and had grown up on stories of the greats: Messner, the Polish mountaineer Jerzy Kukuczka, and the Austrian Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner, the first woman to climb all 14 peaks without oxygen. While Jurgalski wasn’t a climber, many of them, including Popier, were. The last thing they wanted to do was topple their heroes. “I was crying when we found out that [Erhard] Loretan was only in the ‘metal pole area’ on Dhaulagiri—140 meters from the true top,” Jurgalski said. He was a particular fan of Loretan and, as with Jerzy Kukuczka, the idea that the Swiss climber was no longer alive to correct the record made the discovery feel especially difficult.

The group debated long and hard about how much of their research to reveal. In 2020, with the blessing of Jurgalski and the others, Australian climber and chronicler Damien Gildea published an article in the journal of the American Alpine Club. It laid out the historic mistakes they had discovered but deliberately did not mention any names. Popier and others urged caution about going any further. But Jurgalski, encouraged by Messner’s measured response to the 2021 New York Times article, argued strongly that they should tell the world what they knew.

“If I think about the facts, I should say Messner has not done the 14, and all the others as well,” he told me, simply because “it is correct.” Popier sighed when remembering the discussions around that time. “Jurgalski is too stubborn in a way, but that’s his character,” he said. “He’s always putting his fingers into the plug.” And so on July 8, 2022, Jurgalski published a lengthy “Summary of Research” on 8000ers.com—and opened Pandora’s Box.

Jurgalski holding images of mountains — Jurgalski leafing through large-format photo prints from historic expeditions. His flat is full of files and photos sent to him by collaborators over the years. (Photo: Tristan Kennedy)

Despite his elevation to the position of bogeyman, Jurgalski maintains he never set out to tarnish Messner’s reputation. His initial summary was careful to state that, despite the error on Annapurna, Messner “remains one of the best mountaineers ever.” He and his fellow volunteers also produced a detailed FAQ document about the research—published a full year before Guinness’s decision—in which they explained that questions of climbing style were outside their purview. Of course they understood the difference between alpine-style ascents like Messner’s—made alone, or in small teams—and commercial climbs reliant on high-altitude porters, fixed ropes, and bottled oxygen, they wrote. “[But] as independent chroniclers, we have a duty to care about the accuracy of the summit. Otherwise what are we for?”

Ultimately, Jurgalski decided to go public in an attempt to draw a line between what he calls “the legacy era” before 2018—when honest mistakes were understandable, given the information and technology available—and the modern era, when there’s no excuse for not knowing where the summit lies.

Unfortunately, the nuances of this position have all too often been overlooked. As the war of words between Jurgalski and Messner ramped up, the German’s weapon of choice—a creaking, Web 1.0 site filled with tiny text and detailed tables of statistics—proved no match for a well-followed Instagram account, a functional PR strategy, and stage time in mountain towns like Trento. “I think I have a fight like David against Goliath,” Jurgalski told me—and the ripple effects of Messner’s displeasure have been far-reaching. “You cannot imagine how many people write to me like ‘You’re an asshole. You’re this, you’re that,” Jurgalski said. “Thousands!”

Casual cruelty in Facebook comments is one thing, but people have also sent him handwritten letters—even going as far as to deliver them personally. “You’re probably the biggest bean-counting asshole on the planet,” read one he showed me. In a touch that suggested either hilarious incompetence or sinister indifference, the author had written it on headed paper, printed with his name and a return address.

“It was bullying, really,” Canadian mountaineering historian Bernadette McDonald said in November 2023, when we spoke in the immediate aftermath of Messner’s decision to single out Jurgalski. “Someone bigger, stronger, and more famous, basically trying to wipe off the face of the earth this insect that was bothering him.” McDonald has worked with both men: Jurgalski as a fact-checker on her books, and Messner as a speaker, in her former role as director of Banff Mountain Film Festival. Like many people who know him, she was hesitant about criticizing the powerful mountaineer publicly, and in our initial interview she said she understood why Messner went on the attack. “His whole persona—his wealth, his fame, all his books, his films—it all goes back to being first on the 8,000ers, and of course Everest without oxygen,” she said. Later, in an email, she clarified that she’d not seen further evidence of bullying behavior, writing, “I think the intensity of their standoff has eased somewhat.” But initially she told me Messner had “lost a lot of credibility” by lashing out. “He didn’t need to do that,” she said.

Other observers have pointed out that Messner’s line about records not mattering doesn’t really stand up to scrutiny. “If Messner claims that his alpinism was never about any records, that’s pure hypocrisy, in my opinion,” said Jochen Hemmleb, a German writer and filmmaker who specializes in mountaineering history. As a lifelong alpinist himself, with several Himalayan expeditions under his belt, Hemmleb said he respects Messner’s emphasis on style and climbing in small teams. But he remains baffled by the insistence that the summits weren’t the goal—or that being known for being first somehow doesn’t matter.

“I’m fully with Messner: style is perhaps everything in alpinism,” he explained, “but please, don’t claim that your alpinism has never been about records. It has always been, to a certain degree, about achievements that could be sold to an audience, and the summit sells—I mean, it’s something everybody understands.” Messner’s career, he pointed out, was always based on his marketing savvy as well as his supreme climbing skills. His genius lay in packaging purist alpinism for a mainstream audience, and in order to do that he had to speak in the language of firsts and records. “You can do your alpinism with style and completely abolish records,” Hemmleb said, “but if you want to make a living, if you want to be in the public eye, you probably have to engage in that record game. Nothing wrong with that, but please, let’s be fucking honest about it.” The real issue for Hemmleb, however, was that the noise around Messner’s historic record had drowned out any discussion of the value of Jurgalski’s current work.

Climbing all of the 8,000ers is no longer the preserve of alpinism’s elite. In recent years, the number of climbers on the peaks has skyrocketed, and mountaineers with comparatively little experience can now make names for themselves with speed records and firsts. In 2019, Nirmal “Nimsdai” Purja, a former special-forces soldier, scaled all 14 in under seven months, claiming a speed record in the process. A Netflix film about his effort, 14 Peaks, made Purja a global superstar, and in the wake of his success several guiding outfits, responding to demand, retooled their operations to cater to clients who wanted to climb all 14—often chasing records of their own.

The sheer weight of numbers means it has become difficult for independent observers to keep track of what’s happening on the world’s highest mountains. In June 2023, Billi Bierling announced that Hawley’s Himalayan Database would no longer attempt to register all commercial clients tackling the standard, fixed-rope routes.

Despite the recent rush, however, the attraction of the 8,000ers remains strong. The potential rewards for climbing them, in terms of reputation and earning potential, are still significant—as are the risks. When the stakes are so high, there’s an obvious temptation for climbers, guides, or both, to call a peak “done” when it’s not. These days, “you have a whole industry based on making people believe that they reached the true summits,” said Hemmleb. So it’s hardly surprising if people sometimes fudge the truth.

Japanese climber Toshio Imanishi was the first to reach the top of Manaslu, in 1956. His summit photo shows him standing on the true summit. (Photo: Toshio Imanishi)

American climber Ed Viesturs, standing on the same point in 1999. (Photo: Ed Viesturs)

Buried in the thicket of densely packed text that makes up Jurgalski’s “Summary of Research,” one allegation appears to have flown under the radar: Nirmal Purja, Jurgalski wrote, didn’t actually reach the true summit of either Dhaulagiri or Manaslu during his 14 Peaks push in 2019. Jurgalski has also claimed that, unlike Messner and the other “legacy era” climbers, Purja should have known he was stopping short of at least one of the true peaks, because the information was already out there.

In a statement to ��ԹϺ��, Purja denied the claim that he stopped short of the true summits of Manaslu and Dhaulagiri in 2019, and his spokesperson rejected as “false” the claim he might have done so knowingly. Rather, Purja says, he and his team climbed to the true summits of both peaks as recognized at the time by the Nepalese government. “Technology is improving all the time, making it easier to find the true summits,” Purja said in his statement. “For example, the ‘true summit’ of Manaslu was only declared, with the new summit information being made available publicly, in 2021. But that doesn’t mean that everyone’s records and achievements before 2021 aren’t valid or real. To me, everyone who summited Manaslu to the summit known before 2021 summited—it’s still a record,” he said.

Jurgalski, however, pointed out that he had published the first detailed report showing the true location of Manaslu’s summit on July 31, 2019—almost two months before Purja made his ascent, on September 27. In the same post, which he repeated on Facebook, he linked out to the reports about the summits of Dhaulagiri and Annapurna, and he warned specifically about the “uncertain topography” of all three mountains. The post was widely read in mountaineering circles, attracting admiring reactions and comments on Facebook from Bernadette McDonald, Alessandro Filippini, and the Italian climber Simone Moro, among others.

An annotated image of Dhaulagiri from the north shows the commonly-climbed routes onto the summit ridge, the true summit, and the various other locations that have caused confusion among climbers. According to 8000ers.com’s research, many climbers have turned around at the points labeled “West rocky (fore)summit”, and the area labeled “Metal Pole,” so called because at some point in the late 1980s, an expedition placed a metal pole there, perhaps believing it to be the summit. (Photo: Boyan Petrov/8000ers.com)

In 2021, Purja reclimbed both Manaslu and Dhaulagiri—albeit with far less fanfare—reaching the true summits as identified by Jurgalski in each case. But this didn’t stop Guinness, in 2023, from modifying the record that stands at the center of 14 Peaks. Its official version now states that Purja made his “true ascents” in two years and 168 days. While Purja still disputes this claim, writing to ��ԹϺ�� that he “climbed the 14 Peaks in 6 months, 6 days in 2019,” other climbers have been more willing to accept Jurgalski’s corrections publicly—and buy into the idea that, in the modern era, things should be done differently.

Mingma Gyalje Sherpa, a.k.a. Mingma G, is one of the most accomplished guides working in the Himalayas today. Alongside Purja, he was one of the leaders of the all-Nepali team who made the historic first winter summit of K2, in 2021, and has “so many 8,000ers to his name it [is] hard to keep track,” according to Bernadette McDonald’s latest book, Alpine Rising. He told me he’d first crossed swords with Jurgalski in 2015, after a YouTube video he posted of the summit of Annapurna attracted attention online. The 8000ers.com team “said we missed four [vertical] meters,” Mingma G remembered. “I felt like we reached the summit and I started arguing with them.” In 2017, he and Jurgalski had another bust-up on Facebook, about an ascent of Broad Peak. “But in the end,” in both cases, Mingma G said, “he was correct.”

In the years since, the Sherpa has developed a grudging respect for Jurgalski. It was largely thanks to Mingma G’s efforts that the route to the true summit of Manaslu was reopened during the 2021 season, when climbers first returned to “correct” their climbs. And in recent years, he has become an increasingly full-throated champion of the German chronicler and his work. “This man is extraordinary,” he said. “He has a deep knowledge about all the summits, each rock on the summit, [and] what could be seen on the summit.”

The way Mingma G sees it, future debates about where people stand—or stood—on the 8,000ers are senseless. “We shouldn’t be arguing at this point. Eberhard Jurgalski, he made everything clear: OK, Reinhold Messner missed this part, Jerzy Kukuczka missed this part, and I think he has proved everything.”

A close-up photo of a man's hand with an — The “R” visible on Jurgalski’s left hand is a homemade tattoo from his teenage years. He and his friends were in a wannabe gang called “the ruchers”, he explained—a misspelling of “rockers”. “We didn’t really know English,” he laughed. (Photo: Tristan Kennedy)

Early this April, Jurgalski spoke with me again from his flat in Lörrach. As the video connected, he had his head in his hands. The Himalayan climbing season was underway, and he had his work cut out—following the many summit bids, examining their photos, and keeping his records up to date. It’s a Herculean task.

“You must imagine, before Mingma G did this special traverse to the true summit of Manaslu in 2021, we could only prove 53 people summited properly. Now there are maybe 140 people who corrected their false summit, and last autumn there were 459 people on the true summit of Manaslu. In one season. Four hundred and fifty-nine,” he said.

There are times, especially since the Messner fallout, when Jurgalski has found the constant need to keep on top of all these ascents overwhelming. “Since it all came out, I feel I’m working 24/7, because also at night it is in my dreams,” he said. But the work is a compulsion as much as a calling. His brain seems hardwired for completism, and such is his eye for inaccuracies in data—any data—that he sometimes sees run-of-the-mill mistakes as personal affronts. “No!” he said at one stage, his Ent-like voice booming with frustration, when I misquoted a date we’d discussed several months previously. To his detractors, this makes Jurgalski easy to mock. For his supporters, however, these same qualities are what qualify him to be a keeper of records.

“I like the dedication and I like the fascination with details,” said Jochen Hemmleb. “He is, in many ways, a worthy successor to Elizabeth Hawley.” As both a climber and a historian, Hemmleb feels he has one boot in each camp. He believes that just like the American archivist, Jurgalski contributes to mountaineering in a way that goes beyond mere detective work.

“In order to have an objective assessment of history and of achievements, you need the outside view,” he said. Statistics tell stories, he pointed out, and records, far from diminishing the achievements of alpinists, help put them into context. Professional climbers and amateur chroniclers shouldn’t be seen as enemies, Hemmleb believes. Their relationship is far more symbiotic than that. Each group brings a very different, and very particular, set of skills to the table, he said. But if you want a complete picture of what really happens in the high Himalayas, you need both.

Hearing Hemmleb weigh up the historical value of cold, hard facts against the feelings of those who’d experienced cold and hardship firsthand reminded me of something Jurgalski himself had said as I left his flat in Lörrach. Of course he didn’t know what it felt like to climb an 8,000-meter peak. How could he? The world outside his window, with its orderly lawns and neatly swept streets, was a million miles away from the Himalayas and the chaotic jumble of snow, rock, and ice that makes up their summits. But keeping this distance, remaining an outsider, and maintaining his objectivity were not just valuable for his work, he told me—it was vital. “I’m not a mountaineer,” he said. “I cannot do what they do. But no mountaineer, not even a very skilled mountaineer, could do what I do.”

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Lead Illustration: Tristan Kennedy (Jurgalski, Map); Getty (Messner); Art by Hannah Dewitt

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The Man Who Took On Reinhold Messner’s Mountaineering Record

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