Reinhold Messner desperately fought off terror.

"Panic has me in its clutches and all I want to do is scream," Messner wrote in his book "Solo Nanga Parbat," describing his first solo attempt to climb the Diamir Flank of Pakistan's 26,660-foot Nanga Parbat in 1973.

Not only was Messner attempting to be the first to scale the 10th highest mountain on Earth alone and make the first fully solo ascent of a peak higher than 8,000 meters (26,248 feet) — he was also returning to the mountain that took his younger brother, Gunther, after they reached its peak three years earlier. Theirs had been the third expedition to do so.

Messner ended his 1973 assault near 20,000 feet, he said, "and then climbed hastily down again, as if I were fleeing from my own fear."

But the climber from the Italian Tyrol didn't abandon his effort due to a fear of heights or of death. He quit because he hadn't yet learned to manage the deep loneliness that consumed him high on the indifferent mountain.

"The main difficulty is not the lack of oxygen, not the climbing, the cold, the storms — but to be so far away from other human beings," he told the International Herald Tribune in 1995.

Messner refused to see the abandoned attempt as a failure. Instead, it was a victory.

Why? Because he'd climbed the very mountain that beat him before.

After the avalanche-swept descent from Nanga Parbat's peak in 1970, Messner spent two days searching for his lost brother. Exhausted, he literally crawled off the mountain, then spent months in a clinic where he had seven frostbitten toes amputated.

The ordeal left him feeling as though he were a physical and psychological cripple. "It was clear that I would never be able to climb again," he told the Herald Tribune.

He did indeed climb again. In 1975, he and partner Peter Habeler vaulted up 26,470-foot Gasherbrum I in Pakistan. The climb — made alpine-style, using no fixed lines or heavy equipment — grabbed the attention of the entire climbing community. More astounding, Messner and Habeler succeeded without bottled oxygen, an experiment widely thought to be suicidal.

In 1978, the duo conquered 29,035-foot Everest with the same technique.

Messner also returned to Nanga Parbat in 1978 and finished what he'd started three years earlier. He pioneered a brutal new route up the mountain's Diamir Flank. In 1980, Messner was the first to climb Everest alone — again without supplemental oxygen.

New Heights

The Tyrolean would go on to become the first to scale all 14 of the world's peaks of at least 26,248 feet, often establishing new and difficult routes in the process. He completed the checklist in 1986 by climbing 27,824-foot Makalu I in Nepal and nearby 27,923-foot Lhotse I in a single season, leaving the square jaws of the climbing trade agape. He's considered the world's top climber.

"Messner is to climbing what Michael Jordan is to basketball," wrote mountaineer and author Jon Krakauer in a 1997 Outside magazine tribute. "He has taken the sport to a level not previously imagined."

Messner's transformation of the sport revolved around the alpine-style climbing he learned as a child. At 16, he and brother Gunther scaled the north face of the Sass Rigais in the Geislerspitzen, a 9,900-foot peak in the Dolomite Alps.

The boys immediately set their sights on bigger challenges. Their dream climb was the Eigerwand, the Eiger's foreboding north wall. Its sheer face towered more than a mile above the Swiss valley.

Unlike larger, more exotic and distant peaks in Asia and South America, the Eiger was within reach of the boys' home in Villnoss, Italy. But they tempered their ambition.

"The reason we didn't go and attempt (the Eigerwand) that same summer was because our respect for such faces matched their reputation," Messner wrote in his 1978 book, "The Big Walls."

Messner, 62, isn't Hollywood's idea of a strapping mountain man. Photos from his climbing heyday show a stringy physique that's more waif than weightlifter. Messner's aims as a 16-year-old were sky high. He knew he had a great deal to learn. When he climbed with others in his early days, he stayed second on the rope to learn as much as he could from the more experienced leaders.

He learned to organize belays — the securing of ropes — from Sepp Mayerl, who built church tower roofs in East Tyrol. He climbed with Heini Holzer, a chimney sweep from South Tyrol, who helped him overcome his fear of extreme climbing.

In the early days, Messner was drawn primarily by the difficulty of a particular route. Only when he started climbing beyond the Alps did his attention focus more and more on the summits.

Mountain peaks became liberation and closure. Messner acknowledges that descents are critical and — particularly on 26,000-foot and higher mountains — often more dangerous than ascents.

Every climber has to seek his own goals from his own point of view, he says. For him, it's about getting to the top.

"I find the greatest satisfaction and the widest expression on high summits, summits reached by climbing big, hard walls," he wrote.

Against The Grain

Messner has long gone against the climbing grain — his application of streamlined alpine techniques to high-altitude peaks ran firmly against mountaineering orthodoxy. Traditional efforts are massive and costly. These involve tons of equipment, dozens of support personnel and thousands of dollars.

Messner prefers a lean approach — he's put two climbers up a mountain face for the cost of an average vacation.

"No extra oxygen, no fixed ropes, no established camps, no support teams — just a clean break from the siege tactics that dominated the game until then," Brad Wetzler wrote in a 2002 Outside magazine profile of Messner.

Messner believes in stringent follow-up — even when some think he goes to ridiculous lengths. After an encounter with a large creature high in a Tibetan mountain pass, he launched an investigation into the Himalayan legend of the yeti — the Abominable Snowman — to satisfy his own curiosity.

Messner was ridiculed, even though renowned mountaineer and explorer Edmund Hillary in 1960 performed a similar but inconclusive search.

After 12 years of on-again, off-again investigation, Messner concluded that the yeti and what he witnessed were subspecies of the region's long haired, sometimes yellow- or white-headed black bears.

When he finishes one challenge, he's on to the next. In 1990, he teamed with Germany's Arved Fuchs to be the first team to cross the Antarctic without support.

He knows his limits. Messner eased away from technical climbing as he reached his 50s.

Instead, he shifted focus and launched a foundation aimed at cleaning up high-altitude environments littered with debris by mountain climbers over decades. From 1999 to 2004, he sat on the European Parliament as a member of the Italian Green Party.

BY ALAN R. ELLIOTT