The greatest athlete in the history of his sport recently passed away.\u00a0 You’ve probably never heard of him.<\/p>\n
In 1954, a group of Italian mountaineers attempted to climb K2, the second tallest mountain in the world. \u00a0Everest had been conquered the summer before, and the climbers hoped their expedition would repair Italian pride damaged since World War 2.\u00a0 On July 31, Lino Lacedelli and Achille Compagnoni reached the summit, but not without controversy.\u00a0 During the climb, a member of their support team named Walter Bonatti (who had famously conquered the Capucin Massif on Mt. Blanc at age 21) and a Pakistani porter named Mahdi were bringing oxygen canisters up the mountain.\u00a0 When they arrived at the highest support camp just below the summit, they found that the camp had been moved and their team was gone.\u00a0 They were alone at 26,600 feet, forced to spend the night with no tent or equipment.<\/p>\n
Miraculously, they survived.\u00a0 The Bonatti\/Mahdi bivouac is considered one of the most impressive episodes in the history of alpine climbing.\u00a0 Unfortunately, Mahdi lost his fingers and toes to frostbite.\u00a0 And the worst was yet to come.\u00a0 In explaining what had happened, Compagnoni accused the two support climbers of using up all the oxygen and turning back before reaching camp.\u00a0 Bonatti produced two photographs that substantiated that the camp had been moved, and he argued that Compagnoni had moved it to keep Bonatti from joining the team that reached the summit.\u00a0 It was a bold claim that essentially accused Compagnoni of betrayal and attempted mountaineering manslaughter.<\/p>\n
Bonatti was roundly criticized and shunned by his peers.\u00a0 The climbing community rallied around their new hero Compagnoni and accepted his version of the story.<\/p>\n
Ostracized but undeterred, Bonatti kept climbing on his own.\u00a0 In the summer of 1955, he was soloing on Petit Dru in the French Alps when he was overtaken by a summer storm.\u00a0 In the dark and rain, he tied a rope into a series of loops with carabiners attached, and repeatedly hurled it up the rock face.\u00a0 One of the carabiners caught hold in an unseen crack, and Bonatti ascended hand-over-hand in what one mountaineer later called, “the most important single feat ever to take place in mountaineering.” \u00a0For the next 10 years, Bonatti continued to astonish; if anything was deemed unclimbable, he would climb it. \u00a0In his final act, in 1965, he climbed the North Face of the Matterhorn.\u00a0 Solo.\u00a0 In the dead of winter. \u00a0And then he retired from climbing.<\/p>\n
He became a popular adventure journalist.\u00a0 But nothing could remove the “thorn in his heart” of Compagnoni’s allegations.\u00a0 Until, in 2004, Achille Compagnoni died, and his partner Lino Lacedelli finally came clean.\u00a0 He admitted that Bonatti had done nothing wrong; the K2 camp had in fact been moved without warning.<\/p>\n
At last, after 50 years alone, Bonatti had reached the one summit that had long eluded him: the clearing of the stain on his reputation.\u00a0 And what a reputation!\u00a0 Journalist David Roberts, when asked to summarize Bonatti’s exploits, said, “If you had a poll of the greatest mountaineers of all time, he might win it. It is that simple.”<\/p>\n
Walter Bonatti made the ultimate ascent on Sept 11, at age 81.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The greatest athlete in the history of his sport recently passed away.\u00a0 You’ve probably never heard of him. In 1954, a group of Italian mountaineers attempted to climb K2, the second tallest mountain in the world. \u00a0Everest had been conquered the summer before, and the climbers hoped their expedition would…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[210,684,842,942,1310],"class_list":["post-265","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-6","tag-capucin-massif","tag-k2","tag-mountain-climbing","tag-petit-dru","tag-walter-bonatti"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=265"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/265\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=265"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=265"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quicksilverhg.com\/thequicksliver\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=265"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}