‘I Needed No Proof’: Reinhold Messner And The ‘Third Climber’
Jaan Künnap/Wikimedia CommonsReinhold Messner in 1985, 15 years after he encountered the third man phenomenon.
Another climber who reported experiencing third man syndrome was Italian mountaineer Reinhold Messner.
In 1970, Messner embarked on a perilous climb of Nanga Parbat in the Himalayas with his brother, Günther. Though the brothers succeeded in summiting the mountain, they ran into trouble during their descent of Diamir Face. At that point, a strange third presence seemed to appear to help them.
As Messner wrote in his 2011 book The Naked Mountain:
“On one section the front points of our crampons were only biting a few millimetres deep into the glassy hard ice… At times our whole weight was on our crampons and axes… Suddenly there was a third climber next to me. He was descending with us, keeping a regular distance a little to my right and a few steps away from me, just out of my field of vision. I could not see the figure and still maintain my concentration but I was certain there was someone there. I could sense his presence; I needed no proof.”
The American Academy of AchievementGünther and Reinhold Messner on the Nanga Parbat in 1970, the year Günther lost his life.
This “third man” wasn’t a guardian angel who could work miracles. In fact, Günther tragically lost his life during the descent. And Messner later came up with a novel explanation for the phenomenon he’d experienced.
“I managed to understand,” he wrote, “that the third man was just me watching myself from a different plane of existence.”
