Messner's contribution to his profession is not only a list of astonishing feats but also the unrelenting philosophy that lay behind them. "I'm only interested in our experiences and not in the mountains—I'm not a naturalist," he told me. "I'm interested in what's going on in the human beings. . . . William Blake wrote a line, when men and mountains are meeting, big things are happening," he said, paraphrasing a favorite quote from the 18th-century poet, and the philosophy behind his new museum. "If you have a high-way on Everest, you don't meet the mountain. If everything is prepared, and you have a guide who is responsible for your security, you cannot meet the mountain. Meeting mountains is only possible if you . . . are out there in self-sufficiency."

In an essay he wrote when he was only 27, he decried the siege tactics that allowed even an unskilled climber to conquer a mountain bolt by bolt, issuing a plea for both the mountain that cannot "defend itself" and for the climber, who was being cheated of the opportunity to test the limits of his courage and skill. Titled "The Murder of the Impossible," the essay, now considered a minor classic, argued that the wielders of expansion bolts and pegs "thoughtlessly killed the ideal of the impossible." Messner's characteristic minimalism—he is adamant he has never put an expansion bolt in a face of rock, as he has never used bottled oxygen—was, therefore, a brash demonstration that the principles he preached could be put to spectacular practice. His landmark high-altitude alpine-style climbs liberated both the individual climber, by showing alternatives to the hugely encumbered and expensive classic expeditions, as well as the mountains themselves. The irony, of course, was that it was Messner who, by these very achievements, murdered and laid in the dust all traditional notions of what constituted "the impossible."

Thanks to the stream of books that followed his accomplishments, and aided by dark good looks that rendered him promotable, Messner achieved a celebrity status that extended far beyond subscribers to Alpinist and Gripped. In Europe, where frequent appearances on television have kept him in the public eye, as well as afforded him a platform for his often blunt outspokenness, he continues to evoke strong emotions, received by admirers with the adoration bestowed on rock stars and by his detractors with resentful charges of self-promotion. He receives both with equal enthusiasm. "Obstacles energize me," he told me. Tirelessly confrontational, he is famous for outbursts of towering rage. "I became so angry that I yelled in a way that the windows there, they were shivering," he told me with satisfaction of an encounter with a local foe. One could say fairly that Reinhold was conditioned from youth by the same phenomena that energize him now: obstacles, risk, and high-adrenaline rage.