Growing up in Austria, Reinhold Messner's father introduced him to mountaineering. By the time he was 13, Messner had made many challenging climbs in the Eastern Alps

In 1970, he and his younger brother, Gunther, set off for the Himalayas to climb Nanga Parbati. Unfortunately, during the descent of the mountain, Gunther was lost under an avalanche Reinhold went back to the mountain a year later in hopes of finding his brother's body, but he was not successful.

Reinhold Messner made his first climb to the top of Mount Everest in 1978 with Austrian Peter Habeler. This was historic because it was the first climb ever accomplished without the use of supplemental oxygen. Messner returned to the mountain in 1980 and made the first solo climb, also without oxygen. Messner described himself as "…nothing more than a single narrow gasping lung" as he summitted Everest. He has set a trend among mountaineers, and by 1996 more than 60 men and women had duplicated Reinhold's record of summitting without supplemental oxygen.

Reinhold Messner, a record holder on many levels, was the first man to ever climb all 14 of Earth's tallest peaks

In 1990, he became the first person to cross Antarctica on foot.

In 1995 Messner went on record saying that he had stopped high altitude climbing, but in 1996 he showed up in base camp below Gasherbrum I in the Himalayas. When he saw the crowd of hopeful summitters in base-camp, though, he just turned around and left. In the summer of 2000, however, he returned to the Himalayas attempting to summit Nanga Parbat via an unclimbed route. After he and his brother Hubert, and two other climbers reached a very high spot on the mountain face, they turned back because the only route to the summit was too dangerous.