Mountains - Memories - Museums

The Dolomites hold immeasurable thrills for travellers – now, the opening of a new mountaineering collection from one of the greatest climbers of all time, Reinhold Messner, is adding new meaning to their story.

Mountains are an unlikely location for a collection of museums. Yet tucked away at high altitude, they have become gathering spots to reflect on nature, modern alpinism and climate change. What's more, they all have one thing in common: record-breaking climber Reinhold Messner.

Messner has been confronting extreme challenges for much of his life. In 1980, the Italian made the first solo ascent of Mount Everest. By 1986, he'd conquered the world's 14 highest mountains before anyone else, and without supplementary oxygen. In the years that followed, he dragged a sled unaided across both Greenland and Antarctica. His triumphs are enough to stir anyone's inner explorer.

Messner might be regarded as one of history's greatest climbers, but he's also a keeper of stories. Since summiting his first mountain aged five, he has written 80 books about his white-knuckle expeditions, and, even at 81 years old, the German speaker from Brixen in South Tyrol in the north of Italy is not preparing to slow down. If anything, he has many more stories to tell.

His latest project, located in the 3 Zinnen Dolomites region, was developed with his wife, Diane, amid rising interest in the area among travellers. The number of visitors to South Tyrol is consistently growing, according to the tourist board, and its mountains are a neat synthesis of two different worlds: a setting for entry-level hikers and a fantasy land for mountaineers.

When I met Messner, he was walking with small steps to his latest venture, Reinhold Messner Haus, which opened this summer. "It is my dream and challenge to keep the original spirit of mountaineering alive," he said, as if batting away any suggestion of retirement. "To pass my knowledge onto the next generation – that is why we have created this new house."

On the face of it, Reinhold Messner Haus is both a collection of trusted mountaineering tools and a timeline of the Italian's extraordinary feats. The building is not in a town centre like most traditional museums, but hidden away across a plateau atop Mount Elmo above the village of Sexten. It isn't located in any regular structure, either; it is inside a former cable car station that had previously been earmarked for demolition. "Sustainability in action," as Diane told me. "Everything was already here, so we didn't use new materials or resources." Now, the bulk of this depot-turned-visitor-centre is open to the public; the other rooms, where the Messners have a one-bed apartment, remain private.

While the spaces are filled with curios from the Messners' private collection gathered from decades of travel, the presence of Tibetan prayer wheels and Mahakala masks, Hindu figurines and uplifting paintings makes it feel closer to a cultural and artistic meeting place. "We wanted to provide a platform for a better understanding of our relationship with nature," said Diane. Inside, I keenly felt this sense of spirituality. Outside, meanwhile, the Dolomites beamed, baring their teeth back at me.

Down a stairwell rigged with inactive cables and cogs, we arrived in a room designed as a traditional adventurer's study and archive. Here, the golden age of mountaineering comes to life through maps, charts and boxes of black-and-white photos, all of which Messner has never sorted through, until now. "You need to understand that I would go away on an expedition, come home, write a book, do a few lectures, then leave on another trip – I never cared what was going on with all my materials," said Reinhold. "I wasn't worrying about yesterday or the past. I was living in the future."

- Author: Mike MacEacheran, BBC

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