“A tourist follows a trail, a mountaineer finds one.” Outspoken, charismatic, daring and brilliant, few individuals hold the respect of the mountaineering community like Reinhold Messner. Widely ...

Editor’s note: “Behind the News” is the product of Sun staff assisted by the Sun’s AI lab, which includes a variety of tools such as Anthropic’s Claude, Perplexity AI, Google Gemini and ChatGPT.

At age 77, after having pushed the limits of what a human being can physically achieve, Reinhold Messner looks back at a life lived at the edge of life and death, and turns philosophical about the art ...