Walter Bonatti, 1930–2011

Five days into a solo climb on the Petit Dru in the French Alps, Italian mountain climber Walter Bonatti was trapped in a storm with no retreat; above him was a featureless expanse of rock, and below him an abyss. Bonatti, then 25, tied carabiners into loops on his climbing rope, then repeatedly tossed it upward until one of the carabiners lodged itself in an unseen crack in the rock face. Bonatti climbed up hand over hand, in what British mountaineer Doug Scott later called “probably the most important single climbing feat ever to take place in mountaineering.” The rock face he conquered, subsequently named the Bonatti Pillar, collapsed in 2005.

Bonatti was born to working-class parents in Bergamo, Italy, and found his passion climbing in the Alps as a teenager, said the London Guardian. A precocious talent, he was selected in 1954 as the youngest member of a national expedition to climb K2, the world’s second highest peak, seen as a bid “to recover some Italian pride after the agonies of the Second World War.”

The expedition was “a moment of glory for Italy,” but a source of lifelong bitterness for Bonatti, said The New York Times. Bonatti was assigned to support two older climbers, Achille Compagnoni and Lino Lacedelli, in their final assault on the peak by transporting oxygen canisters to a prearranged camp a third of a mile below it. But when he and a Pakistani porter arrived, they found that the others had moved the camp, forcing Bonatti and his partner to spend a freezing night exposed on the face of the mountain. Compagnoni and Lacedelli claimed that Bonatti had emptied the oxygen tanks in a bid to sabotage their ascent, and it was “a big thorn in his heart” that almost everyone believed them, said his partner, Rossella Podestà.

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Bonatti “was ostracized by other mountaineers and spent years living down a reputation for selfishness and egotism,” said the London Telegraph. That finally ended in 2004, when Lacedelli wrote a book admitting that Bonatti had done nothing wrong on K2, restoring his stature as “one of the finest mountaineers of the 20th century.”