Mountain High Museum

An eccentric museum in South Tyrol reflects one man’s unique view of mountaineering.

- Alice Gregory

IN SEPTEMBER, I FOUND MYSELF 1,524 METERS UP THE Dolomite peak of Kronplatz mountain, lost, alone, and completely happy. As I gnawed my way up, I had to stop every 100 meters and catch my breath. But whatever panic and lung-burn I experienced was mitigated by the frosted clover and edelweiss and enzian. The air smelled sweetly of manure and cut grass; the tinkle of cowbells and the call of cuckoo birds echoed through the valleys.

Waiting for me at the top of the mountain was Reinhold Messner. At age five, Messner scaled his first mountain in South Tyrol, the autonomous province of Northern Italy where he was born and still lives. In the decades that followed, he went on to climb another 3,500 peaks and became one of the most celebrated mountaineers of the 20th century, wrote more than 50 books, loaned his name to a line of toiletries and represented the Italian Green Party in the European Parliament.

Now 72, Messner no longer climbs professionally. Instead, he has spent the past decade focusing on the Messner Mountain Museum, six high-altitude institutions devoted to the history and culture of mountain climbing.

The entire project is estimated to have cost 30 million euros. The first museum opened in 1995 in the Vinschgau region. The latest, Corones, a crashed-spaceship of a building that opened in 2015, is here on Kronplatz, the nearly 2,275-meter mountain that I exuberantly and somewhat stupidly volunteered to climb. Construction of the 1,000-square-meter concrete building involved the excavation of more than 3,900 cubic meters of mountain.