Christian Kuntner

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Christian Kuntner (born January 15, 1962 in Prad ; † May 18, 2005 in Nepal ) was an Italian extreme mountaineer .

Kuntner has climbed 13 of the 14 eight-thousanders , including Mount Everest with Marco Bianchi in 1995 . On May 18, 2005, he was killed by an avalanche on the fourth attempt to climb the 8091  m high Annapurna . Kuntner was buried on May 28, 2005 in his home village of Prad.

Life

Kuntner was born on January 15, 1962 in Prad ( South Tyrol ). He completed his school days in Bolzano with a degree in mechanical engineering and then taught mathematics and natural science at the secondary school in Prad for eight years. He then worked as a freelancer in a planning and surveying office, as this gave him more time to plan and carry out his expeditions. Between the various expeditions and ascents he worked as a technical draftsman and mountain guide.

Expeditions and ascents

Project in the "Year of the Mountain" 2002

His passion for mountaineering began in his native mountains, the Alps. The Ortler Group, the Dolomites , the Bernese Oberland and the Valais Alps were often the destinations of his tours. For the International Year of the Mountain 2002, he and his fellow mountain climber Abele Blanc had planned a very special project: from mid-April to mid-July 2002, all recognized 4000-meter peaks in the Alps were to be climbed. However, weeks of bad weather made it impossible for them and so they “only” reached 60 of the 84 peaks in the planned time.

Successes in the Himalayas

In 1991 he began climbing the Himalayas: The Cho Oyu (8188 m) was his first eight-thousander. This was followed by Manaslu (8163 m), Broad Peak (8051 m), Dhaulagiri (8167 m), Mount Everest (8848 m), K2 (8611 m) via the Japanese route in the north face, Shishapangma (8027 m) with ski run, Hidden Peak (Gasherbrum I) (8080 m) and Gasherbrum II (8034 m), Makalu (8485 m), Nanga Parbat (8125 m), Kangchenjunga (8586 m) via a new route and Lhotse (8516 m). Kuntner reached all the peaks without the aid of additional oxygen and high porters.

death

The last of the 14 eight-thousanders, the Annapurna (8091 m), was his undoing. In 1997, 2002 and 2003, Kuntner tried both the north face, which was first climbed by the French Maurice Herzog and Louis Lachenal in 1950, and the south face, which the British Sir Chris Bonington climbed only 20 years later . Due to unpredictable snowstorms, omnipresent crevasses and great danger of avalanches, both routes are still among the most feared 8000 meter routes.

During the ascent in 2003 Christian Kuntner described: “The steepness and exposure of this ice and rock wall falling over 3000 meters into the depths is breathtaking. Every wrong step ends in nothing, at best three kilometers deeper in the vertical fall on the torn glacier field. The climbing difficulties sometimes exceed the fifth degree, the inclinations of the ice walls are between 60 ° and 90 °, so they are vertical. "

Between May 16 and May 18, 2005, various expedition teams met in Camp II at an altitude of around 6000 meters. They had fought their way up the north face one after the other and were now stuck because of the bad weather conditions (blizzards and snowfalls). When trying to attach fixed ropes to get to Camp III, which is about 1000 meters higher, an ice avalanche suddenly broke off on the morning of May 18 and buried the group climbing around Kuntner under itself. The injured climbers (Christian Kuntner, Stephan Paul Andres, Abele Blanc, Marco Camadona and Marco Barmasse) were rescued by their colleagues, but Kuntner's internal injuries were so severe that he died a little later in the camp.

Silk road

Even away from the mountains, Kuntner repeatedly undertook extraordinary tours. In 1998 his goal was the 10,000 km long Silk Road , the longest trade route in the world. In just three months he rode his mountain bike from Islamabad ( Pakistan ) via Kashgar ( China ) to Lhasa ( Tibet ), over passes and through deserts.

Publications

Christian Kuntner has recorded his eight-thousand-meter ascent in a volume of photographs and provided them with notes. The foreword was written by Reinhold Messner . The aim of the tape was to document all 14 eight-thousanders in its own way. A fatal ice avalanche on its last eight-thousander brought work on this illustrated book to an abrupt end. In 2011, the “Freundeskreis Christian Kuntner”, in cooperation with the Provinz Verlag, completed and published the book project planned by Kuntner under the title 13 12 eight-thousanders .

Individual evidence

  1. a b c d Christian Kuntner - Short biography ( Memento of the original from February 5, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , formerly on christiankuntner.com, copied from hans-perting.com @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.hans-perting.com
  2. report by Abele Blanc to "MountEverest.net" (Engl.) ( Memento of the original on 8 July 2012 at the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mounteverest.net
  3. (Engl.) Report on "MountEverest.net" the accident ( Memento of the original dated 4 May 2012 at the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link is automatically inserted and not yet tested. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.mounteverest.net

Web links