Italian mountain climber Walter Bonatti dead at 81

Sep 14, 2011, 10:43 GMT

Rome - Italian mountain climber Walter Bonatti who in the 1950s and 1960s won fame for scaling some of the most difficult peaks of the Alps and the Himalayas, has died, Italian media reported Wednesday. He was 81.

Bonatti died in Rome on Tuesday night, the Turin-based daily La Stampa said. He had been ill for some time, the newspaper said without specifying the nature of his illness.

Fellow Italian climber Reinhold Messner, the first man to climb Mount Everest without the aid of supplementary oxygen, paid tribute to Bonatti who he described as a 'beautiful person'.

'Bonatti was one of the greatest mountain climbers in history, the last traditional-style mountain climber,' Messner was quoted as saying by the ANSA news agency.

Born in the northern city of Bergamo on June 22, 1930, Bonatti's feats included, in 1951, the first successful climb of the Mont Blanc massif's Grand Capucin peak. In 1965 he achieved the first solo winter ascent of the north face of the Matterhorn.

Bonatti was also involved in a long-standing controversy with the late mountain climber Achille Compagnoni over a 1954 expedition they undertook on the K2 in the Himalayas.

Compagnoni accused Bonatti of using some of the oxygen he was carrying for other climbers, thus causing their supply to run out.

Bonatti denied he had used the oxygen, saying he had not been equipped with the necessary mask nor regulator to do so.

In his tribute to Bonatti, Messner referred to the incident, noting how: 'Walter ... has been slandered for 50 years but in the end everyone had to acknowledge he was right.'