In a conversation with the SZ about 14 months ago, Hermann Huber outlined what mountaineering is all about: above all, being able to accurately assess your own possibilities, physical strength and resilience. “As a young person you knock off your horns – or you die in the process,” said the then 91-year-old alpinist and entrepreneur.
He himself has survived many situations in which things could have turned out differently, for example at the age of 13 when he fell from a height of seven meters off a mountain face and only suffered skin abrasions. And yet he lost many friends and companions, three in 1958 alone, all of whom fell to their deaths. For Huber, the accidents were a clear mission: He wanted to increase safety in mountaineering, so the technically talented native of Munich began to tinker.
The passionate mountaineer developed the paddy ice screw, which is hollow on the inside, which when screwed into an icy wall ensures that the ice does not splinter, which means that the hook holds better – a principle that is still used today. Huber also invented the first adjustable crampons, until then there had only been ones made of cast iron, which were heavy and unchangeable. This innovative product also quickly established itself in the industry. Huber was always aware that his groundbreaking ideas were a double-edged sword: “Today’s equipment is so incredibly good that some are tempted to climb routes that are too difficult.”
“There were few mountaineers as modest as him,” says Reinhold Messner
In 1955 he developed the so-called Andean backpack for the Salewa company in Munich, where he started as an apprentice shortly after the Second World War. It keeps your back free so you sweat less. Huber worked for many decades in the company, which now has its headquarters in South Tyrol but also has an outlet store in Aschheim, from 1972 to 1988 as managing director.
Since 1967 he has lived in a terraced house in Unterhaching with his wife, known in mountaineering circles as “Taubenstein-Fanny” who died in 2017, and their two sons, both of whom now live abroad. In his mountaineering career, Huber undertook a number of larger expeditions, for example to north-east Greenland in 1968, where he fell into an ice creek and was only able to save himself with great difficulty – soaked, hypothermic and without equipment. The tours in New Guinea in 1974 and in the Pamirs in 1986 were among his personal highlights.
And so he was not only praised as a developer of vital equipment details, but also as an extreme climber: “An excellent alpinist across the entire spectrum,” said Reinhold Messner last year. “There were few climbers as humble as him.” Hermann Huber has now died at the age of 92.
An earlier version of the article stated that Hermann Huber’s wife had died in 1987, the correct year of death is 2017.