The 89-Year-Old Rock Climber

Maria puts on her helmet and steps into her bright blue harness. With quick, experienced hands, she tightens the belt and hooks up her carabiners. Behind her towers the Zwerchwand rock face, a steep wall featuring multiple climbing routes suitable only for experienced climbers. Maria looks up and smiles broadly. “When I see a steep wall, my heart starts to sing”, she says.

What are Maria’s other reasons for climbing? “Second, the climbing itself”, she says. “And third, for the company. I always have a mountain guide with me. What’s better than that?” In the last years, Christoph, who could be Maria’s grandson, has become much more than just a mountain guide; they are friends. Friends who have spent weeks-long climbing holidays in places like France, Croatia, and Spain. “She has this ability to always adjust to new situations”, Christoph says about his travel partner. “At her age, something or other might ache or be painful, but she always finds a solution. That’s impressive.”

What Maria achieved in her eighties is truly impressive as well. “In the past four years, I’ve thought to myself, ‘I want as many climbing days as possible.’ So I did 250. In one year”, she says. 150 to 200 days of climbing – something many of us aspire to – is just a regular year for her, now that she is approaching 90. In her younger days, she was a state champion in skiing and dressage riding. She also explored some of the most difficult climbing routes with her husband Robert, a well-known alpinist. With mountaineering and climbing still firmly considered a men’s domain in the 1960s and 1970s, she was the first woman ever on many of those routes. The mountains have not always been kind to her: In 2008, her husband was killed in a climbing accident on Dachstein mountain, and her son died at age 17 while paragliding.