Career
He was particularly innovative in applying alpine style to Himalayan climbing. 1953 First ascent of Nanga Parbat, 8,126 metres (26,660 ft) (solo and without bottled oxygen). 1957 First ascent of Broad Peak, 8,051 metres (26,414 ft).
Before his successful Nanga Parbat expedition, 31 people had died trying to make the first ascent.
Buhl is the mountaineer to have made the first solo ascent of an eight-thousander. He returned 41 hours later, having barely survived the arduous climb to the summit, 4 miles distant from, and 4,000 feet higher than camp V. Experienced climbers, upon hearing later of Buhl"s near-death climb, faulted him for making the attempt solo.
Regardless, his monumental efforts, along with spending the night untethered, on the edge of a 60 degree ice slope, standing on a tiny pedestal too small to squat upon, has become mountaineering legend. Just a few weeks after the successful first ascent of Broad Peak (with Fritz Wintersteller and Marcus Schmuck), Buhl and Kurt Diemberger made an attempt on nearby, unclimbed Chogolisa (7654 m) in alpine style.
Buhl lost his way in an unexpected snow storm and walked over a breaking cornice on the southeast ridge, near the summit of Chogolisa, subsequently triggering an avalanche which hurled him down more than 800 m.
His body was not recovered and remains in the ice. Buhl was born in Innsbruck, the youngest of four children. After the death of his mother, he spent years in an orphanage.
Before Scouting was banned in Austria Hermann Buhl was a Cub Scout in Innsbruck.
In the 1930s, as a sensitive (and not very healthy) teenager, he began to climb the Austrian Alps. In 1939, he joined the Innsbruck chapter of the Deutscher Alpenverein (the German Alpine association) and soon mastered climbs up to category 6.
World World War II interrupted his commercial studies, and he joined the Alpine troops, mostly on the Monte Cassino. After being taken prisoner by American troops, he returned to Innsbruck and earned his living doing odd jobs.
At the end of the 1940s, he finally completed his training as a mountain guide.