My mountaineering career began with an accident when I was ten years old.

Our family home in those days stood at the upper edge of a small mountain village named Muhlbach, in the Austrian Alps. The house was built on a hillside; a typical alpine-style wood structure, three stories high with a steep pitched roof and every window clustered with flowers. There was a tray of flowers at the bottom, another halfway up, and some pots hanging out to the side of each window. Those colourful blossoms were the pride and joy of my grandmother.

Like many of the other houses in the village, the outside of our home was covered with forester shingles. Each of these shingles measured ten centimetres in width, twenty centimetres in length, and were rounded at the bottom. It literally took thousands of the damn things to cover a wall. My grandfather, a seasoned mountain guide, manufactured and sold them when he was not out climbing, and I, over and above my normal chores, had to carefully pile all that he produced along one wall of the house for them to dry. This was a most tedious and frustrating job for a busy, impatient ten-year-old boy.

The gravel road that wound its way up the valley ended in front of our house. From there, footpaths and a wagon road led further up to the alpine huts and mountains above. Mountaineers from all over Europe would travel to our area to attempt the great climbs accessed from there, sometimes hiring my grandfather to guide them. Often they would ask to store their bicycles or motorcycles in our woodshed.

Many of the famous climbers of the time passed through my domain, and I knew them all. There was Ertl, Frauenberger, Aschenbrenner, Dulfer, Hinterstoiser and Kurz, the Schmidt Brothers, Hechmair and many others. Some of them are still there now, in the little graveyard behind the church. I would watch and listen to these men in awe, always impressed by what a friendly, happy lot they were. While they climbed, I guarded their belongings with my life.

One day, one of these fellows gave me a piton. I couldn’t believe my luck—a genuine, slightly used, rusty rock piton. In my mind, pitons were synonymous with rappelling, so with gift in hand, I rushed immediately to the work shed to get a hammer and an old piece of rope. Then I climbed up on the house roof and drove the piton into the chimney. I tied one end of the rope to the piton and the other I threw over the edge of the roof. The bottom end of it was at least four metres from the ground, but that didn’t slow my enthusiasm. I placed the rope between my legs, up across my chest and over my shoulder just like Dulfer had shown me. Feet apart, I leaned back ready to begin my descent when … the piton came out! Down I went, rapidly gaining speed as I schussed down the shingled roof, flat on my back and head first. Remember, the house was three storeys high. There was a set of telephone wires at the second-floor level with which I made my first contact. The wires tossed me against the wall of the house. Down the wall I went … straight into Grandmother’s flowers. I tried to grab hold of the centre tray of flowers as my legs hit and broke the bottom tray, but the brackets holding both came out of the wall and I continued on down.

Flowers, trays, dirt, brackets and I, with the rope still wrapped around me, were all falling as one—and then the real disaster happened! I landed on Grandfather’s shingles and the entire pile fell over. It took me weeks to straighten those damn things out.

What I considered the biggest stroke of luck though, was that when I was on the ground, flat out among the flowers and shingles and dirt, one of the flowerpots, in delayed action, fell out of its hanger and hit me on the head, knocking me unconscious. This prevented me from getting the biggest spanking of my life.

Thinking of it now, I have that flowerpot to thank for me spending my life in the business of mountaineering.