DW: So, Mr. Messner, you are about to turn 70 years old, it's quite a milestone. How are you faring? Are you happy with life?

Reinhold Messner: We don't carry happiness around with us all the time - sometimes it just happens inside us, or around us. I have it easier these days, because I have nothing more to prove. I'm not in a rush anymore, either, but I am still active. I am very lucky that my knees still work and my joints are all okay. I have had to sacrifice a bit: like a damaged heel bone, missing toes. But otherwise, for my age, I am not doing too badly. I have a lot of ideas to accomplish in the next years - to have a worthwhile life and to be happy.

Which goals would you like to pursue in the next decade of your life?

In the next few years I definitely want to visit my mountain museum and make sure that it survives. I want that to be a lasting legacy. My farms are very important to me, too. And I'd like to work as a filmmaker too, as a storyteller. I want to go out with an idea, into the wild and collect pictures which then tell a strong story on the screen.

The Spaniard Carlos Soria is in the Himalayas at the moment. He wants to climb the Shishapangma. It will be the 12th of the 14 mountains over 8,000 meters (26,250 feet) that he has managed. The man is 75 years old. Are you happy that you managed to do all that by your early 40s?

I am especially pleased that I managed to get it all done before anyone else was on those mountains. Back then, you just had to get a permit for your expedition and your group, whether you were alone, a pair, or whether there were five of you - just worked your way up by yourselves. I am lucky to have been born early enough that I could still experience mountains in their purest form. These days, 20,000 people try to climb the Matterhorn each year, and Mont Blanc is even worse. The mountains are now designed for mass tourism.

Messner and Peter Habeler (right) were the first to climb Mount Everest without oxygen, back in 1978

Earlier this year, 500 Sherpas were preparing Mountain Everest so that thousands of clients could pay a lot of money to climb the mountain. Then there was an accident and 16 Sherpas died in an avalanche. It was like a type of industrial accident, I suppose you could say. There were strikes and the tourists went home. But next year they will come again. I hope that everyone can have the chance to climb these mountains, but what is going on here has little to do with real mountaineering. It is tourism - sure it's hard work and it's a bit dangerous - but the responsibility for the safety of the climb is being pushed onto the locals. This is all about showing off what you have done, and nothing to do with your experience of nature.

If you were giving advice to a young, adventure-seeking mountain climber these days, what would you tell him or her?

The young people have to find their own way. I wouldn't be able to account for all that I did when I was a 20-year-old. But I see a few young climbers, like the Austrians Hansjörg Auer and David Lama or the American Alex Honnold, who are traditional mountain climbers who manage to achieve great things. There are tens of thousands of peaks on the planet that haven't been climbed. There are hundreds of thousands of different routes up the mountains that can be explored in the next years. The young climbers have learned that they don't need to go to the famous mountains. The key, if you want to experience an adventure, is to go where the others haven't been, so that you can decide things for yourself and you are responsible for yourself.

Busy mountain: The route up to the top of Everest is now full of climbers

How high can you climb these days?

I haven't tested it out. But in the last few years I climbed above 6,000 meters a few times. I feel better up there than I do at normal altitude. I don't know why. Perhaps in the next ten years I will regularly start going to Nepal or to the Himalayas, just for the health benefits. There was a case of a very sick man - I won't say who it was - who had done some amazing 8,000-meter climbs with his wife in his lifetime. The doctors had given up on him. He went to the Himalayas, to see his mountains for the last time and perhaps to die there. He then climbed an 8,000-meter peak and he came down healthy. This medical wonder should be an incentive to researchers to not just think about the mountains as somewhere where adventurers like to play, but also as a place to potentially heal sick people.

Nowadays, I certainly wouldn't climb Everest without a breathing apparatus. At my age, I don't want to die in the mountains after working for 65 years to do everything I can to not die there. To head up Everest with two oxygen tanks and two Sherpas, one at the front and one at the back, is not my idea of fun.

Reinhold Messner now lives in South Tyrol in Italy, where he writes books and takes care of the Messner Mountain Museum, a five-building facility located around the Alps. Messner turns 70 on Wednesday (17.09.2014).