What kept me young were the ideas I projected into the future. One of the last great adventurers of our time recounts his journey. From the first three-thousander in the Dolomites in 1949, Reinhold Messner's tours led him into the ice of the Western Alps, to the Andes, and finally to the magnificent eight-thousanders of the Himalayas. After his time as a rock climber and high-altitude mountaineer, he marched to the North and South Poles and through the great deserts. In a interplay between extreme mountaineering and personal self-experience, Messner describes, step by step, idea by idea, his life path as a self-determined boundary walker.