Fritz Wiessner

Fritz Wiessner was a German American pioneer of free climbing, born in Dresden in 1900, who emigrated to New York City in 1929 and became a United States citizen in 1935. He began climbing with his father in the Austrian Alps and climbed the Zugspitze at twelve. In the 1920s he established hard routes in Saxony and the Dolomites, some of them now rated up to 5.11 at a time when the hardest free climbing grade in the United States was 5.7, and at 25 he made a first ascent of the Fleischbank in Tyrol, proclaimed the hardest rock climb done up to then. His speciality was wide crack and off-width climbing, and in 1939 he made one of the earliest attempts on K2. He died in 1988.