92-Year-Old Mountain Climbing Legend Shares His 70-Year Journey | Extraordinary People | NY Post

While other retirees sit around, this 90-year-old is climbing mountains. “The mountain is the main purpose of my life,” Enzo Appiano told The Post. The active nonagenarian swims, hikes and hits the gym like a man one-fifth his age.

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Appiano looks back at his impressive seven-decade career, starting in the 1940s when he scaled the dangerous Rocca Sbarua in Italy. He now rock-climbs with aplomb in the Lanzo Valleys outside Turin.

From 'This 90yearold climbs mountains like it’s nothing"

Enzo Appiano first scaled the “frightening” Alps surrounding his native Turin, Italy, in 1948 — and he has no intention of stopping until the day he dies.

“The mountain is the main purpose of my life,” the plaid-clad nonagenarian tells The Post.

Perhaps that’s why he’s inspiring a generation of millennial mountaineers in his homeland.

Giulia Valentina Paolini, the Turin-based writer-producer who translated Appiano’s story from Italian to English for The Post’s latest “Extraordinary People” short film, calls the hiker “such a legend for younger climbers that they frequently ask him to take them climbing when they meet him at the gym, which he does.”

So, what’s Enzo’s secret for staying on top of things?

“I still have the same kind of enthusiasm of when I began my career as a mountain climber,” he says, matter-of-factly.

Oh, and fear. That’s a crucial element, he says. “I always feel scared on a mountain. It’s the basic feeling, because if you’re not scared anymore, that’s when you’re screwed. When you’re in the wilderness, everything could happen.”

As he peruses weathered journals and yellowed photos documenting his many ascensions over the decades, Enzo shares his origin story with The Post.

It started just over 70 years ago when he and some work buddies, bored with their jobs at an “electromechanical company,” decided to “invent something” to do.

“The very first time I climbed a mountain we were out for a hike, then I saw a huge side of rock — and I tried!,” he says, chuckling. “We had been told of this famous [rock in] Sbarua, [which] means frightening in English, because you can feel afraid just watching it.”

They followed their instincts — and some old nails pounded into the rock by prior climbers — and by the end of the day they had conquered it.

“After that time — we kept on climbing everywhere,” Enzo says.

To this day, charting new territory remains the great joy of his life.

“It gives me pleasure and satisfaction — especially when you reach a peak before anyone else or when you open new routes. It’s such an amazing thing.”

But Enzo admits his adventures are tinged with tragedy.

“Once, one of my fellows . . . fell down and he was injured, and back then we had no cellphones or helicopters for rescue,” he says. “We couldn’t leave him there so we tried to bring him down. But when we moved him . . . He died in my arms. I suffered in that occasion, but it’s part of the game.”

It’s also part of a passion that Enzo says helped him understand the real value of life.

“It’s something really deeper for me: I have to climb. The mountain, for me — I can’t live without it,” he says. “Mountains have maintained my youth . . . The day I stop, I will not be able to move anymore.”

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