Did you know that Maestri’s gas-powered compressor was hauled up to the summit of Cerro Torre in 1990 during the filming of Werner Herzog’s film Scream of Stone?
The plan was to helicopter the infamous power tool down to El Chalten and have it brought to Reinhold Messner’s—one of the film’s screenwriters—mountain museum in Italy. Very few people lived in El Chalten at the time—it was nowhere near the “Jackson Hole of South America” destination that it has become today—and there was no protest from the “locals” about the plan. However, many climbers were working on the set of Scream of Stone, and they complained. So did Adrian Falcone, the park’s head ranger at the time.
After some debate, the compressor was lowered back down to its last resting place on Cerro Torre’s headwall, and it was bolted to the rock with cables so it could not be easily removed again.
It’s been about a month since, as they say, shit went down on Cerro Torre, the slender queen of Patagonia … and if you feel as I do, then you too are no doubt sick of reading and thinking about this Gordian knot of a climbing issue. But I thought the above anecdote was a zesty morsel of trivia in a topic that has otherwise been chewed to flavorless, unrecognizable cud.
If you’re a subscriber, you’ll be receiving our annual Photo Issue (No 201) in the mail any day. In it, you’ll find my article “The Tyranny of History,” which I hope provides new light, hard facts, depth and background to “CT 2012,” as I call both this issue as well as my robot. If going around in circles for 40,000 posts—99 percent of which are absolute misinformed garbage—on various climbing forums hasn’t sated your appetite for reading about all things Cerro Torre, and you’re actually still interested in this juicy vertical imbroglio, I hope you will take the time to stand in your local specialty climbing shop and check out my essay and, hell, maybe even buy the magazine itself. (What an original idea!)
But I understand that you are a hardcore climber—you don’t have money; you don’t like to read anything longer than an 8a.nu comment; magazines are for gumbies, etc.—and so here I will offer you a slimmed-down (though not dumbed-down) guide to this ethical conundrum. Because, after thinking about it every day for the last month, I’ve actually come to realize that this issue isn’t that impossible to understand. In fact, even a dummy can “get” Cerro Torre, if it’s properly explained. Allow moi to do so:
A lot of bolts were placed up a beautiful, hard mountain. No one liked the way the bolts were placed, and a lot of people said the bolts weren’t necessary to climb the peak. As years passed, the original sting faded as people continued to rely on the bolts to get to the top—because that’s what everyone else before them had done, and they wanted to get their summit, too. Finally, the route was climbed without the “bad” bolts. Less than one third of the bolts were taken out. Five days later, the route was climbed again without the bolts, this time for its first free ascent. Twice in one week, a new generation of climbers proved that the bolts weren’t necessary to climb this mountain. End of story. What’s the big problem?
get ’em, son!
The bolts ultimately enabled Lama’s free ascent. His free route would likely not exist if the bolts had never been installed in 1970. He and other parties were aided by the bolts in their exploration of a free variation. Why destroy one route yet laud another when the former was complicit in creating the later?
Oh and by the way, I love it how you insult your own readers in your article. Classy.
That logic goes both ways: yes, all of history is built upon the past, but that doesn’t justify something that the climbing community has more or less unanimously deemed to be wrong (indiscriminate bolt ladders installed with gas-powered compressors to manufacture a directissima in the mountains, on one of the most beautiful summits on earth).
The reason to laud the “new” route is simple: it follows the naturally climbable features on the mountain! You see, in climbing, you look for features (jugs, flakes, cracks) that offer a path upward. Part of the challenge of this sport is to find these climbable features–this is called “route finding.” Upon finding the climbable features, it’s then up to the climber’s own skill to be able to rise to the natural challenge of the mountain and overcome these difficulties with minimum impact or alteration of these difficulties.
I fail to see how this is such a foreign concept for some people. Nothing was “Destroyed” this year in Patagonia; in fact, a new route–THE route–was created. You can still climb the SE Ridge of Cerro Torre, only now you have to climb the natural features on the mountain to get up it! Wow! Such a crazy idea!!!
I think that what hayden and jason did is not right. They did not prove that bolts were unnecesary (Lama did but removed nothing) as they used them for the descent, and not sure if they used any in the ascent as belaying points or so but they could have in case of emergency, and that would be fair wouldn´t it? I mean, maybe it would be better if the bolts were not there, but once they are, i find it unnecesary to remove them. use them or not, but let them there for others less skilled or in trouble. This could be applied to other bolted routes. Can i remove the bolts if i have been able to climb the route without them? Bolt removal has caused accidents by the way ( i know that in different contexts but so)
As i have been following your TNB articles, i read hayden is a good friend of yours but maybe they did a mistake here. Everybody does sometimes.
Anyway, i am enjoying this blog a lot. Great job.