Maestri's claimed first ascent and his compressor route made the history of Cerro Torre controversial, and the later removal of the bolts added to this controversy. However, the unfortunately now deceased climbing prodigy David Lama also had his own scandal on the compressor route while sponsored by Red Bull.
If you like this story, I highly recommend “The Tower”, a book on this topic by Kelly Cordes. This book, although history, reads like an outdoor adventure mystery thriller.
Those two guys removed an established easement. Sure one can argue that it should never have been installed in the first place, but it was and apparently it became widely used. They had no business taking it down.
Rock climbing ethics is more complicated and dramatic than that.
Applying this logic about easements doesn’t really capture the whole picture, because you’re considering people only, not considering the
mountain. I think some people who support chopping those bolts would argue that this is like restoring the Mona Lisa after some random guy painted their own painting over it. Yes, removing that guy’s crappy painting is technically a destructive act and removes the world’s ability to see that painting. But net-net, things have improved, even though there will always be some signs of the damage done by a fool.
Exactly right. Climbers care a lot about the ethics of an ascent. It’s interesting how much those ethics have changed over the history of the sport.
One of the core ideas is that later climbers should respect or improve upon the style of the first ascensionist. e.g. if a climb was first done using siege tactics, then doing it in a single day is celebrated. But making a climb easier or safer after the fact is much more controversial, because it can feel like changing the nature of the route itself.
Snake Dike is a good example that’s flared up recently in the climbing world. It’s a classic, relatively easy route up Half Dome, and many climbers free solo it. But because it’s a face climb, protection mostly comes from bolts drilled into the rock. The first ascensionist placed very few bolts, which left long runouts and real consequences if you fall.
To many old school climbers, adding bolts to Snake Dike is disrespectful because the risk is part of the route’s character. Their view is basically: don’t bring the mountain down to your level. The new generation of climbers don’t seem to feel that way at all - they think you shouldn’t have to take unnecessary risk to climb a classic route.
To which the obvious rejoinder is that two wrongs do not make a right.
At the end of the day, it's sort of a "might makes right" situation. If someone with the means and inclination to add bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. If someone with the means and inclination to remove bolts exists, it is hard to stop them.
At the end of the day, climb your own climb. If you take actions that affect how others climb, what you're calling ethics is in fact ego.
Indeed, they were visitors and were given no permission to alter mountains in such ways. If it should have been done, it should have been done by owners of that terrain - I presume Chile / Argentine.
The arrogance of this... I see no difference between Maestri's act and their. Arrogance of fanatics who think they stand above others, their cause is righteous and so on.
I love mountains, I love climbing to the death, but there is nothing respectable in these actions. Also, if they could climb it without using bolts, it was hardly 'forever erased for future' even though I get that route was probably permanently altered. In same/similar way that tens of thousands of other routes have been altered in similar way by placing permanent stuff in the wall - in all of European Alps, Yosemite, Himalayas and so on. I do find various old to very old equipment in main routes or just climbing crags all over French and Swiss alps for example. At that point its part of mountaineering history. Sometimes, even a specific famous name is assigned to given piece by those who know its story.
That stood out to me... I understand that rock climbing is Serious Business to its practitioners and people on internet forums, but these two guys actually got arrested for removing those bolts, which is a whole new level of serious.
Was it really some kind of crime to do that? What happened to those guys after that?
In the USA, there was a person who was traveling around removing bolts. The person showed up in our local area. A couple of members of the climbing community had a conversation with the local police. The police had a concern about him creating a potentially dangerous situation of people trying a climb and expecting to find bolts only to find the bolts missing. The police went out of their way to arrest him. They got him on probation violation and had him extradited to his home state. The climbing community replaced all the removed bolts, and people went back to enjoying the rock climbing.
The local climbing community chose to take care of this quietly without media or internet drama.
I can't find many details, but I had heard Hayden's name before, he sadly died of suicide after losing his partner in an avalanche ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Kennedy_(climber) ). Jason Kruk appears to still be climbing to this day, so neither appeared to wind up in significant legal trouble after rightly or wrongly damaging a tourist destination.
I think you’ll be sad if you look up Hayden Kennedy.
No serious legal consequences to them from this climb, though, and the route remains clean. There was a wonderful film in this year’s Mountains On Stage film tour called Patagonian Chimeras, about a team of women who climbed the new variation by fair means.
Curious to know the basis on which they were arrested. I guess it's something in the realm of criminal damage to public property. But that would imply that Maestri's bolts had become part of the public property that is the mountain. I assume Maestri was not arrested for inserting the bolts.
Not being a mountain climber at all I don't really have an opinion on this, but I do naturally sympathise with the anti-bolt guys because I am fond of the idea of leaving no trace.
They didn't remove the bolts for "leave no trace" reasons. They removed them because the style they were put up was considered "poor climbing ethics". They felt it could go "free" and on gear.
This would have made the summit unobtainable to all but the strongest climbers in the world... Which would have upset many people who had traveled far and spent a lot of money to attempt the summit.
Alex Honnolds "climbing gold" podcast has like a 3 part series on this history if your interested to learn more.
You don't have to be charged with anything to be arrested. Kennedy's wikipedia page suggests they were released from jail, implying LEO decided they actually committed no crime (and certainly weren't charged). If you're really curious, maybe the jurisdiction has public arrest records, but this assumes that the cops were doing everything by the book, which is not always an apt assumption.
My guess is that towns and leo get, let's say, passionate, when a big tourism draw gets defaced, or when something can get more dangerous, but cooler heads eventually prevailed.
My first reaction to the title was "how can a mountain be controversial?!", and, even after reading the article, the title still sounds wrong to me. I mean, a mountain is a mountain, it just... exists in a very undisputable way. What climbers did or didn't do on that mountain can be controversial, but not the mountain itself.
Mountaneering nerdery is in some sense nobler, since people practising it put their health and lives at stake. Debates about C++ undefined behaviour would get a different flavour if every now and then some high-profile developer were killed by nasal demons.
One of the things I appreciate about the Andes Mountains is that in this age of social media ruining everything most areas are still pretty wild. You don’t see long queues of people waiting to take selfies. You may not see other people at all. They are second in height to the Himalaya but in most other ways are more interesting.
I feel like the governments there low-key try to keep it that way.
im sure that the Andes are far more remote and wild than anything I have experienced in my life as a European, and I would dearly like to be fortunate enough to see them some day, but I would note that "long queues of people waiting to take selfies" hasn't been my experience in nearly every mountain or hill ive been to save a couple extremely touristy spots in the height of summer (uk examples: snowdon peak, mam tor, stanage edge etc). Ive been able to go entire days without seeing another group of hikers many places in norway, sweden, uk, even while following hiking guide books
That's because there so much of them and most of the range is not very comfortably accessible (you usually need to endure some discomfort either getting there or staying nearby).
Where you can get nearby fairly easy like base Las Torres, you'll have plenty of people doing just that.
I don't think this is by intent. It's just that the countries themselves are relatively poor and have higher priority projects for their limited resources.
The higher Himalayas are largely unpeopled as well, especially above 4000m. The only time I met people above those altitudes were at night in camps/settlements. I'm sure the EBC route is more crowded, but that's one very small trek in an enormous mountain range.
The industry that has sway over the Andes is mining. Against that, tourism income is negligible and in fact more tourism could threaten the mining industry.
This ain't true, even in many cca popular places in European alps you can be alone whole day. Just don't go into most popular hotspots on busy holidays days, traveling rule 101.
People just taking selfies and generally big crowds are not climbers/mountaineers, its everybody else but.
Sure there's this principle but this just moves the need for justification. Humans leave their traces everywhere so why this principle for mountains? There are many traces that should be removed such as hydroelectric power stations, river straightening and so on. Is this whataboutism? I just think a few bolts in a mountain don't do much harm and as a casual observer of these mountains you won't even notice. Also I am very much for "leaving no traces" in the sense that everyone picks up their trash.
I am all for free climbing. But I don't really like this perspective from a high horse. So it's fine for comparatively rich people to fly there by plane to free climb Cerro Torre?
I don't think it's just a matter of ethics - some legal entity owns these mountains (park authority of some kind?) and drilling holes and placing bolts done without the permission of the owner sounds like vandalism to me.
I am of the belief that we should leave a place better than we find it.
When litter is in my path, I remove it. To do otherwise would go against this fundamental principle.
Natural places should be protected from the widespread exploitation by humans. We are destroying the entire planet. Why can’t we protect the places we have long agreed should be protected? Enough with the anthropocentric BS already. We are a part of the world, not separate.
Maestri's claimed first ascent and his compressor route made the history of Cerro Torre controversial, and the later removal of the bolts added to this controversy. However, the unfortunately now deceased climbing prodigy David Lama also had his own scandal on the compressor route while sponsored by Red Bull.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Lama#Cerro_Torre
If you like this story, I highly recommend “The Tower”, a book on this topic by Kelly Cordes. This book, although history, reads like an outdoor adventure mystery thriller.
Check out Kelly’s intro on his blog, where he also shares his famous Marg recipe: https://kellycordes.com/2014/11/26/my-cerro-torre-book-and-m....
I can personally attest, that Kelly makes the best Margs.
Those two guys removed an established easement. Sure one can argue that it should never have been installed in the first place, but it was and apparently it became widely used. They had no business taking it down.
Rock climbing ethics is more complicated and dramatic than that.
Applying this logic about easements doesn’t really capture the whole picture, because you’re considering people only, not considering the mountain. I think some people who support chopping those bolts would argue that this is like restoring the Mona Lisa after some random guy painted their own painting over it. Yes, removing that guy’s crappy painting is technically a destructive act and removes the world’s ability to see that painting. But net-net, things have improved, even though there will always be some signs of the damage done by a fool.
Exactly right. Climbers care a lot about the ethics of an ascent. It’s interesting how much those ethics have changed over the history of the sport.
One of the core ideas is that later climbers should respect or improve upon the style of the first ascensionist. e.g. if a climb was first done using siege tactics, then doing it in a single day is celebrated. But making a climb easier or safer after the fact is much more controversial, because it can feel like changing the nature of the route itself.
Snake Dike is a good example that’s flared up recently in the climbing world. It’s a classic, relatively easy route up Half Dome, and many climbers free solo it. But because it’s a face climb, protection mostly comes from bolts drilled into the rock. The first ascensionist placed very few bolts, which left long runouts and real consequences if you fall.
To many old school climbers, adding bolts to Snake Dike is disrespectful because the risk is part of the route’s character. Their view is basically: don’t bring the mountain down to your level. The new generation of climbers don’t seem to feel that way at all - they think you shouldn’t have to take unnecessary risk to climb a classic route.
https://gripped.com/news/first-ascentionist-pushes-back-on-h...
I think the point is they had no authority to do that.
Michaelangelo's Last Judgment had exposed genitals that were covered with draperies by Daniele da Volterra later.
Then at some point they were removed again to restore the original, but some remain.
It would not be reasonable for _me_ to step up and erase the remaining ones, even if it would be a restoration.
To which the obvious rejoinder is that Maestri had no authority to put them there in the first place.
To which the obvious rejoinder is that two wrongs do not make a right.
At the end of the day, it's sort of a "might makes right" situation. If someone with the means and inclination to add bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. If someone with the means and inclination to remove bolts exists, it is hard to stop them.
At the end of the day, climb your own climb. If you take actions that affect how others climb, what you're calling ethics is in fact ego.
>what you're calling ethics
I wasn't calling anything anything. I was just putting the obvious counter-argument on the table. You make a fair point.
Indeed, they were visitors and were given no permission to alter mountains in such ways. If it should have been done, it should have been done by owners of that terrain - I presume Chile / Argentine.
The arrogance of this... I see no difference between Maestri's act and their. Arrogance of fanatics who think they stand above others, their cause is righteous and so on.
I love mountains, I love climbing to the death, but there is nothing respectable in these actions. Also, if they could climb it without using bolts, it was hardly 'forever erased for future' even though I get that route was probably permanently altered. In same/similar way that tens of thousands of other routes have been altered in similar way by placing permanent stuff in the wall - in all of European Alps, Yosemite, Himalayas and so on. I do find various old to very old equipment in main routes or just climbing crags all over French and Swiss alps for example. At that point its part of mountaineering history. Sometimes, even a specific famous name is assigned to given piece by those who know its story.
> police arrested them and confiscated 102 bolts
That stood out to me... I understand that rock climbing is Serious Business to its practitioners and people on internet forums, but these two guys actually got arrested for removing those bolts, which is a whole new level of serious.
Was it really some kind of crime to do that? What happened to those guys after that?
In the USA, there was a person who was traveling around removing bolts. The person showed up in our local area. A couple of members of the climbing community had a conversation with the local police. The police had a concern about him creating a potentially dangerous situation of people trying a climb and expecting to find bolts only to find the bolts missing. The police went out of their way to arrest him. They got him on probation violation and had him extradited to his home state. The climbing community replaced all the removed bolts, and people went back to enjoying the rock climbing.
The local climbing community chose to take care of this quietly without media or internet drama.
I can't find many details, but I had heard Hayden's name before, he sadly died of suicide after losing his partner in an avalanche ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Kennedy_(climber) ). Jason Kruk appears to still be climbing to this day, so neither appeared to wind up in significant legal trouble after rightly or wrongly damaging a tourist destination.
I've heard a variation of the story where the police took them away (i.e., "arrested" them) to protect them from what was becoming an angry mob.
I think you’ll be sad if you look up Hayden Kennedy.
No serious legal consequences to them from this climb, though, and the route remains clean. There was a wonderful film in this year’s Mountains On Stage film tour called Patagonian Chimeras, about a team of women who climbed the new variation by fair means.
The route is not clean, the Red Bull film team added more bolts, when Lama did his climb there in 2010.
https://web.archive.org/web/201 90530021810/http://www.alpinist.com/doc/web10x/newswire-lama-speaks-comp...
This couldn't happen in my climbing area, the Saechsische Schweiz, famous for creating the first Climbing regulations. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saxon_Switzerland_climbing_reg... Police will arrest you for putting bolts in there for sure.
I want to know why they left them with some.
I imagined those just fell down while they were taking them out so they didn't took out 125, lost 20+, and got caught with 102.
Curious to know the basis on which they were arrested. I guess it's something in the realm of criminal damage to public property. But that would imply that Maestri's bolts had become part of the public property that is the mountain. I assume Maestri was not arrested for inserting the bolts.
Not being a mountain climber at all I don't really have an opinion on this, but I do naturally sympathise with the anti-bolt guys because I am fond of the idea of leaving no trace.
They didn't remove the bolts for "leave no trace" reasons. They removed them because the style they were put up was considered "poor climbing ethics". They felt it could go "free" and on gear.
This would have made the summit unobtainable to all but the strongest climbers in the world... Which would have upset many people who had traveled far and spent a lot of money to attempt the summit.
Alex Honnolds "climbing gold" podcast has like a 3 part series on this history if your interested to learn more.
I think the question here is: what is the specific criminal charge or law that was broken to be arrested?
You don't have to be charged with anything to be arrested. Kennedy's wikipedia page suggests they were released from jail, implying LEO decided they actually committed no crime (and certainly weren't charged). If you're really curious, maybe the jurisdiction has public arrest records, but this assumes that the cops were doing everything by the book, which is not always an apt assumption.
My guess is that towns and leo get, let's say, passionate, when a big tourism draw gets defaced, or when something can get more dangerous, but cooler heads eventually prevailed.
My first reaction to the title was "how can a mountain be controversial?!", and, even after reading the article, the title still sounds wrong to me. I mean, a mountain is a mountain, it just... exists in a very undisputable way. What climbers did or didn't do on that mountain can be controversial, but not the mountain itself.
Yeah, I thought this would be about a border dispute or something.
Ofc we all know this but its nice to be reminded that gatekeeping and nerdery is not limited to tech forums.
Mountaneering nerdery is in some sense nobler, since people practising it put their health and lives at stake. Debates about C++ undefined behaviour would get a different flavour if every now and then some high-profile developer were killed by nasal demons.
One of the things I appreciate about the Andes Mountains is that in this age of social media ruining everything most areas are still pretty wild. You don’t see long queues of people waiting to take selfies. You may not see other people at all. They are second in height to the Himalaya but in most other ways are more interesting.
I feel like the governments there low-key try to keep it that way.
im sure that the Andes are far more remote and wild than anything I have experienced in my life as a European, and I would dearly like to be fortunate enough to see them some day, but I would note that "long queues of people waiting to take selfies" hasn't been my experience in nearly every mountain or hill ive been to save a couple extremely touristy spots in the height of summer (uk examples: snowdon peak, mam tor, stanage edge etc). Ive been able to go entire days without seeing another group of hikers many places in norway, sweden, uk, even while following hiking guide books
That's because there so much of them and most of the range is not very comfortably accessible (you usually need to endure some discomfort either getting there or staying nearby).
Where you can get nearby fairly easy like base Las Torres, you'll have plenty of people doing just that.
I don't think this is by intent. It's just that the countries themselves are relatively poor and have higher priority projects for their limited resources.
> Where you can get nearby fairly easy like base Las Torres, you'll have plenty of people doing just that.
Are you sure it's the accessibility or the fact that Torres del Paine, which is very famous, is next door?
I get what you're saying though, maybe you just picked a bad example
The higher Himalayas are largely unpeopled as well, especially above 4000m. The only time I met people above those altitudes were at night in camps/settlements. I'm sure the EBC route is more crowded, but that's one very small trek in an enormous mountain range.
The industry that has sway over the Andes is mining. Against that, tourism income is negligible and in fact more tourism could threaten the mining industry.
I did Cerro El Plomo in January and it was a very blissful experience. Barely any people and no phones. Can highly recommend.
This ain't true, even in many cca popular places in European alps you can be alone whole day. Just don't go into most popular hotspots on busy holidays days, traveling rule 101.
People just taking selfies and generally big crowds are not climbers/mountaineers, its everybody else but.
Alex Honnold has a series about it on his podcast I'd recommend listening to. (The Greatest Lie)
Nice read. Very interesting.
Cerro Torre means "tower hill". Appropiate.
The mountain should have never been bolted in the first place.
The debate that it is an established route and thus should be left up comes from a place of entitlement.
If you can’t climb the mountain, what are you even doing there? There are plenty of mountains in the area that can be climbed instead.
Same can be said about the Dawn Wall of El Cap. Harding should have never bolted it. Removing his bolt ladder was the ethical move by Robbins.
What kind of ethics is it to decide that these walls must be free climbed? If you want to do that, fine, go ahead and ignore the bolts.
There is the "Leave No Trace" principle where you do not leave anything behind.
This is why you see in trad climbing the lead will place cams and nuts, while the last in the group on that pitch retrieves them.
Sure there's this principle but this just moves the need for justification. Humans leave their traces everywhere so why this principle for mountains? There are many traces that should be removed such as hydroelectric power stations, river straightening and so on. Is this whataboutism? I just think a few bolts in a mountain don't do much harm and as a casual observer of these mountains you won't even notice. Also I am very much for "leaving no traces" in the sense that everyone picks up their trash.
> Humans leave their traces everywhere so why this principle for mountains?
It’s called conservation. It is why we have these places to climb in the first place. These are protected wild places.
I am all for free climbing. But I don't really like this perspective from a high horse. So it's fine for comparatively rich people to fly there by plane to free climb Cerro Torre?
I don't think it's just a matter of ethics - some legal entity owns these mountains (park authority of some kind?) and drilling holes and placing bolts done without the permission of the owner sounds like vandalism to me.
I am of the belief that we should leave a place better than we find it.
When litter is in my path, I remove it. To do otherwise would go against this fundamental principle.
Natural places should be protected from the widespread exploitation by humans. We are destroying the entire planet. Why can’t we protect the places we have long agreed should be protected? Enough with the anthropocentric BS already. We are a part of the world, not separate.
If you are being serious; read the tower for much more context.