A quest for honest heroes

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If you were going to go to war over a mountain, Cerro Torre would be the one to do it for.

No one has ever lived on the sides of Cerro Torre for more than a few days, and yet the peak has been home to mythic accomplishments, heated controversy, a battleground of climbing ethics and philosophical questions on the innate value of truth, the freedom of climbers and the legacy of mountaineering. The peak, the tallest in the Chaltén Massif, a jagged shard of skyline in Patagonia, was deemed impossible by the first of those who ventured toward its flanks. Then an Italian claimed to have climbed it, and lost his Austrian partner in the process. Then, decades later, an expert on the Chaltén Massif debunked that longdoubted claim, compiling into a single American Alpine Journal article the various evidence, from the fact that no ropes or pitons or any other trace of their ascent was ever found on the upper reaches of the peak to the improbability that after filling his journals with descriptions of tedious progress and overbearing exhaustion, the climbers were suddenly able to sprint to the summit.

“We all want to believe in the impossible, we want to believe in the greatest ascent in history, and that makes it really easy to dismiss inconvenient evidence,” says Kelly Cordes, author of the recently released book The Tower: A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre. “To look at it purely objectively, it’s almost comical that anybody believed it, it so clearly did not happen.”

In addition to picking up where previous books and articles about the region have left off, Cordes takes Cerro Torre’s history an introspective question further, asking about the basics of what makes us human and how the need to believe what we believe shapes what we see when we look at the highlights of human history on the mountain.

That history goes like this. 

Following the enticements of fellow Italian climber Cesarino Fava, Cesare Maestri began traveling to Patagonia in search of unknown challenges. In 1959, Fava, Maestri and Austrian ice climber Toni Egger set off for Cerro Torre. Fava assisted in hauling gear for the initial portions of the climb before turning back to wait for the climbers on the glacier below. Maestri made what is now commonly accepted as a fraudulent claim to the first ascent in 1959 with Egger, who he says was killed in an avalanche while being lowered on their way down from the summit.

Doubt of Maestri’s claim to that ascent fueled his return in 1970, this time hauling hundreds of bolts and a compressor to power his bolt gun. He drilled one of the world’s most beautiful peaks like it was target practice, stringing up some 400 bolts that built a ladder to the summit — the Compressor Route, on the southeast ridge, considered an abomination by alpine climbers who prioritize climbing with the use of natural protection and turn to manmade hardware only as a last resort. The engine block for the compressor is still fixed to the wall, nearly a mile up.

In 1974, what is now the accepted first ascent was made by a team of Italian climbers who completed the Ragni di Lecco route. Then in 1979, American climbers Steve Brewer and Jim Bridwell completed the Compressor Route — discovering in the process that Maestri didn’t actually reach the summit via that route, either.

The controversies haven’t stopped. In recent years, David Lama’s attempt to free climb the Southeast Ridge drew criticism primarily for the Red Bull film crew that wanted to hover near him. While he attempted to climb using hands on rock, a clean approach, his film crew lashed ropes to the mountainside and drilled new bolts into it leaving a huge footprint. When criticism persuaded them to abandon that method, they instead used a helicopter that buzzed the mountain so persistently other climbers compared it to climbing through Vietnam. 

That same year, 2012, saw climbers Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk able to complete the southeast ridge by “fair means” — using natural protection, not the 400-bolt ladder to the summit, which often ran near the cracks and flakes a climber could use to set gear and protect a fall. On the way down, Kennedy and Kruk removed 120 of the bolts, having now proved them unnecessary. When they returned to town, they were harassed and sent to jail, though no crime had been committed.

“It became such a fascinating story to me, one of those things that, the more you dig, the more you uncover,” Cordes says. “Then in a moment of bad judgment I thought it would be a good idea to write a book about it, but it was too damn much work.”

For two years, Cordes conducted interviews across multiple continents and with translators helping with several languages. He reviewed documents and photographs — 150 are included in The Tower.

Cordes recounts the various ascents of Cerro Torre, including his own climb to establish a new route with Colin Haley in 2007, with a proximity that leaves the reader feeling as though they’re watching from within arm’s reach of the rock, grasping the tiny ledges Lama pinched to ascend his 5.13 route to the summit, or dancing up the icy chimney Kennedy and Kruk found when they climbed the southeast ridge without the Compressor Route’s bolts, or elbow-deep in the mushrooms of rime ice that top the peak and almost every summit venture must weather.

While the book records those other ascents, the bulk of it goes to addressing Cerro Torre’s tallest tale — the ascents claimed by Maestri and now generally accepted as disproven. Cordes is a former editor for the American Alpine Journal, which published an account by renowned Chaltén Massif climber and Cerro Torre history expert Rolando Garibotti that, from a technical perspective, debunks Maestri’s claimed 1959 first ascent beyond any reasonable doubt.

“Only the most irrational person could read it and look at Rolo’s [Garibotti] level of research and still have any doubts,” Cordes says. “When you start looking at this thing, and you start looking at the evidence, it’s almost funny how people have believed it at all.”

And yet, some people seem to. Or there is, at least, the wish for it to have been true and a protectiveness over Maestri’s handiwork on Cerro Torre: the Compressor Route. Time and again, Cordes reports his interview subjects saying something to the nature of, Maestri and Egger probably didn’t finish the route, but if they had, it would be one of the greatest accomplishments in the history of mountaineering.

Italian alpinist Maestri, called “Spider of the Dolomites” and renowned for fantastic accomplishments in Europe, claims that after a storm coated the peak’s southeast face in ice, he and Egger reached the mountain’s summit in 1959. Egger was killed in an avalanche on the way down, and with his body went the camera that included their summit photos, proof of their ascent.

But all traces of their climb vanish just a fraction of the way up the mountain, Maestri’s description of the route doesn’t fit what others have experienced when climbing it and isn’t consistent from one telling of the story to the next.

Then there’s the question of the gear available and the conditions described. Maestri says a freak storm coated the face in ice and Egger, the stronger ice climber of the two, led the way to the summit, but no one has seen conditions set up that way on the peak in the decades that have followed. Even if a perfect sheath of ice had covered the face, the ice tools climbers used at the time wouldn’t have facilitated that kind of climbing.

“Everyone for years, for decades, has been talking about, ‘Well, we’ve never seen those conditions happen again, but if it did happen, yeah, it’s possible. It would be hard ice climbing, but yeah, it could happen.’ However, the modern ice ax hadn’t been invented yet,” Cordes says.

At the time, climbers used a single, long ax and chopped holds. Ice at a ramp-like and pleasantly skiable angle of 50 degrees was considered extreme.

“Quite simply, the capability to do it didn’t even exist,” Cordes says. “Everyone talks about, is it possible for Maestri to have climbed it in 1959, and I think as climbers, there’s a camaraderie, maybe. We want to give the benefit of the doubt, and I think as humans we want to believe that anything is possible on any given day. … We never want to say that something’s impossible as humans. However, ice climbing is utterly dependent on the equipment and, in 1959, it truly was impossible. Not only impossible for Maestri and Egger, impossible for anyone in the world to climb the north face of Cerro Torre if it were coated in ice in 1959. … With a single 80 cm wooden ax on grade six ice, you’re going nowhere.”

Like Garibotti before him, Cordes chips down Maestri’s claimed ascent with one piece of evidence after another all of which arrives at the verdict that Maestri just isn’t telling the truth. Where Garibotti’s article was a mountaineer’s technical assessment of how the climb couldn’t have happened as Maestri claims, Cordes’s work is an investigation into why people cling to Maestri’s claim on the peak, both that 1959 ascent and the 1970 establishment of the Compressor Route. The de-bolting earned Kruk and Kennedy serious harassment around town for having damaged a piece of history, or “vandalized” the peak — a curious turn, since their work was to undo alterations to the natural features, not the other way around.

The Tower is threaded with a strong undercurrent of the research Cordes did into human belief and how our existing beliefs shape what we see when evidence is in front of us. Those altered perceptions are both maddening, he says, and somehow a central part of what makes men, men instead of machines.

“I’ve always said, I would have loved for the story to have been true, but it simply wasn’t, and at a certain point it became so ridiculous that I became a little detached from any emotional desire for it to be true,” Cordes says. He recalls having a conversation with a friend in 2002 — he hadn’t yet done much research on the peak, and Garibotti’s article had not yet been published — and the friend asked, “What do you think, do you think Egger and Maestri really climbed it?” Cordes recounts, “and I was like, ‘Man I don’t know…. I hope so.’” 

Hidden behind this obfuscation, the lies and the tall tales is the reality of how Toni Egger died — and it was not, apparently, as Maestri had said, while he was coming down from the summit.

“Even more than the fundamental belief that the truth is important, there is the incontrovertible fact that Toni Egger died and his family never got an honest answer about how their son, their brother died. And Toni Egger’s sister is still alive in Austria. She knows that it didn’t happen the way Maestri said. She’s been waiting for an answer all of these years, and she still doesn’t have it. I think that matters,” Cordes says. “I guess I do have a fantasy of my own that is probably as ridiculous as some fantasy people are buying into with Cerro Torre, but this fantasy that Maestri will come clean and that Egger’s sister will get an honest answer. But I don’t think it will ever happen.”

Maybe all that matters is that Egger died trying to climb an unclimbed mountain. But Cordes himself gets carried away playing through the baffling facts and trying to make sense of the confusing rope configuration found with Egger’s remains when they surfaced in the glacier more than a mile from where Maestri says an avalanche swept him away. And about those remains — glaciers move at varying paces, to be sure, but if Egger fell to his death where Maestri says he did, based on the traces of him found on the glacier near Cerro Torre, his remains moved more than a mile in 16 years, and then only 300 feet in the 29 years to follow.

“There’s any number of scenarios that your mind can run away with and we don’t know if any of them are true. What we do know without fail is that Maestri’s story is not accurate,” Cordes says. “I think there’s a big problem with the fact that Maestri came home and told a lie to a dead man’s family” 

It’s not that he suspects anything other than that Egger died while climbing. But how and when and why he died aren’t clear as long as that story is lost behind Maestri’s myth of them having reached the top. 

Maybe Maestri thought Cerro Torre was so remote, and so difficult, no one would ever come close enough to its summit to disprove his claim. It took months to get to the base of the peak in the 1950s. The town near the Chaltén Massif, El Chaltén, didn’t exist until the 1980s, when Argentina established it to hold the ground from Chile’s claim to the territory.

“There are probably few places in the world today that are harder to reach with our modern transportation than Cerro Torre was in 1959,” Cordes says. “I guess one of the problems with lies is that you can never see the future and you can never know how you’re going to be discovered. Maestri had no way of knowing that there would be a town there, that there would be people crawling all over the mountain. It was so hard to get to and so impossible to climb given the techniques, the equipment they had, that surely he thought nobody would ever come, nobody would ever know.”

One thing Maestri and Cesarino Fava, who climbed a portion of the route with Maestri and Egger in 1959, have never wavered on is that Egger and Maestri reached the summit. Fava, who died a few years ago, maintained that story to the end. His children, three of whom live in El Chaltén, do as well.

But then, Fava has taken Maestri’s word. He descended and waited on the glacier while Maestri and Egger climbed on for days, and then helped home a weakened Maestri who returned alone, moaning Toni’s name.

Only Maestri knows. 

What they were hiding or why they lied, Cordes doesn’t want to speculate. To him, Maestri’s a tragic character.

“It’s not hard to imagine one terrible moment of grief where you tell a lie to honor your dead friend, and — I’m a cynic for sure — and there’s a strong side benefit of you having done the greatest ascent in history that comes with that lie to honor your dead friend, but the thing about it is, with a lie this big, you tell it once and you have to keep telling it. Effectively, you’re trapped,” Cordes says. “It takes a really big person to some day break all of that, but when that’s your most famous accomplishment, the thing that you’re best known for, I don’t know. I can’t pretend to know what’s going on with him, but it could feel like your whole life is a lie.”

Maestri’s friends say he’s bitter, tormented, his life ruined by the Cerro Torre controversies.

The people defending his ascent in the face of the evidence, Cordes says, are probably protecting something of their own, something that’s become intertwined with their identities in an unbreakable way.

“I think an argument could be made that the people who really care about Cesare Maestri would encourage him to tell the truth because I think that’s the only way that he’s going to find peace, if he’s as tormented as he says he is and as they say he is,” Cordes says. “I don’t think it’ll ever happen though. It’s too engrained, too deeply entrenched that it makes me wonder about all kinds of things, what sorts of things am I stuck in my own brain where I can’t see out of. I’m sure I have them.”

Maestri refused to take an interview with Cordes. He sent him a letter — and even called a mutual friend to confirm that Cordes had received it. Cordes was at her house when the call came.

Maestri’s last interviews on Cerro Torre and the letter he sent to Cordes have moments in which, as Cordes describes, Maestri “goes off the rails” — ranting, pointing fingers and flinging accusations that make little sense.

“I don’t have any doubts that he’s a tormented guy,” Cordes says. “He’s certainly a mystery in himself, at least to me, but I would argue even to some of those who say they know him best. … For all that [Maestri] says he doesn’t care, and these people are meaningless to me, I wonder. I wonder if when he’s at home alone, and his wife is ill — it’s sad, you know, it is sad, and I can I totally feel this compassion and sadness for him. And then, that’s what makes it so complicated and why he is such a tragic figure, because then also I think, ‘Wait, wait, wait, Toni Egger’s family deserved an honest answer about how he died.’ And I don’t know how to rectify those two things. I guess they both exist.”

Maestri is listed in the acknowledgements for The Tower, in gratitude, if nothing else, for contributing one of the wildest stories in all of climbing history, Cordes says.

Strong feelings still surround that story on all sides — the climbers furious at the lies, furious at the machinery used on a pristine peak, and the locals who were irate in 2012, when Kennedy and Kruk removed bolts from the Compressor Route. Taking those bolts down effectively dismantled the bolt ladder people used as a route.

“The route was falling into oblivion anyway and some of the people who are most angry in El Chaltén, with a gun to their head they couldn’t draw the line of the Compressor Route. I really don’t think it was about the actual two-inch pieces of metal that had been fading into oblivion,” Cordes says. “I think it was about feeling disrespect- ed by outsiders, and, with that, combine a healthy dose of stress in a small town that’s being overrun by tourists. You came to this beautiful landscape to get away from it all, have a little more balance in your life and now all summer long you’re working nonstop with people coming in and out on buses and demanding their sandwich now, goddamnit.”

Outsiders had no right to make that decision, the locals argued — but in fact, for decades, the only people to have climbed Cerro Torre were foreigners. And in mountaineering, there is no process for checking in with locals — or anyone else, for that matter — to approve a route before it’s completed.

“Climbing is a self-regulated system, so what brought us Cesare Maestri also brought us Jason [Kruk] and Hayden [Kennedy], and you can’t have it both ways. You can’t say it’s OK for Maestri to do this but not for Jason and Hayden to do that,” Cordes says. “We don’t always like what people do. I don’t like what Maestri did and I did like what Jason and Hayden did, but I understand, and if someone wants to go put the Compressor Route back in, they’re free to do it.”

He’s tried to handle it all with some empathy — commiserating with El Chaltén’s annual overrunning population of tourists in a way that resembles Estes Park, where he lives, and the herds of slow-driving tourists who stop to photograph every wild animal within sight of the road. And having grown up in State College, Penn., where football was king, he had classmates from the Paterno family, was friends with one of the Sandusky kids and was junior high football coach to Mike McQueary, who blew the whistle on the cover-up. He’s seen how persistently people can work to continue believing in what and who they have always believed in.

The people who still believe in Maestri were so kind, he says, he worried about them, knowing what he wrote wouldn’t be complimentary to their friends and family.

“I tried to write the truth as best I could while still being compassionate,” Cordes says. “I think it’s important to stick to the truth. Sometimes it’s not easy to do that.”

As a few of the initial responses have come back — he was on particular lookout for comment from Mirella Tenderini, an Italian author well-connected in the climbing community and editor for Cesarino Fava’s autobiography. She was the one who facilitated his letter exchange with Maestri, and took that call to confirm he’d received it. When she came back with compliments and noted his compassion, he says, “The human side of me was really relieved. And in a way that’s what this whole story is about, maybe, is belief and objectivity — where do they intersect, where do our human elements intersect with those two things.”

Will we suffer for losing this one legendary ascent — the greatest ever, if only it were true?

Cordes doesn’t think so: “I think that we have enough phenomenal, inspiring, mind-blowing examples of things that really did happen to provide us with a lifetime of inspiration and that’s far more powerful than believing in a fairy tale.”

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