I met Kelly Cordes the other day.Howse Peak is a 10,800-foot twin-tipped spire rising from the Continental Divide between British Columbia and Alberta’s Banff National Park. Has the community forgiven you?ĭL: The more I talked, people realized that I made a mistake-why I did it. In the end, you ended up doing the route, the Southeast Ridge, in incredible style. The controversy surrounding the new bolts that were added for your film crew got pretty heated. A: Your first two years in Patagonia didn’t go smoothly. I knew I would need the comp climber in the end though. Even if the weather had been good in the first two years I tried it, I don’t think I would have succeeded. Did that hurt or help you?ĭL: It was a rough process. A: Your background is in sport climbing and competition climbing. I was far from being an alpine climber though. Every climber knows the photo of Cerro Torre. In the refugio, there were a couple of old climbing magazines. Fitz Cahall THE INTERVIEW Adventure: How did free climbing Cerro Torre become your dream?ĭavid Lama: On one of my first trips in 2008, I went to Cochomo in northern Patagonia. I tried to understand what others saw in Cerro Torre. I really tried to figure out why I did what I did. “If that doesn’t affect you on a personal level, then you aren’t human,” says Lama. Lama, whose background was in sport and competition climbing, acknowledges he was in the wrong. The Internet criticism was loud and vociferous.
Both the local climbing community and many in the international community condemned the action. In his first season in 2010, the film crew accompanying Lama added 30 new bolts to a section of the peak where climbers had been negotiating terrain without them. Lama’s own fascination with Cerro Torre was touched by controversy. Rationally thinking though, it was very dangerous. “Maybe irrationally, removing the bolts didn’t make it any more dangerous. “I was just so confident I would do it,” says Lama of his mental state. On January 21, Lama successfully free climbed the route and pushed alpine climbing to a new level. Still, Lama and his partner, Peter Ortner, didn’t flinch. There was potential for massive, life-threatening falls. Lama would have to rely on removable protection placed behind creaking granite flakes held to the mountain by ice. While hiking toward the mountain, Lama crossed paths with Kennedy and Kruk and learned that many of Maestri’s bolts, which he thought he would use to protect his climb, were gone. They avoided using the bolts, but relied on pitons and rope tension to navigate difficulties.įor the last three years, Lama had been trying to become the first person to free climb this iconic, difficult peak. As they descended, they chopped down approximately 125 bolts. In January 2012, Canadian Jason Kruk and American Hayden Kennedy succeeded at a “fair means” ascent via a mix of aid and free climbing. The difficulty and terrain’s complexity stopped many accomplished climbers.
It’s part difficult puzzle, part statement. In 1971, climbing legend Reinhold Messner wrote the now famous essay “Murder of the Impossible” in which he shunned tactics that left permanent impacts on mountains.įor years, climbers have unsuccessfully tried to ascend the Southeast Ridge without Maestri’s bolts. At the time, it startled the climbing community into a heated debate about wilderness ethics. The compressor still remains lashed to the wall a few hundred feet beneath the summit, where Maestri abandoned it after claiming his second summit of the peak, even though he stopped 150 feet shy, avoiding the last permanent cap of airy snow ice which he believed was not really part of the mountain. In 1970, hounded by critics doubting his 1959 summit, Maestri returned to the peak armed with a gasoline compressor that he used to drill about 400 bolts into the Southeast Ridge’s headwall.
His line snaked alongside and crossed Maestri’s infamous Compressor Route. In 2012, Austrian climbing prodigy David Lama added his own controversial-but ultimately proud-chapter to the peak’s history when he became the first to free climb the stunning 3,600-foot Southeast Ridge. Technically, it is much more difficult than climbing Everest there are some years when no climbers make it to the top of Cerro Torre. Since Italian Cesare Maestri claimed-likely fraudulently-to reach this Patagonian summit in 1959, the peak has certainly been the most controversial. Many climbers consider the slender granite spike Cerro Torre to be the most beautiful peak in the world.