A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)
markhorrell.com
markhorrell.com
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.
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.
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.
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.
I wasn't calling anything anything. I was just putting the obvious counter-argument on the table. You make a fair point.
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...
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?
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.
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.
The local climbing community chose to take care of this quietly without media or internet drama.
Also, the local community can make whatever decisions it wants, not decisions that satisfy 'whoever' else.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I feel like the governments there low-key try to keep it that way.
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.
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
People just taking selfies and generally big crowds are not climbers/mountaineers, its everybody else but.
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.
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.
It’s called conservation. It is why we have these places to climb in the first place. These are protected wild places.
I do wonder whether the boulderers find it annoying when a boulder is clearly already solved by the worn, chalk marked hand holds. Probably explains why many seek out new untouched sites to solve first.
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.
Put a different way: the climb becomes the bolter's experience, not the mountain's experience. It is no longer intrinsically mountain climbing, it's hiking.
Well no, but I wouldn't get mad if someone else wanted to.