Posted 8 months ago
The Tower by Kelly Cordes: A Review
Perhaps more than any technical summit on Earth, the iconic rime- and wind-blasted granite needle of Cerro Torre (10, 262’), in Argentine Patagonia, has long been a beacon for elite alpinists. It spikes from the Patagonia icecap like, as Reinhold Messner described it, a “shriek turned to stone,” and is an object of fascination among climbers, whether they ever intend to climb it or not. Like Mount Everest or K2 or El Capitan, it is steeped in lore.
Given Cerro Torre’s twisted, convoluted, and at times downright baffling history, it’s also been a giant mirror for the human condition, one that, with its sheer, cold, unforgiving flanks at the very tip of South America, close enough to the Pacific Ocean and Antarctica to be near-constantly battered by storms of Biblical fury, reflects the very best and the very worst of its suitors—it is an extreme peak with extreme weather that has evoked extreme behavior. Specifically, I mean the saga of the Italian climber Cesare Maestri, who in 1959 claimed to have stood on the summit via what would have been a radically futuristic line up the north face/ridge (climbed with Toni Egger, who died, reportedly, on the descent) and who, more than a decade later and facing doubts about his ascent, returned and laid siege to the southeast ridge with a gas-powered air compressor, drilling a jaw-dropping 400 bolts along a string of bolt ladders in otherwise-protectable terrain, perhaps to show that no mountain, even mighty Cerro Torre, need be considered “impossible.”
I was lucky enough to get my hands on an advance copy of Kelly Cordes’s brilliantly written, exhaustive retelling and explication of the Maestri story and the mountain’s climbing history, The Tower: A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre (out November 11 from Patagonia; 400 pages, $27.95 hardcover; patagonia.com/us/shop/books?k=aw). It’s a topic I’ve been interested in since reading Rolando Garibotti’s iron-clad debunking of Maestri’s 1959 climb, “A Mountain Unveiled: A revealing analysis of Cerro Torre’s tallest tale,” in the 2004 American Alpine Journal. Perhaps no topic gets climbers going more than Cerro Torre, a peak that has become more controversial yet since 2012, when the talented alpinists Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk used an ice axe to strip 120 of Maestri’s bolts on the upper headwall after their first “fair means” ascent of the Southeast Ridge.
I don’t want to give away too much, because Cordes has spun an imminently readable, page-turning mystery, packed with facts and sources, including interviews conducted with many of the principals, from Italy to America to El Chalten, compiled during two years of research and spanning the peak’s history from the 1950s to the present—to “Patagonia 2.0,” when hyper-accurate weather forecasts have removed much of the doubt, fear, guesswork, and nightmare epicking from climbing in the Chalten Massif. Cordes has always been a great writer, meticulous to a fault, funny and self-deprecating, careful with wordcraft and specific with meaning. Here, he’s at his best, spinning a clear, concise, elegant yarn with some interludes of first-person narration, including a recounting of his and Colin Haley’s 2007 heroic single-push linkup of Los Tiempos Perdidos to the 1974 Ragni di Lecco route, but mostly stepping aside and letting the facts tell the story—without getting too “fact-y” on us.
What emerges is a fascinating and gripping narrative, one that should definitively answer, once and for all, what happened—or, more precisely, did not happen—with Maestri and Egger’s climb of 1959, and one that comes as close as anyone ever will, given Maestri’s thorny reticence to discuss the topic, to understanding his bizarre motivation and tactics upon his return to Cerro Torre in 1970. Cannily, Cordes sidesteps any facile discussion of “style” and “ethics” (ahem, looking at you, Internet climbing forums) and instead goes for the true philosophical crux: Is climbing a democracy or is climbing anarchy (freedom)? In other words, just as Maestri was free to drill his industrial bolt ladders, should future climbers, sure with better means and tools, but also with a different, more evolved view of what it means to climb a mountain, also be free to remove his bolts, to restore the challenge of summiting Cerro Torre to a more organic state? And who gets a say in this decision, and why—and what does this say about what we profess to care about as climbers?
I simply loved this book, and I’m a weary veteran of one-too-many armchair mountaineering reads, not as easily impressed as I once was by any slab of paper with a mountain on the cover and photos inside of manly men with frost in their beards. I tore through The Tower in two nights, this with a newborn in the house: it’s a classic. Supplementing the prose are a host of excellent, full-color (two 16-page galleries) and black-and-white photos of Cerro Torre—of the various climbs, facets, walls, arêtes, flutings of ice, sheer drops to the glacier, and of course of the compressor itself, still hanging up there, 150 feet below the summit on its namesake route, slowly being disintegrated atom by atom by Patagonia’s gale-force winds. A symbol of the determination but also the hubris and folly of the animal known as man.
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