B.C. climber removes infamous bolts
A young Canadian mountaineer has landed at the centre of an international storm after he and his American climbing partner scaled Argentina’s legendary Cerro Torre — once considered the hardest peak on Earth to conquer — then arbitrarily removed many of the 400 bolts that had been drilled into its dizzyingly vertical rock face more than 40 years ago, when controversial Italian climber Cesare Maestri completed a history-making but helicopter-assisted first ascent to the summit.
Jason Kruk, a 24-yearold professional-mountain climber from Squamish, B.C., describes Maestri’s step-ladder of bolts on the 3,128-metre Cerro Torre or Tower Hill as a “complete atrocity” that demanded action from a new generation of alpinists to restore “respect for the mountain.”
But what he calls the cleansing removal of Maestri’s “garbage” during the January expedition to Patagonia has sparked a fierce debate within the global climbing community — and temporarily led Kruk and Hayden Kennedy, his 21-year-old climbing companion from Colorado, to be detained for questioning by police in the Argentine town of El Chalten, a tourist hub at the foot of the mountain.
And while Rolando Garibotti, a leading South American climber, has praised the daring duo’s “inspired” re- sponse to Maestri’s infamous “act of vandalism,” Kruk and Kennedy’s de-bolting of Cerro Torre led a group of Italian climbers to issue a statement condemning the “militant and arrogant” action, “the result of a unilateral decision and of a concept of mountaineering, which lacks respect for those of the past.”
The removal of the bolts also prompted outrage among some Argentine locals in El Chalten, who confronted the young climbers after their descent from the mountain.
“It was quite late at night,” Kruk told Postmedia News, recalling the hours following their Jan. 15 climb. “I was in town trying to make a phone call. And some folks saw me, and they got a bunch of people together ... I had about 40 people very angry with me. They called the cops.”
The B.C. adventurer said the police were reasonable and “we weren’t arrested or anything.” Kruk and Kennedy handed over bolts they’d removed from the mountain, which he expects to be given to the local alpine club for safekeeping or display.
“In our mind they were trash,” said Kruk, “and we didn’t want people to accuse us of leaving trash in the mountain.”
Some critics have accused Kruk and Kennedy of destroying artifacts and disturbing a heritage site linked to a landmark event in the international history of mountaineering.
The 82-year-old Maestri, hailed by some as a climb- ing icon but dismissed by others as a fraud, gained fame in 1959 after claiming to have conquered another sheer face of Cerro Torre in an ascent that killed his partner, the Austrian guide Toni Egger, and led to widespread doubt that the pair had really reached the summit.
Maestri’s 1970 climb on a southeast route up Cerro Torre, partly intended to counter doubts that his 1959 claims were true, was accomplished with the help of an airlifted compressor used for drilling the 400 bolts into the steep ridge as climbing aids.
Maestri’s technique generated criticism at the time, with Italian-born mountaineer Reinhold Messner penning a landmark essay — titled Murdering the Impossible — in which he eloquently lamented the overuse of technology and the decline of raw human ingenuity in completing difficult ascents.
“One of the few things that climbers can agree upon is that the style and equipment that Cesare Maestri used back in 1970 went far beyond what was accepted globally, even for the time,” said Kruk. “He had a helicopter fly out a 350-pound, gasoline-powered compressor, and he used a winch to basically haul this compressor up the sheer granite mountain, and used it to power a drill.”
The route that Maestri contentiously established is known as The Compressor, and the very machine he used to attach the bolts removed by Kruk and Kennedy is still anchored to the rock wall near Cerro Torre’s summit.
The two mountaineers issued an open letter to fellow alpinists explaining their actions.
“There has been a lot of talk over the years about chopping the Compressor bolts,” they wrote. “Undoubtedly, it is a lot easier to talk about it than to actually do it and deal with the consequences. After a lengthy introspection on the summit, we knew the act needed to be initiated by one party, without consensus.”