A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

Rock climbing ethics is more complicated and dramatic than that.

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.

Indeed, they were visitors and were given no permission to alter mountains in such ways. If it should have been done, it should have been done by owners of that terrain - I presume Chile / Argentine.

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.

Mountain didn't come with the easements at first and it was still possible to summit. It should be possible to do it without them again. The bottom line is anything else besides that is lazy. As the article says, there's many alternate mountains for more inexperienced climbers.

It reads like the scandal was only from the first attempt at the free climb, where a bunch of belays and bolts were left behind. He since went back and on attempt 3 was able to free climb the compressor side completely. This was after they removed the 120 bolts.

In the USA, there was a person who was traveling around removing bolts. The person showed up in our local area. A couple of members of the climbing community had a conversation with the local police. The police had a concern about him creating a potentially dangerous situation of people trying a climb and expecting to find bolts only to find the bolts missing. The police went out of their way to arrest him. They got him on probation violation and had him extradited to his home state. The climbing community replaced all the removed bolts, and people went back to enjoying the rock climbing.

The local climbing community chose to take care of this quietly without media or internet drama.

I can't find many details, but I had heard Hayden's name before, he sadly died of suicide after losing his partner in an avalanche ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hayden_Kennedy_(climber) ). Jason Kruk appears to still be climbing to this day, so neither appeared to wind up in significant legal trouble after rightly or wrongly damaging a tourist destination.

I think you’ll be sad if you look up Hayden Kennedy.

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.

I've heard a variation of the story where the police took them away (i.e., "arrested" them) to protect them from what was becoming an angry mob.

I want to know why they left them with some.

They didn't remove the bolts for "leave no trace" reasons. They removed them because the style they were put up was considered "poor climbing ethics". They felt it could go "free" and on gear.

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.

Yeah, I thought this would be about a border dispute or something.

Mountaneering nerdery is in some sense nobler, since people practising it put their health and lives at stake. Debates about C++ undefined behaviour would get a different flavour if every now and then some high-profile developer were killed by nasal demons.

im sure that the Andes are far more remote and wild than anything I have experienced in my life as a European, and I would dearly like to be fortunate enough to see them some day, but I would note that "long queues of people waiting to take selfies" hasn't been my experience in nearly every mountain or hill ive been to save a couple extremely touristy spots in the height of summer (uk examples: snowdon peak, mam tor, stanage edge etc). Ive been able to go entire days without seeing another group of hikers many places in norway, sweden, uk, even while following hiking guide books

That's because there so much of them and most of the range is not very comfortably accessible (you usually need to endure some discomfort either getting there or staying nearby).

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.

I did Cerro El Plomo in January and it was a very blissful experience. Barely any people and no phones. Can highly recommend.

This ain't true, even in many cca popular places in European alps you can be alone whole day. Just don't go into most popular hotspots on busy holidays days, traveling rule 101.

People just taking selfies and generally big crowds are not climbers/mountaineers, its everybody else but.

The higher Himalayas are largely unpeopled as well, especially above 4000m. The only time I met people above those altitudes were at night in camps/settlements. I'm sure the EBC route is more crowded, but that's one very small trek in an enormous mountain range.

The industry that has sway over the Andes is mining. Against that, tourism income is negligible and in fact more tourism could threaten the mining industry.

What kind of ethics is it to decide that these walls must be free climbed? If you want to do that, fine, go ahead and ignore the bolts.