France’s Piolet d’Or awards have been called mountaineering’s Oscars. Often controversial, this year’s prize saw the Cerro Torre saga brought back to the boil as Cesare Maestri once again defended his 1959 first ascent. But, as Ed Douglas reports, the evidence is stacking up against him.

What should we think about the Piolet d’Or? The prize was first awarded in 1991, the offspring of the Groupe de Haute Montagne – France’s association of elite alpinists – and Montagnes magazine. Its aim is to reward those climbers of any nationality who make the most important alpine ascent of the preceding year.

Lord knows the general public needs educating on the subject of what constitutes a good climber. Business leaders across the globe clap enthusiastically as another slick Everest punter with a line in corporate blarney trousers a few grand. Meanwhile, some raggedy-assed kid and his mate are duct-taping the holes in their tent for their next crack at the impossible.

So an attempt to give credit where it’s due must be a good thing, right? But how you judge an important ascent has proved a tad slippery over the years. There are even alpinists who disapprove of the whole idea of giving a prize for a mountaineering achievement, let alone who wins it. Some of those skeptics have even been nominated for the Piolet d’Or.

The 2005 award went to the Americans Steve House and Vince Anderson for their quite staggering first ascent on Nanga Parbat. Stephen Venables, president of the judges and currently President of the Alpine Club, has suggested that, while hardly a no-brainer, the decision was easier than it has been in the past.

There were still frissons of controversy. House and Anderson took the opportunity of their acceptance speech to reiterate their commitment to alpine-style climbing ahead of outmoded siege tactics. The subtext was a swipe at the methods used by the Russian team on Jannu’s N Face, which took the 2004 prize. But the real beef concerned another nominated team, the Italians Ermanno Salvaterra and Alessandro Beltrami, and the Argentinean US resident Rolo Garibotti.

The trio were included as contenders for their new route on Cerro Torre, El Arca de los Vientos. Climbed last November, this covers 37 pitches, starting up the NE Face to the Col of Conquest, before moving round the N Ridge to join the NW Face and then rejoining the N Ridge. There’s a fair bit of previously covered ground, but it’s still a breathtaking creation.

What really stirred things up was the idea their route could be presented as having almost anything new on it, since it is broadly the line Cesare Maestri claimed for the first ascent of Cerro Torre in 1959. By presenting the route as new, the trio was effectively saying that Maestri’s incredible ascent was just that - incredible. It had been cut from the record.

This was confirmed by the team’s description. Salvaterra wrote: “Our route follows a way up along the initial dihedral that Egger, Fava and Maestri claimed in 1959. From the highest point they reached, we proceeded to Collado de la Conquista along rock walls to the left of the American route.” The obvious inference from this is that Salvaterra knows where Maestri got to almost 50 years ago, and it certainly wasn’t the summit.

Salvaterra is a Patagonian veteran, with two new routes on Cerro Torre and the first winter ascent. He had been on the Maestri-Egger route three times before and over the course of those attempts lost his faith in one of Italy’s brightest sporting stars. He announced that if he found just one of Maestri’s pegs on the upper part of the mountain he would “throw it in the world’s face, but first in my own.” When they returned, however, the team announced they had found nothing.

None of this escaped the attention of Cesare Maestri. How could it? Beltrami is a guide, working out of the same office in Maestri’s hometown of Madonna di Campiglio. After the ‘repeat’ of Maestri’s route, and the complete absence of corroborating evidence, the controversy was anticipated by Maestri was front-page news in Italy. Beltrami had gone to Cerro Torre believing in Maestri; he returned to a small mountain community racked by doubts.

Now 76, the legendary Ragno delle Dolomitti remains energetic in the defence of his claimed ascent. The organisers of the Piolet d’Or received a letter from Maestri’s lawyer, stating that El Arca de los Vientos was not eligible for the award on the basis that Maestri and Egger had climbed the thing in 1959. Included with the letter were sworn affidavits from both Maestri and Fava, reiterating their claims.

As it happens, Rolo Garibotti had himself written to the organisers of the Piolet d’Or, on behalf of his team-mates, requesting that their route be withdrawn from competition, for reasons that Garibotti eloquently explains in the box headed Thanks, But No Thanks (see page 21). But those reasons did not include a sudden conversion to the notion that Maestri told the truth.

“Once again,” Maestri wrote, “I claim the right to be respected.” Warning detractors not to defame his standing as an alpinist and accusing them of offending the memory of Toni Egger, the statement’s tone is one of shocked outrage at the very idea. It’s a mask Maestri hasn’t let slip for 47 years. The former Communist partisan is a bullish man, who speaks his mind. He made it clear in 1972 when interviewed by Ken Wilson and friends that he wouldn’t hesitate to reach for his lawyer and sue for libel if they crossed the line.

“The history of alpinism,” he told the GHM, “is and has to remain ‘clean’ in all its meanings, most critically the one that attributes good faith to every climber. Otherwise the danger of ‘soiling’ every enterprise becomes unavoidable, with the consequence that the entire history of alpinism is in doubt.”

There will be many climbers who share Maestri’s view, that we should automatically trust the word of someone claiming a first or significant ascent. That’s certainly been the view of Maestri in the past. At the BMC’s Buxton Conference of 1974, Maestri was cheered by the audience after talking about his second claimed ascent of Cerro Torre, that of the infamous Compressor Route. The approval was in part a reaction to the doubts raised in that Mountain magazine interview with Ken Wilson two years before.

“[It was] almost certainly a backlash against our interview,” Wilson recalls, “climbers supporting the supposed underdog under pressure from uppity journalists having the cheek to question them.” But the history of alpinism is far from clean. It needs regular maintenance. Wilson himself has consistently offered an alternative to Maestri’s romantic notion of taking everyone at their word, that of the “plausible scenario”.

While Maestri’s account went unchallenged by direct experience, almost all climbers were prepared to accept his description of the climb, despite its obvious economy beyond a detailed description of the first 300m. Lionel Terray called Egger and Maestri’s ascent “the most important alpine achievement of all time.” That level of approval is something to hang onto.

But doubts were beginning to surface, beginning in Italy with alpinists including Carlo Mauri, who had been on the W Face of Cerro Torre in 1958. Far from Maestri’s errors being the vagaries of an old man’s memory, as he told the Piolet d’Or’s organisers, Maestri has never been able to offer a consistent account of what happened. The line of ascent changed with every photograph he inked in, the sites of bivouacs moved. His contemporaries smelled a wrong ‘un.

In 1968, a British team including rugged operators like Dougal Haston and Mick Burke, as well as the copiously talented Martin Boysen, attempted what is now the Compressor Route, Cerro Torre’s SE Ridge. Their failure made them question Maestri’s account of what looked like a harder route. It was their doubts and those of other top climbers that persuaded Ken Wilson to investigate the climb.

Most climbers are – quite reasonably – appalled at the notion of a journalist pointing the finger of doubt. Most journalists, even those who climb, have little personal understanding of what is required on a tough new climb at that level. Football writers routinely whip up small stories about big stars into ‘scandals’, and it’s hardly surprising the public is so cynical about what they read or hear. Who wants that in climbing?

But, as Garibotti argues, it is essential that magazine and journal editors obtain convincing accounts and “are not credulous, for we all rely on the accuracy of such records.” Garibotti himself has provided the most exhaustive and thorough investigation of the Maestri affair, a 7,800-word essay published in the 2004 American Alpine Journal.

If you want to know why I believe Cesare Maestri did not climb Cerro Torre, then I recommend you read Garibotti’s article. As a journalist, I find it a compelling piece of work. Garibotti has an intimate knowledge of the mountain, was born in Italy, grew up in northern Patagonia and consequently speaks the languages and understands the cultures.

As a climber, I feel depressed at the idea of perhaps the world’s most beautiful and most difficult mountain being treated as badly as it has. It is a cruel irony that Maestri appealed to our best sentiments in his defence, because it is those ideals that at are at risk if it turns out his claims are fantasy. The Italian journalist Giorgio Spreafico, editor of La Provincia and a close student of the Maestri affair, said: “Maestri only repeats: ‘If you doubt me, you doubt the story of mountaineering.’”

Enough high-falutin’ moralising. The evidence against Maestri got crunchy in 1976 when the Americans John Bragg, Jim Donini and Jay Wilson made the first ascent of Torre Egger, sharing part of Maestri’s claimed line to the Col of Conquest. Bragg and Donini started their route believing Maestri’s claim and ended it with the profoundest doubts.

In the lower dihedral on Cerro Torre’s E Face, the climbing that Maestri described so thoroughly was littered with abandoned gear, culminating in a stash of unused hardware on a small ledge just below the obvious triangular snowfield halfway to the Col of Conquest. Above that point, nothing, not a shred of evidence has been found to support Maestri’s story.

It is also the point where Maestri’s description becomes questionable, and the location of the last photograph we have of the climb. It features Maestri in a typically determined pose, and was taken by the expedition’s third climber, Cesarino Fava. Above this point things look shaky. Stepping off the snowfield is harder than Maestri claims, the traverse into the Col of Conquest is much easier than he says. Bragg and his team noticed that looking from below, from the snowfield, Maestri’s description made sense. It’s only when they did the climbing that questions arose.

From the Col of Conquest to the summit, including a substantial proportion of the hardest climbing, Maestri’s description is vague to the point of omission. He claims he and Egger climbed a sheet of ice that sheathed the N Ridge. This, he said, was in places up to a metre thick. “For 300m we go up climbing on air,” he wrote.

No matter that similar ice conditions have never been experienced on Cerro Torre by anyone else. Or that Maestri’s own description puts the angle at no more than 50° when in reality it is almost vertical. (He compared the angle to that of the N Face of Presanella near Trento, a route that Salvaterra has skied down.) What you can’t ignore is that Egger and Maestri’s ethereal progress was encumbered by the gear they took, including 30 pegs, 100 bolts and 30 ice screws, along with their 200m rope, and another 30m of cord.

Maestri claims they placed around 60 bolts on the N Ridge and NW Faces above the col. Not one of those bolts was found by the 2005 team. Maestri himself says it took at least half an hour to place each bolt with a hand drill. Do the maths, subtract the period from the three days it took to reach the summit from the Col of Conquest, and you are barely left with any time to climb a near vertical ice sheet – assuming freakish, unique conditions – in the era before modern ice tools.

In Maestri’s defence, some equipment found in 1998 by Maurizio Giarolli and Elio Orlandi appeared to offer the Italian some independent evidence of success. In 1998, the American climber Mark Synnott used this discovery in support of Maestri’s claim in an article for Climbing magazine. But the find comprised an ice screw, later identified by the British climber Phil Burke as one of his, and a small section of rope, which has also been attributed to the British attempt of 1981.

Forty-seven years on from what was hailed as the greatest ascent in the history of mountaineering, there is no conclusive proof that Cesare Maestri and Toni Egger reached the summit of Cerro Torre. The camera they took disappeared with Egger when he fell and with it any documentary proof. There is no physical evidence that they reached a point higher than 300m off the ground. But is there any proof that he and Egger didn’t climb Cerro Torre?

The short answer is, of course, no. For this reason, the controversy will remain unresolved unless Maestri admits his ascent was fabricated. But in the last 47 years, Maestri has failed to give the “plausible scenario” his doubters have requested. At a conference held in 1999 at Male, close to Maestri’s home, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of his ascent, he once again failed to pick out the line he had previously inked in on various photographs for various publications. The contradictions and paradoxes of Maestri’s periodic outbursts simply don’t add up.

In fact, far from being settled, Maestri’s climb is now throwing up more questions. What is the role of Cesarino Fava in the legend of Maestri? He wrote movingly of how he made a heroic carry to the Col of Conquest and then retreated to wait for Egger and Maestri – and of the tragic outcome. But if Maestri did lie about getting to the col, then so did Fava. (In fact, in public, it has often been Fava who has been the more vociferous in defending the climb.)

The gaps and inconsistencies in Fava’s own account are also puzzling, but the real boggler is why he would lie in the first place? There are theories. Fava was, like Garibotti, an Italian émigré in Argentina, originating in the Trento area but living in Beunos Aires. And like climbing scenes anywhere in the world, Buenos Aires had its own jealous rivalries. Fava’s great rival, Folco Doro Altan, had been teamed in 1958 with Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri on Cerro Torre’s W Face. Success from the east side with other Trento climbers would have tasted sweet. But a conspiracy? It seems outlandish.

Still, Fava’s own hypersensitivity is legendary, even if he is superficially more affable. In 1972 the adventure filmmaker Leo Dickinson was on the SE Ridge of Cerro Torre with a strong British team that included Eric Jones, Pete Minks and Cliff Phillips. Their attempt lasted weeks, and was leavened one day by some climbers coming to visit.

“One was Cesarino Fava,” Dickinson recalls. “At first I didn’t realise who he was and our conversation was very convivial. Fava spoke no English but Richard Chernieski did and explained that he had been with Maestri. Our problem was with the hundreds of bolts we had just encountered on the SE Ridge and conversation focused around this. I distinctly remember Fava’s views that the bolts were a step too far. He added that once Maestri was a great climber but appeared not to be greatly in favour of the latest climb.”

By then Dickinson had realised the significance of their visitor and asked Fava about the 1959 ascent. “His whole body language changed, it was almost as if a shutter came down when he said, ‘Why does everyone ask about that route?’ The conversation ended and they left.”

Many climbers have reflected that Maestri’s 1971 climb of Cerro Torre, involving a powered drill abandoned on the wall and hundreds of bolts, was in a way an admission of guilt. Why commit what appeared even then to be grotesque vandalism to prove that 12 years earlier you were a great climber? Perhaps the last great question to surround Cerro Torre is what will happen to Maestri’s other creation. Should the bolts be chopped? And if not, what happens when they corrode?
“I think that at the very least the sections that can easily be climbed with natural gear should be stripped,” says Garibotti. This would include, he says, the route’s bolt traverse, since the natural line follows the ridge tried by the British in 1968 and climbed by Salvaterra in 1998. “Large sections of the upper headwall can also be climbed with natural gear and in the area of the ice towers, where Maestri placed lots of bolts up blank pillars to avoid climbing ice, the bolts should also be stripped.”

Garibotti doesn’t believe an ascent of the Compressor Route is a valid ascent of Cerro Torre. If you accept that, then the true number of ascents of this mountain of mountains stands at around 30. The far greater calumny, however is this: if Maestri did not climb Cerro Torre in 1959, and allowing that his Compressor Route did not actually reach the summit, then the first genuine ascent of the astounding Cerro Torre was made in 1974 by Daniele Chiappa, Mario Conti, Casimiro Ferrari and Pino Negri.

Already, in several publications, that fact has been tacitly accepted. But the history of climbing on Cerro Torre remains ‘soiled’, as Maestri would term it, by the 1959 controversy and the overuse of bolts on the SE Ridge. Perhaps the time has come to clean up the mess.

Cerro Torre - A Beginners Guide

It is the classic mountaineering epic, two men battling against the elements to climb the most beautiful and hardest peak in the world, only for the brilliant leader to die descending from the summit.

The soaring granite walls of Cerro Torre (3127m) are located in Patagonia, southern Argentina, and in the 1950’s it attracted some of the best alpinists in the world, including the great Walter Bonatti and Carlo Mauri. Some questioned whether the peak, beset with savage weather systems and obviously difficult, could ever be overcome.

Cesare Maestri had a formidable reputation as a rock climber in the Dolomites, with a track record of outstanding solos, but had done little further afield.

Maestri had been lured to attempt Cerro Torre by a photograph sent him by Cesarino Fava, a Trento climber who had emigrated to Argentina. He joined Maestri on the 1959 climb. Toni Egger was a superb Austrian ice climber, who had done the first of ascent of Jirishanca in Peru. He was drafted in to climb Cerro Torre’s upper icy sections.

Starting on 28th January, 1959, these three left their snow cave at the base of the mountain. Fava claims to have climbed with the other two to the Col of Conquest in one exceptionally long day. From there, it took Egger and Maestri another three days to reach the summit. Anxious for their safe return, Fava claims he had given up hope when he spotted a shape collapsed in the snow at the foot of the route. It was, he says, Maestri, who explained Egger had fallen on the descent. Lionel Terray said that their claimed ascent “was one of the greatest achievements in alpine history.” Doubts, however, quickly spread among those with a detailed knowledge of Cerro Torre.

Now climbing’s richest story has more holes than yarn.

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