THE NEW YORK TIMES
Mountaineering’s Greatest Climb Unravels
By KELLY CORDES FEB. 21,
2015
Photo
ESTES PARK, Colo. — THE greatest climb in the history of
alpinism, a story of mythological proportions, occurred on Jan. 31, 1959. Cerro
Torre, a 10,262-foot spire of granite, rises from the Southern Patagonia Ice
Cap like a sharpened spear, so steep that climbing it had long been deemed
impossible.
But in 1959, the Italian Cesare Maestri — the famed
Spider of the Dolomites — and the Austrian Toni Egger made a futuristic dash to
Cerro Torre’s summit. The ascent took a mere four days; the descent another
three through a building storm. One of their teammates, anxiously awaiting
their return, on the seventh day noticed a body lying in the snow below the
mountain. He raced up the slope, his heart in his throat. Cesare Maestri lifted
his head from the snow and muttered three words: “Toni, Toni, Toni.”
So the story went. Greatest ascent. Toni Egger gone,
killed in an avalanche on the descent, his body missing.
The climb was so far ahead of its time that it would
take 47 years and dozens of attempts by some of the finest alpinists of each
generation before anyone else would succeed on that same aspect of Cerro Torre.
Think three-minute mile. Or a spaceship to the moon — a decade before the spaceship
was invented.
Now new evidence adds convincingly to what scrupulous
critics have long known: The two never made it to the top.
Beyond the sheer improbability of his claim, Mr. Maestri
lacked proof. The team’s only camera was with Mr. Egger. You had to take Mr.
Maestri at his word. It was all he had.
In few endeavors is trust as implicit in the DNA of the
activity as with climbing mountains: You and your partner, tied together,
trusting each other with your lives. It’s embodied in the enduring phrase “The
brotherhood of the rope.”
Over the decades, a literal mountain of evidence has
piled up against Mr. Maestri’s claimed ascent. Remnants of their passage, in
the form of pitons, fixed ropes and other gear, littered the initial thousand
feet, which he described as completely exhausting. Yet above, on far more
difficult terrain, not a trace has ever been found. His descriptions of
features higher on the mountain, which he could know only if he’d been there,
were wildly inaccurate.
Perhaps most damning, Mr. Maestri claimed that a storm
coated the upper face in ice, allowing Mr. Egger, a virtuoso in such
conditions, to get them both to the summit. But the invention of the modern ice
ax — absolutely requisite to rapidly climb ice so steep — was still a decade away.
Against all the evidence, Mr. Maestri, now 85, has held
his ground, defiantly so, lashing out at his “detractors” and refusing to
address the myriad issues surrounding his claim. He remains a hero in northern
Italy, though lost in the crossfire has been another question: What happened to
his climbing partner?
Sometimes a photograph can speak for the dead.
In Mr. Maestri’s 1961 book “Arrampicare è il Mio
Mestiere” (“Climbing Is My Job”), a photograph bears a caption identifying Toni
Egger climbing the lower flanks of Cerro Torre. The problem is, the photo
wasn’t taken on Cerro Torre. Recently, in his tiny cabin in the village of El
Chaltén, Argentina, where Cerro Torre and the other peaks of the Chaltén Massif
soar above the horizon, Rolando Garibotti cracked the case.
Mr. Garibotti, 43, is himself one
of Patagonia’s greatest climbers. After a dozen hours studying maps and photos
and scouring his memory banks, he pinpointed the location shown in the photo.
Then, late last month, he climbed, alone, to the exact location — a needle in a
haystack among the massive spires — and replicate Mr. Maestri's photo.
It’s a perfect match, and it reveals a place never
before mentioned in an otherwise thoroughly documented expedition. It’s
dangerous to reach and distant from Cerro Torre. No one knew they had ventured
there during their only time together in Patagonia.
Did they realize they were outgunned and went to
investigate other climbing options? Could the photo — the last known image of
Mr. Egger — hint at the actual location of his death? Each new turn takes us
further from Mr. Maestri’s impossible story.
Memories are subject to distortion, of course, as
scientists have pointed out in the wake of the Brian Williams story. But there
is a vast difference between coming to believe what began as a lie, and the
honest malleability of memory. An Italian journalist recently contacted Mr.
Maestri, who denied and deflected, then recalled visiting the vicinity of the
image.
If he remembers events differently than the evidence
suggests, he should be generous enough to deliver his photos from those seven
days — photos that now seem to exist — and help un-puzzle what really happened
to his dead partner. Mr. Egger’s remains have emerged in bits and parts over
the years from a glacier below both Cerro Torre and the dangerous approach to
the location of the recently revealed photo. Was he swept away by an avalanche?
Did he fall into a crevasse? Only Mr. Maestri knows.
More than once, given the controversy surrounding his
claim, Mr. Maestri has said, “If I could have a magic wand, I would erase Cerro
Torre from my life.”
No wonder.
