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 Il Maestro

Umilenie. It’s a word with which Anatoli Boukreev was well familiar. It describes a complex emotion, one of tenderness, sadness, and exhilaration. Anyone unable to respond to beauty that deeply, Russians believe, has missed the point of being human. It’s an emotion deeply familiar to all alpinists.

Cesare Maestri may not recognize the word but will likely understand its implications. In 1959, Maestri, then 29 and known as the Spider Man of the Dolomites, and his climbing partner, 31 year old Austrian Toni Egger, attempted what was considered an impossible line up the sheer and featureless 5000 foot North Face of Cerro Torre. It was to be a first ascent of the tower itself. On February 1, after summiting the formation, Maestri and Egger descended 1000 feet toward the Torre Glacier. While Maestri lowered Egger down the wall to search for a bivy ledge, an avalanche swept Egger to his death along with the team’s only camera. Maestri was later found by the remainder of the team wandering in a daze on the glacier.

In the face of the tragedy and in spite of the lack of documentation, the mountaineering community believed Maestri’s summit account. Nevertheless, in 1970, a rival mountaineer introduced doubts about the ascent and the community split instantly. When pressed for details, Maestri’s descriptions of the final pitches remained foggy at best. Fueled by the doubts, saddened and embittered, Maestri returned within the year to climb the tower by fixing ropes and aggressively bolting a line up the easier southeast ridge. Adding further derision to his name, Maestri did not summit the 300-foot mushroom of ice atop the formation, stating rather “the mushroom was not really part of the mountain and would fall off someday.” He later stated that he did not summit on purpose, but rather stopped a few meters from the top and set up a rappel to smash the bolts of the final bolt ladder in effigy. So the FA of Cerro Torre was not granted him, but claimed in 1974 by the Italian climbing team Ragni di Lecco comprised of Mario Conti, Casimiro Ferrari, Daniele Chiappa, and Pino Negri. Referred to now as the Compressor Route thanks to the 150-pound gas powered air compressor Maestri and his team hand-winched to the headwall, the route has now become the standard.....

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