Salvaterra, Cerro Torre and Maestri

Ermanno Salvaterra's intervention after his latest ascent on Cerro Torre with Rolando Garibotti and Alessandro Beltrami.

PlanetMountain.com

November 2005

Traduci in

Patagonia 2005, Salvaterra, Garibotti, Beltrami

Ermanno Salvaterra, who recently returned from Patagonia where together with Rolando Garibotti and Alessandro Beltrami he made the first ascent of "El Arca de los Vientos"", has published the following report in Planetmountain.com's Forum. His intervention is doubtlessly of interest, especially considering the media impact this latest ascent has had and the rekindling discussion about the 1959 Maestri-Egger route.

Salvaterra, the Torre and Maestri
report by Ermanno Salvaterra (Forum, PlanetMountain)
"Hi everyone. This is my first time in a forum and so I'm not even sure whether I'm doing the right thing. Perhaps though it's right that the person directly involved, myself, or for others the guilty one says something about this matter. First of all I don't think I'm someone who loves publicity because I'm perfectly happy at home with my wife and my fantastic children. If important newspapers decide, like they have done recently, to publish something it is because, given the topic, they are interested in doing so.

Someone accused me of having reopened a closed chapter but they should know that this story has never been closed. Perhaps we've spoken little about it here in Italy but the international mountaineering world has never ceased to do so. Mr Garibotti, who then became my partner on this climb, was criticised by me because he never got in touch with me when he wrote, in more than two years of work, his piece published free of charge for the annual American Alpine Journal. Perhaps many should document themselves or read what was published on many an occasion in the English climbing magazine Mountain. Or read Maestri's book "Arrampicare Ã¨ il mio mestiere", Cesarino Fava's diary published by the Bollettino della SAT in March/April 1959 or the book "Patagonia: terra di sogni infranti". Reading just these we should have a discreet documentation.

I attempted that route for the first time in '90 or '91 together with Guido Bonvicini and Adriano Cavallaro. We carried out our first attempt in October and got to within one pitch of the English East Dihedral and then we turned back because the face was avalanche prone. Whilst waiting for it to become safe we climbed the French-Argentine route on Fitz Roy and the Compressor Route on Cerro Torre. We made a second attempt in November and slept in the "English box" at the base of their dihedral. The weather was terrible the next day and my partners wanted to descend. I asked them to give me just a couple of hours to climb up a bit. I wanted to reach Col of Conquest and we did. I was curious to see the place. The storm pushed us back down. Other partners, on the eve of departure for that ascent, decided not to go but their decision didn’t touch me in the slightest. In 1994 I made another attempt with the Austrian Tommy Bonapace, an expert of that route. We started from Base Camp and in the evening we reached the base of the first triangular snow field. Some unpleasant things happened and in the morning, after a terrible bivouac he said "Finish Ermano, never more"! He intended that he had finished with that route, definitively. Years passed and every now and again that route assailed me. For various years I defended Maestri, Egger and Fava. I didn't defend them in a Forum or chitter chatter in a "bar". I defended him to the utmost against his (please forgive me Ken Wilson) great accuser KEN WILSON, editor of the English magazine Mountain. Then I slowly began to change my point of view. I reread and restudied what I'd said and written in Cesare's defense and I changed my mind. The idea of that route was never dead therefore. Last November I returned from Patagonia and a month or two later I celebrated my 50th birthday. For the first time I had to face the fact that time was passing, but my desire to climb was still high.

In January I practically decided that I would return there to attempt this ascent. At the end of winter my friend Rolo Garibotti wrote to me with a project. The idea enticed me but I replied saying that I would first like to attempt that "thing". He wasn't too convinced initially. A few years back he wanted to go there the Slovenian Silvo Karo, but Silvo told him that that route was too dangerous and so Rolo abandoned that project. When I proposed it to him he wasn't too convinced himself but he then accepted with enthusiasm and Ale was already in on it. Then in summer the long series of polemics in the newspapers. We didn't depart to make an enquiry; we departed simply to follow that line. Last January the Austrians Toni Panholzer and partners made a series of attempts on that face and they got to within 200m of the summit climbing the East Face in its lower section and then continuing directly up one of the two north dihedrals. Part of this corner system was climbed by Giarolli-Orlandi. We initially thought of following that line but the insecure nature and the difficulty of the route prompted us to change objectives.

Great Bruno Detassis once said to search for the lines of weaknesses through the difficult sections, and this was our objective. I really would have liked to find a peg which Maestri claims to have used. We found some in the 300m lower dihedral but then nothing else. Had I found something, not necessarily close to the summit, but even just beyond the first snow field, then this would have been sufficient for me and the mountaineering skeptics. Had we found something then that would have been proof of their passage. Not having found anything we haven't got proof of the fact that they didn’t pass but the doubt, allow me, exists."

Ermanno Salvaterra