Cerro Torre

There is a gas-powered air compressor hanging on Cerro Torre about 100 m below the summit. Cesare Maestri hauled it, all 300-plus pounds of it, up the southeast ridge in 1970 and used it to drill roughly 400 bolts over a two-season siege. In January 2012 Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk removed about 125 of the bolts on their descent, erasing the route; days later David Lama free-climbed the line without them. The compressor stayed, later cabled to the rock so it could not be removed. The tower rises 10,262 feet from the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, sheer enough that for decades many doubted it could be climbed at all.

This map shows how abruptly the tower rises. The contour lines around the summit compress into nearly a single mass, tracing walls that gain thousands of feet in almost no horizontal distance. The spires of Torre Egger and Cerro Standhardt continue the ridgeline to the north, glaciers pool beneath the east face, and to the west the lines run out onto the vast white plain of the ice field.