Cerro Torre, A Mountain Consecrated - The Resurrection of th

If they finish their attempted new route on North Twin (obviously a big if there), anyone who actually cares about hard alpine climbing will remember them more for that.

There is a difference between the route and the summit. You cannot attribute a line so someone else, just because he went a few meters above after you. That's bad faith and dishonesty!

If there is still hard climbing above your high point, you didn't finish the line. The final mushroom has vertical ice. This seems pretty clear.

Dishonesty would be claiming you finished a route when you didn't. It gets worse when you start rationalizing that the remaining difficulties weren't so hard or that you didn't care about summitting all along. Just state what you did- that's the most honorable thing you can do, nothing more or less.

"We are approaching the ice of the terminal cap. ABove our head a little snow cornice suggests us to cross in diagonal towards a tongue of ice, which will allow us to climb up more easily towards the summit. I place the last "pressure bolts" and I attack the ice securing myself with very long pitons manufactured by ourselves. I allow Ezio to go up to be closer to me and to secure me in a better way. He stops in the last "pressure bolts"; while he climbs it starts snowing. Also Carlo goes up and in an instant, suddenly, a rumpus kicks up. I have inside me the terror that everything will happen like many years ago. Then, at that time, the tragedy started in the same way. I carry on going up. Now the slope is less steep, but I place anyway my long pitons. The rope finishes. I look around. This is the summit."

Maestri's team did not reach the summit, stopping some 60 meters short, at the end of the headwall. Maestri dismissed the final ice and snow section by commenting: “Its just a lump of ice, not really part of the mountain, it will blow away one of these days.” It is unclear if Maestri reached the end of the vertical rock as he claims.

We know that everybody consider the end of the route where the difficulties finish.

cragging and climbing a mountain are different

But I understand that you are a hardcore climber—you don’t have money; you don’t like to read anything longer than an 8a.nu comment; magazines are for gumbies, etc.—and so here I will offer you a slimmed-down (though not dumbed-down) guide to this ethical conundrum. Because, after thinking about it every day for the last month, I’ve actually come to realize that this issue isn’t that impossible to understand. In fact, even a dummy can “get” Cerro Torre, if it’s properly explained. Allow moi to do so:

A lot of bolts were placed up a beautiful, hard mountain. No one liked the way the bolts were placed, and a lot of people said the bolts weren’t necessary to climb the peak. As years passed, the original sting faded as people continued to rely on the bolts to get to the top—because that’s what everyone else before them had done, and they wanted to get their summit, too. Finally, the route was climbed without the “bad” bolts. Less than one third of the bolts were taken out. Five days later, the route was climbed again without the bolts, this time for its first free ascent. Twice in one week, a new generation of climbers proved that the bolts weren’t necessary to climb this mountain. End of story. What’s the big problem?