Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

markhorrell.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 64 posts

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#51

Post by margalabargala »

bluebarbet wrote: post #49
margalabargala wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To which the obvious rejoinder is that two wrongs do not make a right. At the end of the day, it's sort of a "might makes right" situation. If someone with the means and inclination to add bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. If someone with the means and inclination to remove bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. At the end of the day, climb your own climb. If you take actions that affect how others climb, what y…

>what you're calling ethics I wasn't calling anything anything. I was just putting the obvious counter-argument on the table. You make a fair point.

Sorry, the "you" there (and really my whole last paragraph) is addressed at the climbers with strong opinions about how other people climb, not you personally.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#52

Post by butlike »

rcpt wrote: post #4

Those two guys removed an established easement. Sure one can argue that it should never have been installed in the first place, but it was and apparently it became widely used. They had no business taking it down.

Mountain didn't come with the easements at first and it was still possible to summit. It should be possible to do it without them again. The bottom line is anything else besides that is lazy. As the article says, there's many alternate mountains for more inexperienced climbers.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#53

Post by butlike »

modo_ wrote: post #43
_vertigo wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rock climbing ethics is more complicated and dramatic than that. Applying this logic about easements doesn’t really capture the whole picture, because you’re considering people only, not considering the mountain. I think some people who support chopping those bolts would argue that this is like restoring the Mona Lisa after some random guy painted their own painting over it. Yes, removing that guy’s crappy painting i…

Exactly right. Climbers care a lot about the ethics of an ascent. It’s interesting how much those ethics have changed over the history of the sport. One of the core ideas is that later climbers should respect or improve upon the style of the first ascensionist. e.g. if a climb was first done using siege tactics, then doing it in a single day is celebrated. But making a climb easier or safer after the fact is much mor…

I agree with the old school climber's philosophy. It's almost like the old school emphasizes the sense of adventure, and the new school emphasizes the sense of experience via touring (which in my mind are two different things).

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#54

Post by butlike »

margalabargala wrote: post #48
bluebarbet wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To which the obvious rejoinder is that Maestri had no authority to put them there in the first place.

To which the obvious rejoinder is that two wrongs do not make a right. At the end of the day, it's sort of a "might makes right" situation. If someone with the means and inclination to add bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. If someone with the means and inclination to remove bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. At the end of the day, climb your own climb. If you take actions that affect how others climb, what y…

The bottom line is the mountain didn't have bolts from the get-go. You're still free to climb it, and if you can't; you won't.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#55

Post by margalabargala »

butlike wrote: post #54
margalabargala wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To which the obvious rejoinder is that two wrongs do not make a right. At the end of the day, it's sort of a "might makes right" situation. If someone with the means and inclination to add bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. If someone with the means and inclination to remove bolts exists, it is hard to stop them. At the end of the day, climb your own climb. If you take actions that affect how others climb, what y…

The bottom line is the mountain didn't have bolts from the get-go. You're still free to climb it, and if you can't; you won't.

Unless you opt to be the next person to hike a 150kg gas compressor up there to install them.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#56

Post by butlike »

brian_spiering wrote: post #31
matheusmoreira wrote: post #5

> police arrested them and confiscated 102 bolts That stood out to me... I understand that rock climbing is Serious Business to its practitioners and people on internet forums, but these two guys actually got arrested for removing those bolts, which is a whole new level of serious. Was it really some kind of crime to do that? What happened to those guys after that?

In the USA, there was a person who was traveling around removing bolts. The person showed up in our local area. A couple of members of the climbing community had a conversation with the local police. The police had a concern about him creating a potentially dangerous situation of people trying a climb and expecting to find bolts only to find the bolts missing. The police went out of their way to arrest him. They got…

Why not just install ladders at that point so everybody can join in and climb. Or maybe a ski lift system to the top? Where's the cuttoff? When it becomes personally too hard for you, the tool that assists you is allowed? Someone else's bolts make it easier. It's a shame the local community chose this route.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#57

Post by butlike »

cjonas wrote: post #35
NoboruWataya wrote: post #33

Curious to know the basis on which they were arrested. I guess it's something in the realm of criminal damage to public property. But that would imply that Maestri's bolts had become part of the public property that is the mountain. I assume Maestri was not arrested for inserting the bolts. Not being a mountain climber at all I don't really have an opinion on this, but I do naturally sympathise with the anti-bolt guy…

They didn't remove the bolts for "leave no trace" reasons. They removed them because the style they were put up was considered "poor climbing ethics". They felt it could go "free" and on gear. This would have made the summit unobtainable to all but the strongest climbers in the world... Which would have upset many people who had traveled far and spent a lot of money to attempt the summit. Alex Honnolds "climbing gold…

Just goes to show you money can't buy everything. Can't buy you being in good enough shape to climb the mountain at the mountain's level.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#58

Post by butlike »

alberto-m wrote: post #40
mellosouls wrote: post #20

Ofc we all know this but its nice to be reminded that gatekeeping and nerdery is not limited to tech forums.

Mountaneering nerdery is in some sense nobler, since people practising it put their health and lives at stake. Debates about C++ undefined behaviour would get a different flavour if every now and then some high-profile developer were killed by nasal demons.

if (undefined) { launchNuclearCache(); }

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#59

Post by butlike »

ofrzeta wrote: post #9
chabes wrote: post #7

The mountain should have never been bolted in the first place. The debate that it is an established route and thus should be left up comes from a place of entitlement. If you can’t climb the mountain, what are you even doing there? There are plenty of mountains in the area that can be climbed instead. Same can be said about the Dawn Wall of El Cap. Harding should have never bolted it. Removing his bolt ladder was the…

What kind of ethics is it to decide that these walls must be free climbed? If you want to do that, fine, go ahead and ignore the bolts.

Because it breaks down if we use another example. Would you want to solve a rubik's cube that was pre-turned so there were only 3 flips left to complete the cube? Changing the state of the activity (adding bolts/belays/ladders/etc.) is not in the spirit of the event, just as almost finishing a rubik's cube for someone else isn't in the spirit of actual event.

Put a different way: the climb becomes the bolter's experience, not the mountain's experience. It is no longer intrinsically mountain climbing, it's hiking.

Re: A short history of Cerro Torre, the most controversial mountain (2012)

#60

Post by chabes »

ofrzeta wrote: post #47
chabes wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Humans leave their traces everywhere so why this principle for mountains? It’s called conservation. It is why we have these places to climb in the first place. These are protected wild places.

I am all for free climbing. But I don't really like this perspective from a high horse. So it's fine for comparatively rich people to fly there by plane to free climb Cerro Torre?

My point is about letting wild places be wild, not about the environmental impact of climbing as a whole.
Post reply on HN