New York Times - THE greatest climb in the history of alpinism, a story of mythological proportions, occurred on Jan. 31, 1959. Cerro Torre, a 10,262-foot spire of granite, rises from the Southern Patagonia Ice Cap like a sharpened spear, so steep that climbing it had long been deemed impossible.

 

But in 1959, the Italian Cesare Maestri — the famed Spider of the Dolomites — and the Austrian Toni Egger made a futuristic dash to Cerro Torre’s summit. The ascent took a mere four days; the descent another three through a building storm. One of their teammates, anxiously awaiting their return, on the seventh day noticed a body lying in the snow below the mountain. He raced up the slope, his heart in his throat. Cesare Maestri lifted his head from the snow and muttered three words: “Toni, Toni, Toni.”

 

So the story went. Greatest ascent. Toni Egger gone, killed in an avalanche on the descent, his body missing.

 

The climb was so far ahead of its time that it would take 47 years and dozens of attempts by some of the finest alpinists of each generation before anyone else would succeed on that same aspect of Cerro Torre. Think three-minute mile. Or a spaceship to the moon — a decade before the spaceship was invented.

 

Now new evidence adds convincingly to what scrupulous critics have long known: The two never made it to the top.

Beyond the sheer improbability of his claim, Mr. Maestri lacked proof. The team’s only camera was with Mr. Egger. You had to take Mr. Maestri at his word. It was all he had.

 

In few endeavors is trust as implicit in the DNA of the activity as with climbing mountains: You and your partner, tied together, trusting each other with your lives. It’s embodied in the enduring phrase “The brotherhood of the rope.”

 

Over the decades, a literal mountain of evidence has piled up against Mr. Maestri’s claimed ascent. Remnants of their passage, in the form of pitons, fixed ropes and other gear, littered the initial thousand feet, which he described as completely exhausting. Yet above, on far more difficult terrain, not a trace has ever been found. His descriptions of features higher on the mountain, which he could know only if he’d been there, were wildly inaccurate.

 

Perhaps most damning, Mr. Maestri claimed that a storm coated the upper face in ice, allowing Mr. Egger, a virtuoso in such conditions, to get them both to the summit. But the invention of the modern ice ax — absolutely requisite to rapidly climb ice so steep — was still a decade away.

 

Against all the evidence, Mr. Maestri, now 85, has held his ground, defiantly so, lashing out at his “detractors” and refusing to address the myriad issues surrounding his claim. He remains a hero in northern Italy, though lost in the crossfire has been another question: What happened to his climbing partner? Read more..