[5][6] In 2005, Ermanno Salvaterra, Rolando Garibotti and Alessandro Beltrami, after many attempts by world-class alpinists, put up a confirmed route on the face that Maestri claimed to have climbed.

Maestri went back to Cerro Torre in 1970 with Ezio Alimonta, Daniele Angeli, Claudio Baldessarri, Carlo Claus and Pietro Vidi, trying a new route on the southeast face.

With the aid of a gas-powered compressor drill, Maestri equipped 350 metres (1,150 ft) of rock with bolts and got to the end of the rocky part of the mountain, just below the ice mushroom.

[citation needed] The first undisputed ascent was made in 1974 by the "Ragni di Lecco" climbers Daniele Chiappa, Mario Conti, Casimiro Ferrari, and Pino Negri.

[15] On 16 January 2012, American Hayden Kennedy and Canadian Jason Kruk made the first "fair-means" (a term used to describe a reasonable use of bolts for safety and aesthetics, "a long-accepted practice in [the Patagonian] mountain range")[18] ascent of the Southeast Ridge, near the controversial Compressor Route, using only two of Maestri's original belay anchors on the headwall.

However, the consensus amongst the climbing community is that of agreement for removing the bolts and it has embraced their actions as having "restored Cerro Torre's southeast ridge to the realm of genuine adventure".

[15] Lama estimated the difficulties of his free ascent, which followed a new line circumventing the bolt traverse and in the upper headwall, as grade X− (hard 8a but mentally highly demanding; e.g., climbing on loose flakes, long runouts).

The boundary was defined by the following mountain landmarks and their natural continuity: Mount Fitz Roy, Torre, Huemul, Campana, Agassiz, Heim, Mayo, and Stokes (nowadays Cervantes).

[32] Cerro Torre was featured in the 1991 film Scream of Stone, directed by Werner Herzog and starring Vittorio Mezzogiorno, Stefan Glowacz, and Donald Sutherland.

[33] Jon Krakauer mentions it briefly in Into Thin Air as one of his earlier difficult ascents (1992): "I'd scaled a frightening, mile-high spike of vertical and overhanging granite called Cerro Torre; buffeted by hundred-knot winds, plastered with frangible atmospheric rime, it was once (though no longer) thought to be the world's hardest mountain".