Cesare Maestri

In 1959, Maestri, together with Cesarino Fava and Austrian guide Toni Egger [it], travelled to Patagonia to attempt the north-east ridge of the unclimbed Cerro Torre.

Among the doubters are many well-known alpinists including Carlo Mauri, who had failed to climb the mountain in 1958 and in 1970, Reinhold Messner,[3] and Ermanno Salvaterra,[4] who had defended Maestri until successfully completing roughly the same route himself in 2005.

Besides citing the impossibility of the climb given the ice-climbing tools available in those years, the critics point out that Maestri's description of his route is detailed and accurate up to a glacier substantially lower than where Cesarino Fava claimed to have turned back, but vague and impossible to trace on the mountain thereafter; and that bolts, pitons, fixed ropes and other equipment used by the 1959 expedition is plentiful up to that glacier, but absent thereafter.

[7] In 2015, Rolando Garibotti and Kelly Cordes showed the photo Maestri claimed was taken on the summit of Cerro Torre, was taken on Perfil de Indio.

Over two seasons, he used a petrol-driven air compressor, weighing approximately 135 kg (300 pounds) to drill 400 bolts into the rock, and lay thousands of metres of fixed ropes.

[13] On 21 January 2012, Austrian climbers David Lama and Peter Ortner made the first free ascent of the southeast ridge, proving the face was climbable without the use of bolts.

Maestri in 2006