Cerro Torre

Cerro Torre is barely 3,128 metres high, yet it is one of the most coveted and argued-over summits on Earth. A needle of granite standing on the edge of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field, on the border between Argentina and Chile just west of Fitz Roy, it shoots up from the glacier in walls that look impossibly smooth from below. The strangest thing about it is the crown: the relentless westerly winds off the ice cap plaster the top with rime, building a mushroom of frozen fog that overhangs the rock and can be as hard to climb as anything beneath it. Beside it stand its companions Torre Egger and Standhardt, forming a row of spires that looks almost too sharp to be real.

Its history is a story of ambition and doubt. In 1959 the Italian climber Cesare Maestri announced that he and his partner Toni Egger had reached the summit; Egger was killed by an avalanche on the descent, and the camera said to hold the summit photographs was lost with him. Gaps in the account led many climbers to doubt the ascent. In 1970 Maestri returned with a petrol-powered compressor and drilled a line of bolts up the south-east ridge, stopping below the ice mushroom, which he dismissed as not part of the mountain. The first ascent accepted by all came in 1974, when the Ragni di Lecco team of Daniele Chiappa, Mario Conti, Casimiro Ferrari and Pino Negri needed about two months of effort to reach the top. The argument flared again in 2012, when Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk made a fair-means ascent of the south-east ridge without relying on Maestri's bolts and removed around 125 of them on the way down, reviving a long debate over how far a climber should go in taming a mountain.

For walkers, Cerro Torre is the goal of one of the finest day hikes in Patagonia. The trail from El Chaltén climbs briefly out of town and then follows the valley to Laguna Torre, the lake fed by the Torre Glacier, and the spire stands directly above it when the clouds part. A viewpoint about 2.5 km from the trailhead, the Mirador del Torre, already shows the whole group of peaks; the full walk to the lake and back is about 18 km and takes most people six to eight hours. The weather here changes quickly and the summit is often hidden, which is part of its reputation: a clear view of the Torre is something visitors remember.

Getting there

The base for Cerro Torre is the Argentine village of El Chaltén, in Los Glaciares National Park. The nearest town of size is El Calafate, about 131 km away in a straight line and about 220 km by road via Ruta 40 and Ruta 23; buses between the two take roughly three hours. El Calafate International Airport (FTE) is the practical air gateway. On the Chilean side the nearest domestic hub is Puerto Natales (PNT), about 270 km away, from where buses also run to El Chaltén. The Laguna Torre trail starts on foot from the edge of El Chaltén.