Did you know that Maestri’s gas-powered compressor was hauled up to the summit of Cerro Torre in 1990 during the filming of Werner Herzog’s film Scream of Stone?

The plan was to helicopter the infamous power tool down to El Chalten and have it brought to Reinhold Messner’s—one of the film’s screenwriters—mountain museum in Italy. Very few people lived in El Chalten at the time—it was nowhere near the “Jackson Hole of South America” destination that it has become today—and there was no protest from the “locals” about the plan. However, many climbers were working on the set of Scream of Stone, and they complained. So did Adrian Falcone, the park’s head ranger at the time.

After some debate, the compressor was lowered back down to its last resting place on Cerro Torre’s headwall, and it was bolted to the rock with cables so it could not be easily removed again.

It’s been about a month since, as they say, shit went down on Cerro Torre, the slender queen of Patagonia ... and if you feel as I do, then you too are no doubt sick of reading and thinking about this Gordian knot of a climbing issue. But I thought the above anecdote was a zesty morsel of trivia in a topic that has otherwise been chewed to flavorless, unrecognizable cud.

If you’re a subscriber, you’ll be receiving our annual Photo Issue (No 201) in the mail any day. (Click here to buy the photo issue. No shipping!) In it, you’ll find my article “The Tyranny of History,” which I hope provides new light, hard facts, depth and background to “CT 2012,” as I call both this issue as well as my robot. If going around in circles for 40,000 posts—99 percent of which are absolute misinformed garbage—on various climbing forums hasn’t sated your appetite for reading about all things Cerro Torre, and you’re actually still interested in this juicy vertical imbroglio, I hope you will take the time to stand in your local specialty climbing shop and check out my essay and, hell, maybe even buy the magazine itself. (What an original idea!)

But I understand that you are a hardcore climber—you don’t have money; you don’t like to read anything longer than an 8a.nu comment; magazines are for gumbies, etc.—and so here I will offer you a slimmed-down (though not dumbed-down) guide to this ethical conundrum. Because, after thinking about it every day for the last month, I’ve actually come to realize that this issue isn’t that impossible to understand. In fact, even a dummy can “get” Cerro Torre, if it’s properly explained. Allow moi to do so:

A lot of bolts were placed up a beautiful, hard mountain. No one liked the way the bolts were placed, and a lot of people said the bolts weren’t necessary to climb the peak. As years passed, the original sting faded as people continued to rely on the bolts to get to the top—because that’s what everyone else before them had done, and they wanted to get their summit, too. Finally, the route was climbed without the “bad” bolts. Less than one third of the bolts were taken out. Five days later, the route was climbed again without the bolts, this time for its first free ascent. Twice in one week, a new generation of climbers proved that the bolts weren’t necessary to climb this mountain. End of story. What’s the big problem?