That stood out to me... I understand that rock climbing is Serious Business to its practitioners and people on internet forums, but these two guys actually got arrested for removing those bolts, which is a whole new level of serious.
Was it really some kind of crime to do that? What happened to those guys after that?
No serious legal consequences to them from this climb, though, and the route remains clean. There was a wonderful film in this year’s Mountains On Stage film tour called Patagonian Chimeras, about a team of women who climbed the new variation by fair means.
I feel like the governments there low-key try to keep it that way.
The debate that it is an established route and thus should be left up comes from a place of entitlement.
If you can’t climb the mountain, what are you even doing there? There are plenty of mountains in the area that can be climbed instead.
Same can be said about the Dawn Wall of El Cap. Harding should have never bolted it. Removing his bolt ladder was the ethical move by Robbins.
This is why you see in trad climbing the lead will place cams and nuts, while the last in the group on that pitch retrieves them.