Ice and Iron: Ermanno Salvaterra's Historic First Winter Ascent of Cerro Torre

To stand beneath Cerro Torre in the height of the austral summer is to witness one of the most violent weather engines on the planet. But to venture beneath its wind-sculpted granite towers in the depth of the Southern Hemisphere winter—when temperatures plummet past minus thirty degrees Celsius and polar blizzards sweep unchecked off the Southern Patagonian Icefield—was considered by most veteran mountaineers to be an impossible fantasy.

Yet for Ermanno Salvaterra, an Italian mountain guide from the Brenta Dolomites who would become universally known as “The Man of Cerro Torre,” the frozen needle exerted an irresistible magnetic pull. In June 1985, accompanied by Andrea Gini and Paolo Caruso, Salvaterra traveled to southern Argentina. In those years, the mountain town of El Chaltén did not yet exist; the region was a barren, trackless frontier where winter meant absolute isolation. Any mistake, injury, or catastrophic storm would have to be survived without hope of external rescue.

Setting Foot on the Winter Tower

Wading through waist-deep powder snow while carrying colossal loads, the trio established their base camp in a frozen cave among the boulders near Laguna Torre. Above them, Cerro Torre rose like a ghostly white phantom, entirely plastered in feathers of rime ice and blue glacial glaze.

On June 25, 1985, seizing their first weather opening, Salvaterra and his companions climbed toward the Col de la Paciencia. The cold was staggering. Contact with bare granite through climbing gloves caused instant skin adhesion, and water froze solid inside insulated thermal flasks within minutes. Ropes froze into rigid wire cables that had to be beaten against the rock to bend through belay devices.

Chipping Through the Frozen Armor

Ascending the Southeast Ridge (Compressor Route), the climbers discovered that every single expansion bolt, piton, and crack was entombed under inches of solid, bullet-hard ice. Salvaterra led pitch after pitch, swinging his ice hammer continuously to chip away rime before finding purchase for carabiners and aiders.

When a savage polar tempest slammed into the spire, the team was forced to bivouac inside a tiny snow cave hacked into a hanging snow ramp. For four days, the climbers remained pinned inside their frozen shelter while hundred-mile-per-hour winds shook the mountain with earthquake-like roar. Caruso suffered severe frostbite symptoms, forcing him to remain at the high camp as support when the weather finally cleared into crystalline, freezing stillness.

The Summit Tunnel

On July 8, 1985, Salvaterra and Gini made their decisive summit push. Moving with breathless urgency through air so cold each inhalation burned their lungs, they scaled the upper headwall, passing the ice-encrusted shell of Maestri’s compressor. At the top of the rock wall, they confronted the colossal summit mushroom—a frozen labyrinth of rime ice towering twenty meters above them.

Salvaterra attacked the mushroom directly, hacking a vertical tunnel through the brittle rime formations like a miner digging into a frozen bank. Emerging from the icy chimney onto the windswept summit plateau, Ermanno Salvaterra and Andrea Gini embraced under a cobalt-blue winter sky. Below them stretched the blinding, unbroken expanse of the Patagonian Icefield, glinting like an ocean of diamonds in the low winter sun.

Their triumphant descent through the frozen night brought an end to fifteen days of continuous struggle. Ermanno Salvaterra had etched his name into Patagonian history, proving that even in the dead of winter, human determination could conquer the fiercest needle on Earth.