Apocalyptic warrior
Bill Denz alone on the Compressor Route, 1979-1981
In 1959, Italian climber Cesare Maestri claimed the first ascent of Cerro Torre via a brilliant two-man rush up the mountain’s east and north faces. But the feat was marred by tragedy: falling ice killed Maestri’s partner, Austrian Toni Egger. Climbers the world over immediately and loudly pronounced the climb to be the greatest of all time. But in the ensuing decade, others, spearheaded by Ken Wilson and Mountain magazine, began to doubt Maestri’s story.
Wounded, Maestri decided to climb the mountain again, an alpine masterstroke intended to silence his growing legion of detractors. So, in 1970, he climbed Cerro Torre’s parabolic southeast ridge. But whereas the 1959 climb, if true, is an immortal alpine accomplishment, in 1970 Maestri’s 10-man team fixed ropes up the entire mountain, raised a 150-pound gas-powered compressor to the top of the headwall with a hand-operated winch, and used the compressor to drill 350 bolts up blank (and not-so-blank) swaths of granite. In a final fit of pique, Maestri smashed the last 70 feet of bolts to prove that his mechanized tactics were needed. Wilson’s next Mountain article was titled “Cerro Torre, a Mountain Desecrated,” although in fairness to Maestri, the Compressor Route features lots of naturally splendid climbing on a fantastic feature.
Jim Bridwell and Steve Brewer made the Compressor Route’s second ascent, alpine-style, in 1978. On the last headwall pitch, Bridwell deftly hooked, pinned, and hand-riveted his way past Maestri’s smashed bolts.
Kiwi alpinist Bill Denz had attempted Torre Egger, unsuccessfully, in the mid-1970s. Denz was a driven and proven alpinist, with snow and ice skills honed in New Zealand’s Southern Alps. He immediately fell in love with Patagonia, though his big-wall abilities didn’t prove to be the range’s equal. He made a Yosemite pilgrimage to correct his granite deficiencies. In the Valley he fell in with Charlie Porter, the greatest big-wall alpinist of the era. (A sampling of Porter’s first ascents includes the Excalibur, Shield, Mescalito, and Zodiac routes on El Capitan; the West Face of Middle Triple Peak in the Kichatna Spires of Alaska; and the first-ever grade VII route, done solo on Baffin Island’s Mount Asgard.) Under Porter’s tutelage, Denz became a tough and competent wall man.
They arranged to meet in Patagonia in late 1979 to attempt a new route on Cerro Torre. But Porter began his southern adventure with a rowing expedition through the Patagonian archipelago, got horrendously delayed by foul weather and Chilean authorities, and never made the rendezvous.
Denz decided to try Cerro Torre by himself. “So far I have had seven attempts at soloing Cerro Torre [via the Compressor Route],” Denz wrote in a letter home. “The last one was nearly successful.” On that attempt, Denz invested two stormy days chipping a coffin-shaped cave into the Ice Tower (a granite-cored, ice-plastered buttress that is slightly detached from the main wall 2500 feet above the glacier), then spent five days inside. Twice he climbed within 250 feet of the top; storms vexed both efforts.
Not satiated, Denz returned to Cerro Torre for the 1980-81 season, this time with the premeditated intention of soloing. He chiseled his hardware to the bare minimum and left basecamp with four days of food, wallowing through soft spring snow for 16 hours to reach the natural ice cave at the Col of Patience. The weather fouled and Denz spent a day waiting. The barometer nudged up overnight. Denz climbed to the Ice Tower and found the site where he had whittled his cave the year before. The fourth day he climbed to Maestri’s compressor, which remained suspended only 150 feet from the top. Clouds, rime-coated rock, and the gale thundering over the top of Cerro Torre drove Denz back to his Ice Tower hole, but by noon the following day, the clouds had blown away. Denz moved his bivy to the top of the Ice Tower, right at the base of the headwall.
Cerro Torre’s headwall, notorious for Maestri’s bolts spaced two or three feet apart up 500 feet of blank rock, doesn’t actually start with a bolt ladder. Denz began his sixth day with 50 feet of jittery free climbing. A fresh rush of storm swept in just as he reached the first bolt. Denz ballasted his etriers with pitons clipped to the bottom steps, girded for yet another all-out summit bid, and climbed the bolt ladder.
Cold crept into his soul. Wispy feathers of rime ice grew on the rock. “I got to the compressor and the weather really started to cut up rough,” said Denz in an early 1980s slide show. Denz was six days out on four days of food. He had already eaten his last scrap. The fifth bolt above the compressor was the last of Maestri’s bolts. Denz couldn’t find Bridwell’s rivets beneath the gray carpet of rime. He spotted some incipient cracks to the right and swung over. He was stemming off a rime fluting, trying to pound in a Snarg, when the fluting collapsed. Denz tumbled across the face. He went out right again and fished a wired stopper into a crack, then reached around a small corner.
The wind was insane. His gear and ropes were iced, Denz himself frosted. He had three Friends. He dropped one, then leapfrogged the remaining two up a crack. The wind whipped up one of his etriers, including the heavy nest of pitons clipped to the bottom step; they whacked him behind the ear. The crack pinched down to a seam. Denz thought he could connect to some rime flutings. His highest placement in the seam was a #1 RP. He top-stepped and could just reach the lowest fluting. He drove one axe, then the other, into the rime and did a stormy chin-up. The whole fluting sheared off. Denz went flying, tore out his RP, and was fielded by the stopper, the only other runner he’d left behind.
“I had to call it quits right there,” said Denz. “I just couldn’t do it.”
Denz struggled back to the compressor and started rappelling. Time and again his ropes stuck. Unbelayed, he had to repeat most of three pitches to undo the tangles.
While he was downclimbing on easier ground near the bottom, a small avalanche swept Denz off his feet. He failed to self-arrest. “I rolled myself into a ball with my hands around my head, and hoped for the best,” he noted in one of his letters home. He slid 700 feet, dropped over the 30-foot lip of the bergschrund, and “ended up in a stunned heap in the snow basin below.” Shattered, Denz needed two days to travel the eight miles to base camp. (Normally, the trip takes about six hours.)
Two years later, the Compressor Route received its third ascent.

In 1983, Bill Denz died in an avalanche while attempting the West Pillar of Makalu. He was 32 years old. This anecdote is distilled from interviews, excerpts from his letters, and slide show transcripts published in the New Zealand Alpine Journal in 1981, 1983, and 1984.