Kelly Cordes reading his own book, The Tower: A Chronicle of Climbing and Controversy on Cerro Torre (Patagonia Books, 2014), in full. Cordes recorded it at home in Estes Park, Colorado, during the spring 2020 coronavirus lockdown ("this bizarre time makes a good time for storytime") with technical help from his friend Jason Albert, and released it free on his website as an introduction plus sixteen episodes of roughly 20 to 50 minutes each. Those episodes have been spliced together here into a single recording of about nine and a half hours, running from the introduction through to the epilogue and postscript.
The reading is unabridged and uncensored. Cordes warns listeners about "the hiccups, the sips from my marg, and the wind outside my window", admits his pronunciation of foreign words is "atrocious", and notes that the book contains plenty of swearing in its quotations, so it is not really one for children.
About the book
The Tower is a history of Cerro Torre, the granite and rime-ice spire on the edge of the Southern Patagonian Ice Field that Reinhold Messner once called a "shriek turned to stone". It centres on the mountain's three great controversies: Cesare Maestri's disputed claim to the first ascent in 1959, on which his partner Toni Egger died and for which no evidence has ever been found above the lower part of the route; Maestri's return in 1970 with a petrol-powered compressor to drill some 400 bolts up the south-east ridge, creating the Compressor Route; and the removal of most of those bolts by Hayden Kennedy and Jason Kruk in January 2012, after their fair-means ascent of the ridge, which reignited the argument over who has the right to alter a mountain. Along the way it covers the Ragni di Lecco's 1974 first undisputed ascent by the west face, David Lama's free climb of the south-east ridge in 2012, the campaign for and against the compressor bolts, and the wider question of what role equipment should play in alpinism.
Cordes spent several years on the book, interviewing people in seven countries and working from original documents dating back to the 1950s. The finished text runs to roughly 77,000 words with appendices, a 256-entry bibliography and around 150 photographs. In 2015 The Tower won the Banff Mountain Book Award for Mountain and Wilderness Literature (Non-Fiction, the Jon Whyte Award) and the National Outdoor Book Award in the same category.
About the author
Kelly Cordes is an American alpinist and writer. He was an editor of the American Alpine Journal from 2000 to 2012 and has written widely for Alpinist, Climbing, Rock and Ice and Patagonia. His own climbs include the first ascent of the Azeem Ridge on Great Trango Tower in Pakistan with Josh Wharton in 2004, the first link-up of the Marsigny–Parkin route and the Ragni route on Cerro Torre with Colin Haley in 2007, and many new routes in Alaska and Peru, often in the lightweight, under-equipped "disaster style" he jokes about. After The Tower he co-wrote Tommy Caldwell's memoir The Push (2017). He lives in Estes Park, Colorado.
The original episodes remain available to stream and download from Cordes' website.