page_title: Warren Harding (climber)
section_title: Youth
hierarchical_section_title: Warren Harding (climber) / Youth
caption_attribution_description: English: Warren Harding, Jerry Gallwas, Royal Robbins, &amp; Don Wilson in front of Yosemite Government Center after the 1955 Half Dome ascent attempt. (Gallwas collection)
context_page_description: Warren Harding was one of the most accomplished and influential American rock climbers of the 1950s to 1970s. He was the leader of the first team to climb El Capitan, Yosemite Valley, in 1958. The route they climbed, known as The Nose, ascends 2,900 feet up the central buttress of what is one of the largest granite monoliths in the world. Harding climbed many other first ascents in Yosemite, some 28 in all, as well as making the first true big-wall ascents in the Sierra Nevada range of California.
  He was nicknamed "Batso", a reference to his remarkable penchant for spending days living on vertical cliffs and his exuberant and iconoclastic character. Harding developed specialized equipment for climbing big walls, such as the "bat tent" for sleeping, and "bat hooks" used to hook precariously on small cut-out bits of granite—examples of his B.A.T. or 'Basically Absurd Technology' products. He was known for his doggedness, drinking, and farcing, as reflected in his motto: Semper Farcisimus!
  Harding authored the book Downward Bound: A Mad! Guide to Rock Climbing.
context_section_description: Harding was raised in Downieville, California, in the northern part of the historic gold country near Lake Tahoe by a family from Iowa that had arrived before the Great Depression.  Harding grew up entertaining himself, preferring hiking to fishing after he realized that he was a "terrible fisherman".  He began mountaineering in the Sierra Nevada in the late 1940s on Mount Whitney, the Palisades, and the Minarets. He took up technical climbing in 1953; it was, he said, the first thing he was ever really good at, because he "could do only what required brute stupidity".
  Within a year, Harding was an active figure in the nascent climbing community of Yosemite Valley, the huge glacial valley in which big-wall or multi-day vertical technical or roped rock climbing developed in the United States after World War II.  He began pushing the limits of the sport in the 1950s, and quickly became one of the "stone masters" of his day.  The hardest climb of the era, the Lost Arrow Spire Chimney, has a horrible, squeezing, dark and difficult pitch named for his lead: the "Harding Hole". He scrabbled his way up a demanding fissure called the "Worst Error" on Elephant Rock, an early effort which the British Guardian journalist Jim Perrin notes, "bears comparison with the achievements of Joe Brown and Don Whillans", famed contemporaries of his in Britain. He pioneered a famous one-day climb up the East Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock, today one of the most-climbed routes of its nature in Yosemite Valley.
  Harding's first major rock climb lay right nearby: the North Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock in Yosemite. Beginning "impromptu" with a "stranger" who Harding thought was "nuttier than a fruitcake", he and Frank Tarver soon passed another party.  They joined up since one group had ability but lacked equipment and the other had equipment but lacked ability.  Together, after four nights out, and 20 or more rope lengths of climbing, they made the top of the long and involved route. They had just finished the longest roped rock climb to date in North America.
  Success for Harding in the establishment world, however, was always secondary, or out of reach.  The draft board rejected him due to his heart murmur, and after working as a propeller mechanic during World War II, he trained as a land surveyor, holding a union card proudly his whole life. Known for his short stature and high voice, his hard drinking and fast cars, his greaser style black hair-do, good looks, and libidinous orientation, Harding recounts in his memoir Downward Bound that he chose the book's title because it reflected the failure of his career as a responsible wage-earner in the face of his urge to go rock climbing.
caption: From left to right: Warren Harding, Jerry Gallwas, Royal Robbins, & Don Wilson after a 1955 Half Dome attempt.
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