Galen Rowell would certainly go along with that. “When you climbed with Warren it was like being on the rock with a human dynamo,” says Rowell, who, although a peerless climber and adventurer in his own right, is far better known for his luminous wilderness photography. “With Warren there was no turning around. He had that kind of total dedication that takes you to the top.”

Almost as important, Rowell says, was Harding’s singular ability to keep things light no matter how dicey the situation. “During our attempt on Half Dome in 1968 things really did get quite serious, but one of the things I remember is Warren making me laugh so much in spite of it. We were using two red ropes, and right off he gave each a name to distinguish them.  One was Big Red, and the other was Little Harry, and each time he’d call for some slack on Big Red or tension on Little Harry I’d have to laugh out loud. It helped a lot.”

Rowell told me about another incident that added to Batso’s legend. It happened at a party in Fresno where mostly climbers were present. Harding, a little tipsy, made a wrong turn going to the john and tumbled headlong down a long flight of stairs into the cellar. “We heard this terrible crash, and we all rushed down to the cellar, and here’s Warren wedged between the water heater and the wall, stuck fast, but totally unhurt.”

Batso laughs when I remind him of this, but he insists that aside from a few harmless 60-foot zippers, it was probably the worst fall he ever took. Nonetheless, as to what he calls his “fame-iosity” as a climber, he demurely asserts that it was merely the result of being in the right place at the right time – which is to say Yosemite Valley in the 1950s, at the dawn of the Golden Age of Big Wall Climbing. That, of course, ignores the salient fact that as the author of dozens of major first ascents, he was himself instrumental in creating that historic epoch.

There were lots of non-pareil climbers on that scene, but it could be said that Harding’s only real rival was Royal Robbins, American climbing’s first superstar. The chasm between them couldn’t have been more pronounced. On the one hand was Robbins, big, strong and athletic, a dancer on the rock, while on the other was Batso, tiny, raffish and bedraggled, often climbing with serious injuries. (He once ascended El Cap soon after suffering a broken leg in an automobile accident.) Robbins was a climbing aesthete, a pillar of the mountain establishment who disdained the bolting of routes, while Harding would bash in a million pieces of iron if that’s what it took to get to the top. His feeling was that once he put his name on a wall, nobody could take it away from him for lack of style points, even the purist “Valley Christians,” as he so contemptuously called them.

“Oh, I ran into Royal right away in Yosemite,” Harding says. “We were bumping heads everywhere, vying for first ascents. The Valley was all virgin then, and the north face of Half Dome was the big deal. Me and Mark Powell and Dolt Feuerer put together a little expedition to do it, only to discover that Royal was already topping out on Half Dome. So, little egomaniacs that we were, we started looking at El Cap. But where? After referring often to a jug of wine, and looking it over very carefully, we decided we’d climb the Nose. It just seemed the obvious thing to do – the simple, dramatic place where the face comes together and…well, okay, let’s do it. We won’t make it, but we’ll give it a shot.”