After that, Batso was a bona fide star. With his hawk-nosed good looks and piercing blue eyes, he played the role perfectly. He spent a couple of weeks in New York doing the big talk shows, had a story in Life, an interview with Howard Cosell on “Wide Wide World of Sports,” and there was talk of books and a movie. He became a hot ticket on the lecture circuit, and, of course, a willing social lion. And, Batso being Batso, he never made a dime out of any of it. “In fact, I think that after expenses, which were rather extravagant, we lost $300 on the lecture tour,” he says with a chuckle. “So after this stint of swimming in fame-iosity, all the partying and notoriety, before you knew it, I was back working construction. And the Valley Christians were complaining about how we were commercializing climbing! Christ, I’ve done a lot of nutty things in my life, but I never tore up my union card. I wasn’t just some climbing bum. I’ve always worked.”

By now the gloom of evening had settled over the lake, and Batso had taken on a distinct starboard list. At some vague point we had been joined by Harding’s girlfriend, Alice Flomp, and a friend of hers, and, since it was now officially cocktail hour, he had switched from wine to double Manhattans. In an unobtrusive manner, Ms. Flomp appeared to be rationing his drinks, and soon, at her urging, we went in to dinner.

At the table, she fussed over Harding like a child, encouraging him to eat his fettucine, and cheerfully wiping up his spills. “I forgot my bungee cords,” she laughed at one point. “I usually carry them to tie him onto barstools.”

By this point, the thread of his narrative was proving ever more elusive, but Harding soldiered on toward the finish. Over Irish coffee he told us how the name “Batso” came about. When the film Midnight Cowboy came out, it seems, his friends decided that he bore an uncanny resemblance to the gritty Dustin Hoffman character, Ratso Rizzo. From that, combined with his penchant for hanging out on rock walls like a bat, came the moniker. And from Batso came B.A.T. – Basically Absurd Technology – Harding’s resolutely unprofitable mountain gear company, one of the products of which was the infamous “Bat tent,” designed to provide shelter on high walls.

“It was a pretty good idea, the Bat tent,” Harding says. “I think I invented it, although there may have been others working on something like it at the time. It was designed to keep you out of the elements, but the first time we used it, on Half Dome, we discovered a basic flaw when a storm hit, which was that it held any water that came its way. We spent a couple of days swimming in the damn things, and nearly froze to death. Back to the drawing board.”

This, of course, was the famous attempt on the south face of Half Dome with Galen Rowell in 1968. In the annals of climbing literature, Harding’s account of his and Rowell’s “death bivouac” and eventual rescue ranks among the most thrilling. “I strongly believed that we weren’t going to survive on Half Dome,” he says. “I just had this feeling of resignation. I’ve read about dealing with likely death, and the sense of peace that comes, and even though I’m not religious, and I don’t pray up there, I had no problem with it. I was ready for it. We spent three days stuck in freezing rain and snow 750 feet from the top, and it puts you into this kind of induced shivering to try to keep yourself warm. After about 36 hours of it, you’re pretty exhausted. That’s the merciful thing about climbing – that you can get so goddamned tired you just don’t care if you die or not. It finally took a helicopter to get us off that face, and it was Royal Robbins who rappelled down to get us. I was so far gone I didn’t recognize him. Of course, hypothermia hadn’t been invented by then, so we didn’t even know we had it.”

Two years later Harding and Rowell made another attempt of the route and bagged the first ascent.