Warren Harding (climber)
| Warren Harding | |
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Warren Harding on the last pitch of the Dawn Wall, El Capitan. Yosemite Valley. 1970.
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| Born | June 18, 1924 |
| Died | February 27, 2002 (aged 77) |
| Occupation | Rock Climber |
Warren Harding (June 18, 1924 – February 27, 2002) 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 (880 m) 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. The book contains a description of the ascent of the Nose and the Wall of Early Morning Light (1970), as well as farcical instruction in climbing basics, ratings of prominent climbers of the period, a humorous account of rock climbing controversies and life-styles of the 1960s and 1970s, and a vivid portrayal of Harding's own rebellious and charismatic character.
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.
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