Slouched against the hard granite belly of El Capitan, two and a half days above the floor of Yosemite Valley, I stare absent-mindedly at the bumper-to-bumper procession of vehicles creeping along in fits and starts a vertical half-mile below. Out of the blue, the nervous, entomologically insistent columns of miniature Toyotas and Winnebagos dredge up memories of how badly I’d wanted an ant farm as a child. I’m turning this over in my mind, savoring the bittersweet taste of long-dormant desire, when my reverie is interrupted by the prick of a raindrop on the back of my neck. Looking up, I notice that the slabs beside me are already speckled with moisture. Across the Valley, thick sheets of precipitation are slanting down from the clouds.

In my hands is a bight of worn turquoise rope leading up into a sea of rock. Every few minutes the rope jiggles slightly, then slides upward, reassuring me that somewhere on the overhanging face above, a pale, small-boned Northern Irishman named Geoff Dawson is making progress toward the next belay stance. I made his acquaintance just last week, outside the Yosemite Lodge bar. Impressed by his droll sense of humor, I’d suggested that the two of us climb El Capitan. So here we are: 2,600 feet off the deck and another 1,000 from the top of El Cap’s Salathé Wall, gazing into the maw of a Pacific cold front, which by now is hosing the whole of Yosemite Valley with a stinging downpour.

The Salathé Wall, it is writ in the mountaineering guide Fifty Classic Climbs of North America, “has been called the finest rock climb in the world—36 rope-lengths of superb, varied, and unrelenting climbing.” Unfortunately, 12 of those unrelenting rope-lengths still stand between us and the summit, and they will be hell to climb in the rain. I recall a pair of mishaps I recently read about in which climbers on El Cap were surprised by ugly weather just a single pitch from the top and in both cases had attempted to make a dash for safety. As icy water cascaded down the cliff, wicked along their ropes, and streamed down their upstretched arms, they grew stiff and stupid with hypothermia. Three of the climbers lost consciousness and died of exposure before they could reach the summit.

Preferring not to dwell on the unpleasant, I dig my rainjacket out of the backpack but realize I have nothing to keep my legs dry. This was sunny California, I’d reasoned when packing for El Cap, and it was nearly June. Within minutes my light cotton climbing pants are dripping wet, and I’m shivering from the chill. Geoff, a hundred feet above and sheltered somewhat by an overlapping fold of rock, struggles upward for another half-hour, then ties off the rope and rappels down to my ledge to discuss our options.

A thousand feet below, we see two teams of climbers already retreating from the wall. An emergency descent from our position would be considerably more complicated, involving a marathon string of two dozen snafu-prone rappels made with wooden fingers and 120 pounds of baggage. We wouldn’t stand a chance of reaching the ground before dark, and when we got down—if we did get down—there would be the matter of having failed on yet another big climb. “Geoff,” I suddenly argue with more emotion than I intend, “we’ve climbed too high to go down. I think we should just sit right here until this crud blows over.”

Geoff, a slight man with the quiet deportment of a librarian, looks at me without speaking for a long beat, then inquires in his singsong brogue, “I can’t claim to be an expert about your American weather, but mightn’t a storm like this last a long while?”

“No way, not here in California,” I say with authority. “Not this time of year.”

Thirty feet to the left of the belay stance, Geoff discovers a cramped, 12-inch shelf of granite in an overhanging corner that looks as if it might provide marginal protection from the cloudburst. We wriggle into our bivouac sacks, sit with our legs dangling uncomfortably over the edge of the rock, and wait for the storm to end.

Hours pass and the rain continues. Across the valley, clouds swirl down over the Cathedral Spires with a menacing beauty. The wind, coming in crazy, violent gusts, drives an icy spray into our alcove, while water pours down the rock at our backs in a continuous flood. As the afternoon light begins to fade, the rain turns to hail, then to snow.

***

The Big Stone, climbers call it, a laconic nod to El Capitan’s imposing stature and international reputation. Indeed, as climbing trophies go, El Cap is probably coveted only slightly less than Mount Everest and the Eiger Nordwand. Or perhaps it’s more accurate to say used to be coveted, for a growing population of rock climbers, devotees of a hugely popular new wrinkle dubbed sport climbing, no longer have much interest in the sheer adventure of it all. Some even say that the sport-climbing revolution—characterized by minimalist climbs of searing difficulty and organized competition on puny, often man-made crags—has rendered the towering walls of Yosemite—and all the risk that goes with them—unimportant, beside the point, obsolete.

I had dreamed of ascending El Cap for most of my climbing life, and come last spring, despite the current fashion, I found myself dreaming of it still. I also wondered about the nasty rumors of Yosemite’s demise as the mecca of the rock-climbing world and the lurid reports of bitter feuding among frustrated Valley climbers. Thus it was that one fine May morning I packed a new pair of rock shoes into my car and steered it toward California, hoping both to climb the peak of my dreams and to find out what had become of Yosemite since I’d first gazed slack-jawed at its storied walls so many years before.

Given that Yosemite Valley embraces just seven square miles and is visited by more than three million people every year, one would not have trouble confusing the place with wilderness. This was underscored one balmy Sierra night, soon after my arrival, as I lay in my sleeping bag on the gravel plain of the Sunnyside Walk-In Campground, better known as Camp Four. Pitched on the site next to mine was a wall tent sheltering two brothers from Fresno, their girlfriends, and a generous supply of tequila.

Earlier in the evening these happy campers had regaled much of Camp Four with a session of energetic and very vocal love-making. Around midnight the merriment finally tailed off, and I thought I might actually get some sleep, but at 2 A.M. the sound of yelling jolted me awake. Peering out of my sleeping bag, I saw the taller of the brothers standing buck naked in the dirt, clutching an empty cellophane package as he addressed his overweight, half-dressed sibling. “You little pig!” he screamed. “You mean to tell me you ate all the fuckin’ donuts? I don’t care where you have to go to get ’em, but your ass is grass if there ain’t a full box of donuts here by morning!”

It was comforting to note that no matter how much the Valley had changed, the entertainment in Camp Four hadn’t. The sun went down and it was 1977 all over again. Knots of climbers in torn, soiled clothing kicked Hacky Sacks back and forth with studied nonchalance. Tinny snatches of the Allman Brothers and the Grateful Dead wafted in on the breeze from cheap boom-boxes. Scruffy young men with shoulder-length hair gathered among the boulders to rehash the crux moves of a famed route called Astroman or to brag about money earned working a body recovery at the foot of Half Dome: “Guy hit so hard that trying to find all the pieces was like an Easter-egg hunt. No big thing, though. You do enough recoveries, you get used to the stiffs.” Just as in past decades, more than half of Camp Four’s 200-odd occupants were climbers, and scores more were bivouacked illegally in the woods nearby. Still, something felt different. The mood was subdued, most of the sport’s biggest names were conspicuously absent, and the resident climbers seemed to have lost their customary swagger. The sport-climbing craze had generated an unexpectedly virulent backlash against Yosemite climbers, and its effects were palpable.

Anti-Valley sentiment first surfaced in 1986, when an influential Australian climber named Kim Carrigan declared in a widely read interview that Yosemite—which for three decades had reigned as the uncontested world capital of rock climbing—was washed up, that Yosemite climbers were overrated dinosaurs who mistakenly believed that their routes were still the hardest in the world. “The Valley,” Carrigan sneered, “is a little world, a very little world, with little people.”

At the heart of the debate lurked a single issue: the role of risk—the importance of adventure, if you will—in rock climbing. On one side of the dispute were the traditionalists, who believed that the place for a climber was on long, beautiful, exposed routes that put a premium on nerve and judgment. On the other side stood the sport climbers, who made liberal use of power drills, preplaced bolts, chiseled finger holds, and hangdogging—the practice of rehearsing extreme moves while suspended from a tight rope fixed from above—to engineer very short, very safe routes of enormous gymnastic difficulty up blank faces that would otherwise be impossible to climb. By the late eighties, sport climbing, which originated on the limestone crags of France, had swept through the mountaineering world like a bullet train. The Valley haut monde, however, contemptuously derided sport climbers as “Eurodogs” and “homos” and declined to step aboard. And Yosemite’s place in the climbing limelight was usurped—virtually overnight—by a collection of small and previously unknown sport crags such as Smith Rock, Oregon, a bush-league escarpment of compressed volcanic mud that no self-respecting rock star would have been caught dead on before 1986.

As it happens, Smith Rock was one of the crags nearest my hometown when I was growing up, so I spent a lot of time in the late sixties and early seventies climbing its crumbly beige walls, fantasizing all the while about the fabled granite of Yosemite. I’d never actually visited Yosemite, but l knew it was home to demigods like Royal Robbins and Yvon Chouinard and Chuck Pratt, while Smith was home to the likes of me. Perhaps that’s why I’ve never been able to take Smith Rock—or, for that matter, sport climbing in general—as seriously as I should.

Alas, my trip to the Valley last spring did little to change this. Yosemite can’t match Smith Rock’s 5.14 routes—in fact, it currently has no 5.14s at all—but its grand scale and architectural perfection strike me as adequate compensation. The magnificence of Yosemite’s geologic flourishes even manages to transcend the rash of “improvements” that have been inflicted on the Valley since it became our third national park a hundred years ago. The squalor of Camp Four, the pizza parlor, the video outlet, the glut of other tacky amenities intended to maximize the profits of the Music Corporation of America, the conglomerate that owns all concessions within the park, certainly do nothing to enhance the splendor of the valley that John Muir held sacred, but they do surprisingly little to detract from it. The ménage a quatre camped next to me may have driven up from Fresno just to get stinking drunk in the woods, but come next morning it was likely that the sight of Yosemite Falls and Lost Arrow Spire would prompt at least a murmur of wonder in the hung-over depths of their souls.

Yes, Yosemite Valley is one of Earth’s most astonishing landscapes, and “El Capitan Rock,” as Muir pointed out, is “regarded by many as the most sublime feature.” The immensity of El Cap—its sheer, monolithic bulk—grabs the imagination with a power felt in the gut. No preliminary slopes or foothills intervene to buffer this 3,600-foot eruption of stone: The Captain’s bald flanks rise from the board-flat glades of the valley floor as abruptly as a muffin popping out of a toaster. To a traditional climber, El Cap’s overwhelming visual impact is intensified by its mythic resonance, by all the tales of daring and catastrophe welded to its gleaming walls. Perhaps it’s the opportunity to brush up against legend, more than anything else, that makes the Big Stone so alluring. When I suggested this to my Eurodog friends last spring, they answered with undisguised expressions of boredom. “You’re going to do El Cap?” one asked. “How quaint.”

***

So it was that Geoff Dawson and I walked nervously to El Cap’s Salathé Wall on a cool, sunny morning in late May. As I laced up my rock shoes, the post-dawn silence was ruptured by a fast-rising whine—the unmistakable sound of air being compressed in the path of a rapidly falling object. Thinking that some idiot had kicked a rock loose from the wall above, I covered my head and made a panicked dash for the trees. When I risked a glance upward, I saw that the sound heralded not a granite missile, but a brown paper bag, which was rocketing earthward in a tight spiral.

A split second later, the bag slammed into a nearby boulder with a loud splat, and an unpleasant odor rose to my nostrils: somewhere far above, a climber had just answered nature’s call. The hazards of climbing big walls are myriad, I silently reminded myself, and not always possible to foresee. Starting up El Cap feels a little like shoving off from shore in a small, open boat with the intent to row across the Pacific Ocean. The size of the project so far exceeds the scale of ordinary human reference that you have to make a big effort to resist thinking about the long days ahead, about the impossible distance to the summit, or the climb will demoralize you and you’ll pack it in pretty quick. The trick is to concentrate on nothing but the pitch immediately at hand, an easy task for Geoff and me, since much of the early climbing on the Salathé turned out to be varied and engaging: flaring jam cracks, an exciting 5.10 friction slab, several thin, intricate sequences of face moves.

If the climbing was fun, however, the freight-hauling that accompanied it was nothing of the sort. We expected our climb to last four days, and the ration of water and food necessary to keep us going that long, combined with our sleeping bags, ropes, and back-wrenching arsenal of hardware, tipped the scales at nearly 200 pounds. We had crammed much of this impedimenta into a bulging blue duffel bag which made its presence felt so emphatically throughout the climb that it developed an actual personality, lugubrious, oafish, and mean. The thing came to feel like a third unwanted member of our team, so it seemed only proper to give it a name: the Blue Beast. Every 150 feet or so, upon arriving at a belay stance, whoever had led the pitch would have to lug the Beast up after him. Geoff, who at 130 pounds weighed only slightly more than the Beast, had an especially nasty time whenever it was his turn to do the hauling.

Little by little, the ground dropped away beneath our boots. A team of four raucous Italians had started up the route right after us, but they climbed even more slowly than we did, and their shouts grew fainter and fainter. An hour before dark, 900 feet up the wall, we reached a long, four-foot-wide bench, the first substantial ledge of the climb, and decided to call it a day. We dined on cheese and gorp in the fading light and listened to white-throated swifts rip the air at 200 miles per hour as they chased moths through the shadows. Far below, we could see the Italians rappelling back to the Valley for the night. Within minutes of stretching out on the rock, I sank into a dreamless sleep.

***

Rising from the scrub oaks beside the lower Merced River, not far from the west entrance to Yosemite National Park, stands a handsome but modest 200-foot cliff called Arch Rock. Were it situated in Massachusetts, say, or even Montana, Arch Rock would rank as a major rock-climbing area in its own right; here in Yosemite, however, it’s just another piece of perfect granite. In the spring of 1998, Ron Kauk, one of the most gifted climbers Yosemite has ever produced, put up a hard new route, rated 5.l2b, on Arch Rock’s cleanly hewn main face. There wouldn’t have been anything particularly unusual about this, except that in pioneering the line Kauk resorted to some jiggery-pokery: He established the route from the top down.

Before the climb, Kauk anchored a rope at the top of the cliff, rappelled down, and used a power drill to install a series of closely spaced bolts on the smooth, otherwise unprotectable wall, a trick known in the patois of climbing as rap-bolting. He then hangdogged the route, rehearsing his moves section by section, resting on the rope between efforts. Satisfied that the climb was possible, Kauk returned to the foot of Arch Rock and free-climbed the cliff in a single push, without falling or resting on his gear.

The Yosemite traditionalists, of course, viewed Kauk’s stunt as the most despicable form of cheating. But in this case the cheating smacked of betrayal as well, for Kauk was renowned as a sworn enemy of sport climbing just two years earlier: he had complained that the only thing of concern to sport climbers “is putting up a route, not how they put up a route. I feel the foundation of free-climbing has really gotten weak with people resorting to hangdogging.”

John Bachar, the abrasive, high-strung arch-traditionalist known for his extreme climbs sans rope, at one time considered Kauk his closest friend. But he regarded Kauk’s act of treachery as a dangerous threat to the moral fiber of Yosemite climbing. Being a brazen sort—legend has it that he once posted a notice offering $10,000 to anyone in Yosemite who dared to follow him for a single day of soloing—Bachar promptly rappelled down Arch Rock and pried out all of Kauk’s bolts.

A few days later, when Kauk confronted his erstwhile pal in the Camp Four parking lot, things got downright western: During the gentlemanly discussion that ensued, Bachar was sucker-punched by one of Kauk’s sidekicks. The accomplice was arrested for assault, and Bachar was taken to the hospital with nerve damage to his neck and upper arm. To rub a little salt in the wounds, Kauk named his Arch Rock route Punchline.

***

In making the first ascent of El Cap in 1958, Warren Harding spent 47 days, spread over 17 months, laying siege to the cliff’s prominent south buttress, which he christened The Nose. Along the way he ran up against numerous sections of featureless granite, totally devoid of piton cracks, and to get over these blank areas he used enough expansion bolts to stock a hardware store—l25 in all. Because bolts can be placed virtually anywhere and thus remove much of the risk and uncertainty from a first ascent, several of Harding’s comrades, including Royal Robbins, considered them anathema.

Hyper-competitive and driven, the sinewy, bespectacled Robbins was probably the best all-around rock climber of the era. The fact that Harding had aced him out of the first ascent of El Cap, the biggest prize in American mountaineering, must have stuck in his craw. So he decided to pioneer a route of his own up El Cap and to raise the stakes—“to keep the element of adventure high,” as he put it—by climbing the cliff with just a fraction of the bolts Harding had used. The result was the Salathé Wall, which Robbins, Chuck Pratt, and Tom Frost dispatched in nine and a half days using a grand total of 13 bolts. Robbins proudly called it “the most rewarding climbing we had ever done.”

At the time, the Salathé Wall was the hardest rock-climb in the world. Within a few years, climbers pioneered other routes on El Cap that were harder still, but the Salathé retained a certain cachet, for it represented the “bolder is better” philosophy that would prevail among Yosemite climbers for the next 25 years and form the crux of the fracas that rages in the Valley today.

Robbins and company managed to get up the Salathé Wall with so few bolts in part by clever route-finding, but mostly by sticking their necks out far and often. On several of the Salathé’s pitches, thanks to the paucity of bolts, the lead climber simply cannot afford to fall. Perhaps the most notorious of these pitches surmounts an obstacle called The Ear, which Geoff and I encountered late on our second day of climbing.

The Ear is a 50-foot-wide flap of granite that, true to its name, juts from El Cap’s temple like a Brobdingnagian appendage. Between the oversize lobe and the body of the cliff is a flaring, over-hanging slot, two feet wide and smooth as a bowling ball, that must be negotiated without benefit of nuts, pitons, or any other protection. Robbins says he was impressed when Tom Frost managed the first lead of the pitch “with only a few screams of terror.” If you fall from The Ear, a climber had explained to me in Camp Four with a friendly smile, “You’re looking at a way-serious whipper. If the rope gets cut on a sharp corner or something on the way down, you might even crater. You know, like, take the big one.”

Thus did I offer a silent prayer of thanks when, upon arriving at the belay stance below The Ear, it was Geoff’s turn to lead. “It looks casual,” I lied, handing him the hardware rack. “Jeez, you get all the cruiser pitches.” Geoff said nothing. Looking a bit more wan than usual, he tightened the chin strap on his helmet, gazed up at The Ear for a while, and then started to climb. He managed to insinuate himself beneath the earlobe without undue difficulty, but then his progress slowed to a crawl. The slot yawned above him like a bomb bay. He had his back pressed against the cliff and his knees jammed against the flaring underside of The Ear, but it was a precarious arrangement, somewhat like trying to remain wedged inside an inverted bathtub. “The rock is rather greasy,” Geoff yelled down in a cracking voice. “Watch us closely!”

For more than an hour he inched his way along the underside of The Ear, his breath coming in labored grunts. The slot grew narrower at the far edge, making it even harder for Geoff to maintain his tenuous purchase. Ten feet from the top, he suddenly croaked out a strangled cry. “I’m coming off!”

“No!” I barked back, nervously eyeballing my belay anchors. “You do not want to do that!” Several seconds of frantic wriggling followed. A low, steady moan drifted down from above, and I braced myself to hold a hundred-foot fall. But Geoff’s desperate squirming propelled him high enough to reach a bona fide hold, the first one big enough to hook more than a fingernail on. He pulled himself up into a relatively restful position, caught his breath, and a few minutes later stood atop The Ear.

“It wasn’t so bad, that,” Geoff said when I joined him at the belay ledge. “Whatever you say, Slick,” I replied. “Whatever you say.”

***

The style in which a climber ascends a route has always been a matter of controversy in the Valley. Twelve years after his victory on The Nose, Warren Harding made a circus-like 27-day ascent of El Cap’s Dawn Wall—covered by Life magazine—in the course of which he drilled 330 bolts. Two months later, Robbins, who called the new line a “rape of El Cap” and “a blot on the Yosemite landscape,” attempted to erase it by removing the offending bolts. Harding responded by suggesting in print that “bugger off, baby, bugger off!!”

A similar confrontation occurred in 1982. Two outsiders, attempting a new route up El Cap in a style deemed “chicken shit” by Valley zealots, awoke one morning to find that their ropes had been cut down and defecated on by a group of climbers (most of them, a widely substantiated rumor had it, members of the Yosemite Search and Rescue Team). Other memorable squabbles over the years have resulted in slashed tires, vandalized campsites, and a recent flood of semiliterate letters to the editors of climbing magazines casting aspersion on the sexual orientation of sport climbers.

Climbing by its very nature is theater of the absurd, and it’s easy to view the current spat between sport climbers and traditionalists as simply a new, mildly entertaining production of a long-running play. Indeed, all the fuss over hangdogging and rap-bolting could strike outsiders as mere low comedy, petty quibbling, a pissing match. But to the players, the world itself turns on the dispute’s finest points, and they find nothing funny about it.

Somewhat surprisingly, given the anarchistic leanings of most climbers, the ruckus owes much of its momentum to wounded national pride. In 1988, the first International Sport Climbing Championship took place in Snowbird, Utah, and the men’s contest, broadcast over CBS television, turned into a humiliating rout for American climbers. No American placed higher than fifth. Kauk—the affable, cover-boy-handsome Californian representing the cream of Yosemite—greased off a relatively easy move low on the wall and finished a frustrating tenth.

The Snowbird fiasco came hard on the heels of a series of visits by eminent French, British, and Australian climbers, during which they had made a mockery of this country’s hardest rock-climbs. Their embarrassed hosts bemoaned the loss of American supremacy and heaped the blame for this mortifying state of affairs on the once-bright luminaries of the Valley, particularly John Bachar. They claimed that Bachar and his buddies had sabotaged the advance of American climbing standards by acting as a self-appointed ethics committee—a vigilante band of crag police who tried to enforce an arbitrary set of rules that European sport climbers had shown the good sense to abandon. It was at this point in the drama that Kauk defected from the Bachar camp and embraced sport climbing with gusto.

The Bachar-Kauk rift, says Jo Croft—a petite blond 30-year-old who has lived and climbed in Yosemite since l978—has created something of an ethical dilemma for Valley climbers. “John and Ron were the two most respected climbers in the Valley,” she explains. “When those two had such a huge falling-out, it scrambled everyone’s bearings. We had always believed that sport climbing was this horrible thing, this plague—and then all of a sudden Ron became a sport climber.”

The confusion was exacerbated by the glamour and money that accompanied the sport-climbing boom in general and the new competition circuit in particular. “Everybody was saying that Yosemite climbing was washed up. that it was history,” says Croft, a 5.11 climber herself. “Meanwhile, the magazines were running all these pictures of totally honed sport climbers, looking great in their Lycra, competing in front of huge crowds and snagging big promotional contracts. Even if you love traditional Yosemite climbing—the special satisfaction that comes from flashing long, adventurous routes like Astroman or the Rostrum or the West Face of El Cap—everyone’s susceptible to peer pressure. It was hard not to feel like you’d missed the boat.”

By now, in fact, most Yosemite denizens have had at least a taste of sport climbing at other areas and will grudgingly admit that it’s fun. The Camp Four ethics committee has even allowed a handful of rap-bolted routes on out-of-the-way walls, and John Bachar himself has reportedly been spotted hangdogging in Oregon and France, though he stands by his belief that Yosemite should be preserved as the sanctum sanctorum of traditional, from-the-ground-up rock climbing, where a willingness to take big risks still counts for something.

But if the Valley is slowly warming up to sport climbing, sport climbers by and large continue to steer clear of the Valley. Yosemite’s majesty holds little appeal for Eurodogs fixated on 5.14, men and women who don’t seem to care what or where they climb, so long as the route is hard and safe and they don’t have to walk very far to get to it. A hot sport climber of my acquaintance recently spent 2 months climbing in France without once venturing beyond the artificial walls that now dot Paris and its environs. “It was great,” he says. “In 30 days I never once got bored, and I was able to do a lot more hard climbing than I ever could have done in a comparable period at a real cliff.”

But sport climbers have reasons for being down on Yosemite beyond the inconvenient fact that it happens to be outdoors. Valley climbing, which is characterized by jam cracks, friction slabs, and some relatively long approach walks, does little to prepare them for the man-made resin walls of the competition circuit, which favors a specialized brand of first-knuckle finger strength and anorexic physiques.

“Serious sport climbers can be real body nazis,” says Jo Croft. “They can get way obsessive. We met this guy in Australia last winter who always made his wife carry his gear, because he didn’t want his leg muscles to get too big.”

***

Sitting in the Four Seasons restaurant a few days before my climb on El Cap, Peter Croft, Jo Croft’s 32-year-old husband, picked at an omelet and stared unhappily out the window, where a hard rain was drumming down on Yosemite Valley. The conversation had turned to the sixties and seventies, the Golden Age of Yosemite climbing, when all of the world’s finest rock climbers would congregate in the Valley every spring. “There definitely aren’t as many good climbers around here,” Croft stated matter-of-factly, “but there are still a few people doing pretty wild stuff.” As it happened, one of these people was Croft himself. Some say, in fact, that he is currently the best rock climber on the planet, bar none.

Croft, who works for the Yosemite Mountaineering School, has never entered a contest and climbs in an anachronistic style that does not allow for hangdogging or rap-bolting. Despite his methods, his activities on extreme rock leave both the traditionalists and the sport climbers dumbstruck. Last March, using traditional means—climbing “on-sight,” without inspection or rehearsal—Croft ascended two routes on Kat Pinnacle rated 5.13c. These climbs rank just a notch below the hardest routes ever done by hangdoggers at Smith Rock or in France.

Even more impressive are the climbs that Croft makes without a rope, climbs that make even Bachar’s ropeless deeds pale by comparison. Croft—baby-faced and earnest and equipped with unusually beefy legs for a rock climber—will solo as many as 70 pitches in a day and thinks nothing of going without a rope on long, high 5.11 and 5.12 routes. “More than ever,” Croft mused, “climbers seem to be looking for simple answers to complex issues. The great thing about Yosemite is that the routes are long, and there’s nothing simple about them. I’ve had a lot of fun on one-pitch sport routes at places like Smith Rock, but short climbs like that, even if they’re hard, are over in half an hour. You just don’t get that sustained intensity.”

Although he doesn’t think of it as one of his most challenging undertakings, Croft’s best-known performance was his ascent of The Nose of El Cap and the Northwest Face of Half Dome—together in a single day—a coup he pulled off with Bachar in l986. A month after my visit, he returned to The Nose, a route that commonly takes competent teams three to four days to complete, and with a buddy named Dave Schultz, climbed all 3,000 feet of it in six hours and 40 minutes. Croft and Schultz then turned their attention to the taller, more difficult Salathé Wall. Ten hours and six minutes after starting up the first pitch, they were standing on the summit.

“Climbing fads come and go,” Croft said thoughtfully. “Plenty of other places are hotter than the Valley right now, but I’ll be real surprised if their popularity lasts. El Cap will always be here, and nowhere else has anything like it.”

***

It’s the end of our third day on the Salathé Wall—the same Salathé Wall that Croft will so handily dispatch a few weeks later—and Geoff Dawson, the Blue Beast, and I are still trapped a thousand feet below the summit, balanced uncomfortably on a ledge the size of a bookshelf, watching fat snowflakes swirl down from the clouds. At dark, however, the snow stops, and the trailing edge of the storm rolls over the Sierra, leaving behind a cold night sky, huge and lonely, shimmering with more stars than I’ve seen in years.

We move at first light. Our haul rope is a snarl of frozen cable, and my joints scream after 18 hours spent awake and motionless on a slab of wet, lumpy stone. Nevertheless, we are on our way up instead of down, and for that I’m grateful. The wall steepens, frequently leaning past vertical. There are few places where we can free-climb; instead we must pull ourselves from one piece of hardware to the next, a time-consuming process that feels more like construction work than climbing. As the sun warms the rock, hundreds of tiny icicles break loose from the summit overhangs and whistle earthward in an eerie madrigal.

The higher we climb, the more nervous I get about dropping something crucial. Simple tasks, such as passing a water bottle between us or exchanging the hardware rack at belay stances, are charged with almost unbearable tension. When I first arrived in the Valley, I met a team just down from the Salathé whose haul bag had come untied and plunged all the way to the talus, where it exploded on impact. Several people in Camp Four went out of their way to tell me another story, perhaps apocryphal, about two fellows halfway up The Nose who had intentionally tossed off their l50-pound bag after deciding to retreat. Unfortunately, they had forgotten to unfasten the bag from the haul line, and it fell with enough force to rip the belay anchors out of the rock, yanking the two climbers to their deaths.

Nightfall finds us dangling in our harnesses from a smooth, leaning headwall just above The Great Roof, an overhang that juts 20 feet from the face like a granite awning. We have no choice but to keep climbing until we reach a ledge, so I switch on my headlamp and lead off into the darkness. An hour later and 110 feet higher, I clip an aid sling into an old wired nut implanted in a crack, heave my exhausted bulk onto it, and prepare to move up another couple of feet, when suddenly I feel weightless and strangely adrift: The old nut has torn from the rock, and I am falling.

I have a momentary, queasy flash of vertigo as I tumble through the night, but before panic hits, I bounce to a stop at the end of the rope, 35 feet below my high point, caught by the last piece of hardware I placed before the fall.

“Jon, have you come off?” Geoff shouts from his belay station. I answer with an obscenity, then dangle in silence, furious that I’ll have to reclimb those hard-won 35 feet. I am bone-tired and punch-drunk from four days and nights on the wall. My feet ache in my too-tight rock shoes, and my fingers are raw and bleeding. I badly want to lie down someplace flat, where I don’t have to worry about taking a 3,000- foot fall if I roll over the wrong way, and go to sleep.

At l A.M., after I finish my pitch and Geoff leads another, we finally arrive at a narrow ledge 300 feet below the summit and stop there for what remains of the night. We sleep late the next morning, then begin the final three pitches. Shortly before noon, I muscle up a 30-foot hand-crack, pull over a square-cut brow of rock, and find myself on top of the Salathé Wall.

I know that, as climbers, Geoff and I are just weekend hackers and that we didn’t do the Salathé very fast or in particularly commendable style. Nor is the Salathé the same challenge it was when Robbins, Pratt, and Frost first climbed it 29 years ago. But for four and a half days, we’ve lived, breathed, and sweated El Cap, spending the currency of each moment as if our very existence hung in the balance, which in fact it did. And when you commit yourselves to a piece of rock that completely, for that long, it matters little whether you’re Royal Robbins, or John Bachar, or Peter Croft, or just a couple of exceedingly ordinary climbers. You feel pretty damn good when you get to the top.

Maybe Yosemite climbing is on the skids; maybe, as some climbers suggest, the whole sport has turned hopelessly petty and ingrown and is entering a period of terminal decline. But as I shoulder the Blue Beast and start down the back of the Big Stone, I’m not thinking about that. Instead, I’m remembering how perfectly Robbins described the view after topping-out on the Salathé: “All the high country was white with new snow, and two or three inches had fallen along the rim of the Valley, on Half Dome, and on Clouds Rest,” he said. “One could see for great distances, and each peak was sharply etched against a dark blue sky. We were feeling spiritually very rich indeed as we hiked down through the grand Sierra forests to the Valley.”