Because It's Nowhere

"You think of a mountaineer and think of a supergutsy person with no fear for his life," Caldwell adds. "In a way nothing could be farther from the truth. You utilize this fear to realize how great being alive is. Everything afterward is many magnitudes more satisfying."

"Beryl knows it's perfectly possible that I might be killed climbing, but she also knows it's what gives me life," Harding says. "I have a greater capacity for doing anything else, even enduring tedium, because I know I can always bug out and go climb a mountain. I wouldn't even consider it fear. Fear is being afraid you might collapse and fall apart. Or bungle enough to drop some absolutely essential item."

"The only true fear I experienced was that those bastards were going to try to rescue us," Caldwell says.

"We don't live to climb. We climb to enhance living. We hardly ever talk shop. It's extremely boring—things like doing half a pitch of 5.10 liebacking or two tied-off 6.8 mashies."

Many self-respecting mountain climbers do not appreciate this kind of disparagement. Asked if some climbers are piqued by Harding and Caldwell's irreverence. Dave Hanna solemnly thought it over, then said, "Hell, yes!"

"Piqued is hardly the word," Caldwell admitted. "Some climbers think this is a religion or a competition or cancer research. Some groove on doing the same climb faster and faster. Others get down to memorizing the location of every pin. Making the climb becomes almost superfluous. To me the advantage of a first climb on a new peak is that you're not competing with someone else. You can come to a hellish problem and not have your mind cluttered with wondering, "How did he do it?' "

"You might compare climbing El Capitan with writing a Ph.D. dissertation," contributes Dean. "It's essentially meaningless."

After El Capitan, the onward, upward school of climbers was anticipating new opportunities to blanch at the sociable pair; Harding and Caldwell had planned next to scale the prodigious ice wall of 20,000-foot Mt. Jirishanca in remotest Peru, to be followed by an ascent of the face of Angel Falls in the Venezuelan jungle.

But now, in what the two admit may be some reaction to the month-long enforced fellowship on El Cap, a fissure has developed in their working relationship)—apparently a common, usually reparable, condition among mountaineers. Each now wonders of the other: Did success spoil rock climber?

And so, while Caldwell still prepares for South America, Harding talks of surmounting certain unnamed, unclimbed spires on the Yukon-Alaska border and voices unspecified complaints about the Hanna-Caldwell relationship. He says he needs to "get away from it all," adding darkly, "maybe even life itself." Caldwell tends to shrug off the feud, his strongest criticism of Harding being that Warren's life-style is "too structured." It is a complaint Harding has rarely heard spoken of him before.