Warren Harding (climber) - Youth

Youth

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, he 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.

His first major rock climb lay right nearby: the North Buttress of Middle Cathedral Rock in Yosemite. Beginning "impromptu" with a "stranger" who Harding thought was "nuttier than a fruitcake," he and Frank Tarver soon passed another party. They joined up since one group had ability but lacked equipment and the other had equipment but lacked ability. Together, after four nights out, and 20 or more rope lengths of climbing, they made the top of the long and involved route. They had just finished the longest roped rock climb to date in North America.

Success for Harding in the establishment world, however, was always secondary, or out of reach. The draft board rejected him due to his heart murmur, and after working as a propeller mechanic during World War II, he trained as a land surveyor, holding a union card proudly his whole life. Known for his short size and high voice, his hard drinking and fast cars, his greaser style black hair-do, good looks, and libidinous orientation, Harding recounts in his memoir Downward Bound that he chose the book's title because it reflected the failure of his career as a responsible wage-earner in the face of his urge to go rock climbing.