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.

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.

[2] 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.

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.

[citation needed] Harding recounted meeting the group at the top: "My congratulations were hearty and sincere, but inside, the ambitious dreamer in me was troubled."

He, Powell, and equipment inventor Bill 'Dolt' Feuerer later conspired: "In the fit of egotistical pique, we grumbled around the Valley for a couple of days, trying to figure out what to do.

[6] Compelled by the National Park Service to stop until after Labor Day due to the crowds forming in El Capitan meadows, the team had a major setback when Powell suffered a compound leg fracture on another climbing trip.

The whole thing had taken 45 days, with more than 3,400 feet (1,000 m) of climbing including huge 'pendulum' swings across the face; and uncounted 'mileage' of laboriously hauling bags with prusik knots up ropes and sliding by 'rappelling' back down.

This was followed by: the wildly overhanging Leaning Tower, also done with Denny and still one of the most popular big-wall routes in Yosemite; the North Face of the 'Rostrum' just outside Yosemite Valley, again with Denny (a notoriously hard and spectacular later one-day testpiece as a free climb); and the beautiful and isolated 2,500-foot (760 m) face of Mount Watkins across from Half Dome, done with Yvon Chouinard and Chuck Pratt (with 'hard man' Harding famously refusing water on the parched last days of the climb to save it for those doing the final leads).

[citation needed] Pratt wrote in the 1965 American Alpine Journal: "By the fourth day, Yvon had lost so much weight from dehydration that he could lower his climbing knickers without undoing a single button.

For the first time in seven years, I was able to remove a ring from my finger, and Harding, whose resemblance to the classical conception of Satan is legendary, took on an even more gaunt and sinister appearance."

[11] Harding and climber-photographer Galen Rowell nearly succumbed to a storm on the difficult and tedious, but strikingly beautiful, South Face of Half Dome in 1970.

[citation needed] Harding also made a much-publicised first ascent of the "Wall of the Early Morning Light", up the tallest portion of El Capitan in its southeast side.

[15] Harding preferred gallon jugs of the very cheapest variant of red, and named the creaky ledge holding their hammocks, and from which they were supposed to be rescued, "wino tower".

[citation needed] Harding's climbing style was considered controversial because he was more willing to employ artificial aids which become a permanent part of the environment, especially expansion bolts.

Some critics, such as historian Steve Roper, English Mountain magazine editor Ken Wilson, and southern Californians like Robbins and Yvon Chouinard, felt that Harding's flamboyant willingness to use expansion bolts took some of the adventure away from climbing.

[17] He also argued that it was hypocrisy to accuse him of publicity hounding, as many of them developed lucrative mountain climbing businesses, making tens of thousands, if not millions of dollars a year selling clothing and equipment.

'[19] After the 1980s, Harding did very little climbing, retiring to the northern hills of the Sierra Nevada, going hot-air ballooning with his close friends Mary-Lou Long and Roger Derryberry, and continuing his love of cheap red wine.

[22]Harding's "Reflections on a Broken Down Climber": My once-keen analytical mind has become so dulled by endless hours of baking in the hot sun, thrashing about in tight chimneys, pulling at impossibly heavy loads.... so that now my mental state is comparable to that of a Peruvian Indian, well stoked on coca leaves...[23]